Comments | beamjockey: "You're Not a Puppet with Strings Tied to You!"

beamjockey

"You're Not a Puppet with Strings Tied to You!"

Dec 22, 2007 02:07

So I noticed that the twenty-first century Davey and Goliath Christmas special, Davey and Goliath’'s Snowboard Christmas, will air this weekend in my area. Out of curiosity, I asked Mister Tivo to record it for me.

D&G are a property of the Lutherans, a sect more likely to fantasize about snowboarding with a talking dog than about, say, machine- ( Read more... )

mountain dew, davey and goliath, lutheran, animation, davey, clokey, christmas, goliath, snowboard, gumby

Comments 11

Davey and Goliath anonymous December 23 2007, 10:33:22 UTC

You're not the only D&G fan out there. Though I never heard of them growing up (where was I?), a number of my friends have memories of them as fond as yours.

My old Boston apartment-mate Dennis (from 25 years ago) and his daughter (now 25... hmm, coincidence? I think not!) were at a baseball game at Yankee Stadium last year; she was wearing a Boston Red Sox tee-shirt, and he was wearing a Davey and Goliath shirt. Nobody noticed the Red Sox fan among them; everybody kept asking Dennis about his shirt!

mbcrui December 23 2007, 16:07:52 UTC

Have you seen Veggie Tales? Another christian cartoon that just crack me up. Sometimes the messages are so obvious they make me wince, but in general it's very cute.

serge_lj December 24 2007, 14:47:35 UTC

Davey with a laptop? If this keeps up, Donner will have Rudolph cover his nose not with mud, but with some lead shielding because of the health hazzards of others being too close to his luminscent proboscis.

The medium doesn't have to be the message.... ext_218039 March 23 2011, 13:00:01 UTC

Heh, I remember Davey and Goliath from childhood too! At the time, I didn't know they were "Christian stuff", but I knew that TV show starred a kid with the same name as me.....

As far as philosophy: the show itself is a confabulation! They are not filming a "real" D&G as they wander around, even as actors!

Indeed, Davey is not a puppet -- he's a fictional character, depicted in puppet-like form. It would be perfectly practical to tell his tale in picture-books, all-text books, animated drawings, or even with live actors. Indeed, the very story you're discussing could easily be presented in all of those forms, (and might be, what with media tie-ins). In all of these cases, the viewer would confidently expect him to go through his story, without reference to the medium of the tale. Would DaveDad's line still be notable if you were reading it in a book, or if it were delivered by a live actor?

Re: The medium doesn't have to be the message.... beamjockey March 23 2011, 16:53:20 UTC

I had not thought of it that way. Everything you say is perfectly correct.

Yet this does not remove the irony; we are still watching a puppet tell another puppet that he is not a puppet.

Both things are true. It's a paradox.

(Sometimes we are told that fictional characters are aware that people are telling stories about them. There are Buckaroo Banzai comics in the world of Buckaroo Banzai, for example. And this practice goes way back. I seem to recall that the second half of Don Quixote refers to the publication of the first half. Girl Genius plays with this idea a lot, giving us Heterodyne Boys books and traveling Heterodyne shows as well as real-life Heterodynes.)

Indeed, the very story you're discussing could easily be presented in all of those forms, (and might be, what with media tie-ins).

Now I'm shuddering to contemplate the live-action full-length feature remake of Davey and Goliath, as directed by Michael Bay.