The Complete Petey, Part Eleven

Annna, do you like try to come up with these puns, or do they just pop into your head like the wacky next door neighbor on a sitcom? Either way, your pun talents could bring about either a Golden Age or the Apocalypse, depending on how you use them. Choose wisely!

I think the Petey in the last panel is under alien mind control: in the past, when confronted with images of his beloved rabbit meat, Petey had nothing but praise for the artist's efforts. Check the back of his neck, Patty! Check before it's too late!

I prefer to think of it as literary criticism. From what I learned in Intro to Literary Criticism, it involves reading out loud and then talking about tenuous threads of puns and wordplay. I am also very good at literary criticism hand gestures, which are apparently better the larger and more violent they get.

But yes, they just pop out.

As for aliens: look again at that Patty's eyes. I don't think she'd be surprised if Petey was under alien control; her camera probably hides some very suspicious circuitry.

or maybe SKULL!

I suspect that with the June, 1970 panel we witness the debut of the third or possibly the fourth artist in the series of those who drew Petey--if this is Petey at all. (If you compare this little impostor with the Petey from his first panel in 1965, a case could be made that the original Petey died in the middle sixties and was replaced by a lookalike.) Our Things I Hate archivist could do Petey scholars an enormous favor by posting a page with images of the little spud arranged in chronological order. Endless arguments and counterarguments could be presented, basing artistic credit on variations in hair, feet, and thickness of line. We could assign the the anonymous artists appellations (not a pun, Lou--Arkansas is in the Ozarks, not the Appalachians) the way they do for nameless scribes or biblical authors, like The Bound Foot Fetishist, Sir Ambiguous, or Mr. Parkinson's.

The ZIP Code system was introduced in 1963. Interesting that it only took Pel-Freez seven years to knuckle under.

observe.

Petey's Mom having sex with a macramé owl is kind of interesting.
I think that you are right about Petey looking like a newsman, probably Marvin Kalb. People in Arkansas deal with the physical remains of their dead by burying them in an outhouse. The same company tha makes outhouses makes coffins, and if the deceased is of ample girth like Big Bubba Billy Bob or Linda Lou, they get the pine box with the crescent window. If'n they are skinny like Zeke or Lavinia,
they dig a hole with the post-hole diggers, and bury them vertically. Several dead Arkansans met their untimely end at the Ozark Mountain Plywood Mill and became decoupage. I had a Black landlady who was from Little Rock, Arkansas and I used to kid her about her hometown. She asked me if I thought that "all of us'ns got lint up in our heads? We be goin' 'round wearin' bibtops and brogans? I played bassoon with the Little Rock Symphony Orchestra!" I told her that I thought that some of y'all got lint up in yo' heads. Some of y'all, the onliest cotton you ever picked was out of a damned aspirin bottle.

I've been through my share of the stuff in my day. As I grow increasingly cranky and old, I am forced to conclude that most literary criticism is an attempt to milk the material long after it's ceased to lactate. This also speaks to a lack of meaning in a lot of literature.

I don't think that Moby Dick "stands for anything", except that it is the target of a man's obsession -- and obsessions are arbitrary things. I don't think Iago represented a segment of Othello's psyche, I think Iago was simply a really rotten bastard who was good at what he did. Just my opinions, and I'm certainly not the most informed reader here; but when you go to too much trouble to overanalyze things, you take what meaning is there, and turn it into mush.

The other thing that irks me -- and I've been known to burn villages to the ground over this -- is the notion that "the author's intent doesn't matter, all that matters is what you get out of it". Fine, have some Rorschach cards and go back to flipping burgers.

