By: Annna
[2001-07-09]
The Complete Petey, Part Eight
November 1968 - May 1969
November, 1968 - Petey does not even have the pretense of a nose. After such a nice job lettering on his treehouse in June 1968, this is a bit of a disappointment. Unless, of course, Petey is a shrewd marketer and has realized that people prefer to buy from children who misspell cutely.
January, 1969 - Another white title, and another quartered adult. It occurs to me that Petey's family is shown in shadow, while other adults (specifically of lower social status--black, a waiter) are quartered.
Younger readers are probably not familiar with the movie to which this comic refers,
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Although it also featured tensions in interracial dining, it did not mention rabbit meat specifically.
May, 1969 - The unheralded appearance of the third named character, Punkin, in the dotted border that will come to signal his presence.
Although his first appearance is Petey announcing his speech, Punkin never talks. Punkin is a smaller, more feral Petey; his ears are actual rabbit ears, not Man's mechanical "rabbit ears," and his forehead is almost nonexistent. Punkin's arms are almost as long as Petey's. Neither of them has a nose, but oddly enough, they both have sub-oral notches or dimples.
It is interesting that Punkin's name sticks to the P-name convention, but brings in a nonstandard P-name with non-rabbit food connotations (pumpkins) when it would make more sense to use a normal P-name like Paul.
Is it just me, or does it seem that they trotted out a new, inexperienced artist for this battery of ads? Petey looks like a 1970s "puffy" cartoon character now, particularly in the third ad.
I can't help but think about the crossover between Petey and "Love is ..." cartoons -- it would be a mercifully brief event, with Petey concluding that love is "Rabbit Meat!"
Punkin, though ... I fear the worst. It's like when Laverne and Shirley moved to Hollywood: the writers seem to have lost touch with their subject matter, and so are tossing in a standard plot device to win over a new audience. What's next? "On a very special Petey ... Punkin fights for his life after alcohol leads to tragedy. You won't want to miss the very next Petey."
Actually I could deal with that, provided they brought back the original cartoonist. Petey would be dressed as a doctor, tending to Punkin in the ER, and saying something like "I prescribe ... MORE rabbit meat!"
Punkin's look verges on Cabbage Patch or Garbage Pail Kids. his rabbit ears start where his hairline should, and it becomes obvious that the artist who was told to introduce him did not develop Petey, but respected the original artist. note that Petey retains his Stretch Armstrong legs, whereas Punkin has been drawn with the "I sat on a sawhorse just now" approach to the crotchial area. when digits of convenience meet, they just turn into a circle with a wavy line down the center!
"May, 1969 - The unheralded appearance of the third named character, Punkin, in the dotted border that will come to signal his presence [emphasis mine]."
My god, for how much longer did this run? These comics are approaching banality: how much importance did Pel-Freez attach to their product that they could have postulated -- nay, brought into existence -- a creature like Petey, whose sole raison d'ętre is cooked rabbit? A world where a baby's first word is "rabbit meat"? At least mine was "McDonald's".
And what kind of name is Pel-Freez? The gross misspelling does not reflect too kindly upon the company: the same goes for many companies, especially Kleenex, since the name has become so ingrained it's almost a word unto itself. But what kind of word is "kleenex"? A phonetic version of "clean-x": and what kind of word is that? What does the "x" have to do with anything? Have you ever seen Carex soap dispensers? "Care-x": that doesn't sound very caring at all. It's sounds like handcare for cyborgs.
Jesus, that's three of us posting our commentary within one minute of each other.
I bet if I actually
tried to tilt them, we'd get
Peteys that looked like they took place in the Riddler's secret warehouse.
Fun game: stare at Petey and Punkin in the last comic and convince yourself that their mouths are noses and the sub-oral notches are their mouths. They look like befuddled Ziggys! It's like the vases/faces or Indian/Eskimo or that butterfly/me killing my classmates with the lefty scissors ink blot.
Jonas:
1. The avalanche has started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
2.
Herman Pelphrey.
Those don't look like rabbit ears to me; they are too wide and squatty. In fact they resemble nothing so much as radar dishes. P2 indeed! Is this the next wave of alien robots, being introduced by Petey with the same fanfare that the auto manufacturers bring to the autoshows? Is this some alien plot to drive us into the hills, where only the rabbits, Nature's hor d'ouerves, will sustain us while Grays smack their lips upon our beef, bacon, and chicken? It this a plan of total world livestock theft, with us left gnawing the tiny bones of the relatives of rats, with whom we will fight over the garbage dumps of our betters, the masters of the black spaces between the stars?
Or does he use this diminutive sidekick as a mobile uplink to coordinate the media assault with the mothership, while still retaining his iron grip on ground operations? My fear grows as I see the beatific smile on Petey's face, presenting this dwarf with its sloping, beetling, cretinous brow, and terrified am I of the thoughts that slide like greased ferrets behind their dead eyes.
if we're to do stuff in synchrony, I request waltzes playing in the background.
