La la la…Pied Piper House!

Gawd I love to google.  Here’s a great hint at how ancient I am.  This morning the Pied Piper theme song would not leave my poor brain in peace.  It’s from a tv show from the 60’s, which means I have a ridiculously weird memory.  Plus there’s the added fact that even then I was way too old to be watching such nonsense, but the CBC did not give us a lot of scintillating choices and we got only one channel.  So we watched whatever popped up on the screen and filed it all away in the dark recesses of our brains only to have it come screaming to the forefront one hot summer day fifty years later in an attempt to drive us batshit crazy.   The Animal Farm segment was my favourite with actual live animals supposedly narrating stories from miniature barnyard sets, featuring Rupert the Rat, Bessie the Bunny, Kookie the Kitten, Harriet Hen, Freddie Frog, Calvin Racoon and Charlotte Cow.  And yes, I googled their names for the sake of accuracy.

And also the words to the song.  So that I could stop merely humming the bits where the lyrics eluded me.

Oooooohhhhh……Come with me, come and see

All the wonders there will be

In my stories, in  my songs

And everything where fun belongs.

We’ll meet heroes, giants bold

Visit lands both hot and cold

Have magic tricks to shiver your skin,

Laughs galore with animals in

Our world of fun – Pied Piper House!

(repeat ad nauseam in a deep booming opera type manner)

There he is!!  Remember him??  He always wore that dumb hat with the stupid fake flower!  Man, they just don’t make television programs like that anymore.  Come with me, come and see, bang my head against a tree.  I may have to resort to such extreme measures to free my mind of this torturous little ditty.

5 thoughts on “La la la…Pied Piper House!”

  1. Pingback: 2010 in review « Breathing Space

  2. I remember he had a parrot named Polly who always used to say “Fiddle diddle, here’s a riddle!”, to which Piper would reply “What is it Polly?”

    I always remember the one where Polly says, “What is it that 10,000 horses can never pull straight?”

    “I don’t know, Polly. What is it that 10,000 horses can never pull straight?”

    “A river, Piper. A river!”

    I always figured Piper secretly wanted to strangle that bird.

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  3. I like the song! And as a child, I would have very much enjoyed the opening to the show. The outfit and set seem like a conscious effort to mirror the look of Laurel and Hardy’s “March of the Wooden Soldiers”. Quite charming and child-appealing.

    But as a child, the cartoons would have driven me away. I despised the ugliness of Hanna-Barbera-style cartooning, with its ugly drawings (versus the lovely Max Fleischer-style, for example), and cheap, repetitive backgrounds. I could watch some ‘toons which featured the style if the dialogue was HIGHLY entertaining), and found personified animals far less irritating than people.

    Which cartoons pasted muster to my “discriminating” 5 year old taste, since you didn’t ask? Mr. Peabody and Sherman, and Fractured Fairy Tales (although the latter was HORRIBLY ugly, I loved all the puns), but NOT Rocky and Bullwinkle. Yogi Bear, sometimes. Quickdraw McGraw as “El Kabong”: (Father of kidnapped daughter: “Walka De Planc is holding her for ransom!” El Kabong: “Whatsa matter? Can’t Ransom get his own girl?” That stuff cracked me up. Uh…still does.)

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  4. I’d love to know more about this show. I’m 15 and I find this obscure stuff fascinating. There’s not much about this on the internet. Most of the show is lost. Only a few short, vague articles about it on the internet. Not much information. It’s amazing to me.

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