Some critics, if it's something that pushes their buttons like a cheap concertina, then it's a must for me. Cultural castaway that I am, I've not seen any of the "Sopranos" series, but if it sets Camille Paglia off, then I reckon it's worth a gander, if not a goose. I guess that I can interpolate her chagrin at having her ethnic group portrayed as a bunch of "Moustache Petes" and "Guido the Enforcer" types; as she stated, if cultural and ethnic sterotypes were launched like that concerning Jews or Blacks or Hispanics, there would ensue a great brouhaha. I, myself, get a bit miffed at the picture of the VW driving Hun wearing leather shorts, pockets full of sauerkraut, drinking beer out of a literstein while yodelling something from Wagner. I subscribed to the Atlantic mag for a while, and generally enjoy reading literary critics perceptive insights into other writers efforts. But you know, that protagonist in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" had white whales on his silk boxer shorts, and say what you will about McMurphy as a personification of the Wild Force of Nature, say what you will, Lou, about Melville, but to insult a man's underwear is a manifestation of a blatantly cavalier attitude toward all that is held sacred by civilized people the World over!

My Green Lantern underoos could kick McMurphy's underpants' ass. 'Nuff said.

What an utterly bizarre conversation. I love this site.

Btw, wouldn't Captain Ahab or Iago Underoos kick ass?

What a great idea -- an all-Underoo production of Shakespeare's greatest works!

The other year, my brother-in-law and I were lamenting the horrid state of cartoons, and how they'll make just about anything into a cartoon. Which got us to thinking about: "The New Adventures of William Shakespeare". Yes, this would be a cartoon where, by night, beloved playwright William Shakespeare dons a mask and serves as a secret agent to the queen. Complete with the standard modern complement of sidekicks (a plucky young woman and a sturdy young man), and of course a talking parrot, the Bard of Avon protects the empire against threats to democracy.

The worst part is, the networks would consider this educational.

Sam, the ceiling needs painting

"Petey's Mom having sex with a macramé owl is kind of interesting. "
i somehow doubt that petey and patty are related due to cartoons such as this: http://thingsihate.org/images/p02-66.gif
well, actually, if they ARE in the ozarks... never mind.

OK, OK, point taken about impossible genetic macramé. But maybe there's a market for "Petey" Underoos?

I think Bruce Cambell should play the superspy Shakespeare. "The fair Ophelia! Nymph, give me some sugar."

When watching a movie like Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (and I mention the movie rather than the book, as it's easier to get lost in the visuals of the former), it becomes important to place it in its proper historical context, so that the viewer might then be able to draw from it all that is there (additional criticism not withstanding). Sharing the same tumlultous time in America's history as Thompson's writing of Fear And Loathing, and as such a prominent (or at least persistent) part of an American standard like Good Housekeeping, I wonder if the same can be said for Petey? Are these rabbit meats ads really more? Do they speak to some higher purpose, ask deeper questions, or point to more complex problems inherent in the post-Summer of Love middle-class America?

Petey is like the ferment of the rabbit trend in American literature,
from Steinbeck's "Tell me about the rabbits, George!" to "Harvey" to
John Updike's "Rabbit, Run" & "Rabbit, Redux" An allogorical anomoly representing the wretched rabbit displacement by suburban sprawl that has become synonymous with middle-class economic success exemplified by frozen Arkansas rabbit meat brought to us by Fred Meyer's Market-Time Roundup of vinyl patio furniture in appealing pastel colors which are both guaranteed non-toxic and FDA approved.

"An allogorical anomoly representing the wretched rabbit displacement by suburban sprawl that has become synonymous with middle-class economic success exemplified by" the supplanting of Watership Down, Animal Farm, and even poor Peter Rabbit with a rabbit we can just eat. The hippie era ends as Petey continues: all those hippies, Thompson wrote, "who thought they could buy happines at three dollars a hit". But it didn't end: now we all get something we can stick in our mouths (possible psychological tangents there). Give me nature, but at least have the decency to cook it first. Oh Petey, you perpetuater of soulless conservative middle-class ideals of management! Where is thine placard, where is thine rock? I can't wait to see the late seventies Petey comics.

Melville was aghast at what critics read into his meisterwerk as well. you can't have sex with an owl, I learned that on alt.tasteless. people who want to tend to toss owlie's salad. I hung out with the East Coast Anna tonight and saw an anime called Kodomo no Omocha (Kodocha); if you want good, zany animation you have to go overseas. she had some really pretty and charming Russian animation, too.