Pel-Freez is the preliminary invasion force from
Nalic Nod Refreshments. the idea is to fatten the human population with rabbit meat, thereby making us tastier.
if you read Pelphrey family history, it's a bit disturbing. someone gives Mr. P's kid a rabbit, his yard fills with bunnies, so what does he do? give or sell them as pets? absolutely not, he starts slaughtering the suckers and hawking their meat! imagine the effect on the younger Pelphrey; he learns about sex and death within a few months of each other...
I am fading fast. tech life means sleeping for three to four hours out of 24, much of the time. so, random stuff is falling out of me, like the fact that
this is a good song for walking down the street in slo-mo with your slickest looking clothes on. I will be gone from this place in a few months, and before moving, will swim in the golden chalice of relief for a few blissful, jobless weeks... worms in my brain get them out.
I am so sorry.
this guy and flickering Alex could maybe set up shop!
Alex could get a distribution deal with him. San Antonio is a nice place; at the end of summer, you can't take a step without crunching cicada exoskeletons, and there's canals and stuff.
There are Aliens in San Antonio! And they eat conejos. I met an Argentine lady psychologist there who had opened the first counciling center for torture victims in Sweden. She was prompted to do this by the Argentine military who had "disappeared" her husband, son, and daughter. She showed me a picture of herself with some other women standing over a discovered mass-grave with about 300 bodies. All I could think of was Madonna singing, "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina!"
Well, Little Punkins first words were Rabbit Meat and he has rabbit like ears - I think Peteys leading him off to the slaughterhouse to be turned into little chunks of rabbit meat and then devoured by Petey, his family and a bunch of quater sized adults.... This stuff is sick!
Isn't anyone else troubled by the subtext in the "Look Who's Coming to Dinner" panel? This isn't a picture of interracial harmony; the situation just underscores (a) the depth and severity of Petey's rabbit-meat jones, and (b) the social climate in Rogers, Arkansas. Petey is so desperate for rabbit that he will actually eat with black people if you wave a Pel-Freez box in front of his face.
I couldn't figure if they're trying to pass rabbit off as "Soul Food" or expand their market by encouraging Black folks to eat rabbit because White folks do. Country Blacks 'round here eat rabbit. For a long time, shad was considered a "junk fish" and White folks here wouldn't eat it but Black folks did. They gave away shad roe in the fish mkts., but now "Planked Shad" is trendy, and shad roe goes for about $7-$12 per set. Same with carp; most White folks 'round here won't eat it considering it a "junk fish" but lots of Black folks have been eating carp all along. Europeans eat carp, and not too long back I saw a whole carp on a platter gracing the cover of "Gourmet" magazine. Too, hasenpffer has long been a treat in some quarters, so there are some ethnic and cultural variables involved in the rabbit market, as well as in dining preferences in general.
(Now there's an oxymoron if I ever heard one.)
On "TV Funhouse" -- a show that can switch from unspeakably hilarious to blisteringly unenjoyable in about a tenth of a second -- one of my favorite bits is where they try to help kids by teaching them mnemonic devices. Of course, they tend to stray from the traditionals. For example, to cover taxonomic classification (kingdom / phylum / class / order / family / genus / species), instead of the classic "King Philip came over for good soup", they recommend: "Please come over for gay sex."
I bring this up because of their mnemonic device for remembering organs in the digestive tract (mouth / esophagus / stomach / gall bladder / small intestine / large intestine / rectum / anus). They offer: "Ma eats squirrel guts because she is living in rural Arkansas".
"Faubus" by Roy Reed
Raised in a socialist, racially liberal household, Orval E. Faubus, the governor of Arkansas during the 1957 desegregation crisis, was
not the last politician to be hollowed out by ambition and voodoo brain worms!
http://www.TheAtlantic.com/issues/98may/weak.htm
Seems to me like he sells rabbit meat specifically, not generally. Ha ha, we grammar pedants love a good joke.
Here's a fun game: Go back over the archive, and everywhere you see the words "RABBIT MEAT", substitute "ANAL RAPE". Now it's outright disturbing, instead of just creepy.
"What a Thanksgiving! We had anal rape, & pumpkin pie, & sweet potatoes, & anal rape, & cranberry sauce, & mince pie, & anal rape, & dressing, & mashed potatoes, & green beans, & anal rape..."
The best one IMO is the valentine one in Part 4 - It's no wonder the curly-haired girl isn't selling any of her valentine kisses, when Patty's selling anal rape for only a dime. "Gee Patty! Anal rape's really getting the business!"
Like Lou said, I'm a little dissapointed that the cartoonist for this installment has resorted to the tired sitcom convention of introducing a new, "cute" character to keep the series from going stagnant. Case in point, cousin Oliver on "The Brady Bunch", or one of the hundreds of new children/grandchildren/nieces/nephews thats were introduced on "The Cosby Show" in its later years. We want Petey, not his creepy(er) little offspring.. or brother.. or whatever.
Yeah, I wish that they'd launched off in an Action/Adventure direction with something like "Big Faubus&Little Petey"
