Word: moles
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...feel for the half rueful, wholly droll confrontation between the really wellborn and those who are merely born to do well. But he is less interested in dynastic decay than in dilettante dilemma. The islanders' big "fight McKinney" meeting bogs down in bickering about whether or not a mole has been gnawing at croquet court number three, and the whole argument becomes entirely academic when a pair of McKinney's bulldozers crash onto the court in the middle of the annual tournament. A hapless adulterer, surprised by strolling teen-agers as he waits for an assignation...
...Vacation. Dad (James Stewart) has a voice like a defective windshield wiper. Mom (Maureen O'Hara) is a handsome illustration of what Oscar Wilde meant when he said that women as a sex are "sphinxes without secrets." Son (Michael Burns) is a TV idiot, who blinks like a mole in daylight. Daughter (Lauri Peters), upset by her teeth braces, keeps her face knotted in such a wooden expression that she could pass for a ventriloquist's dummy. It would be better if these people had never met, but in this family-situation formula comedy they have...
Politics in the swamp is never as intrusive as politics in real life, though, and the two ludicrous conspirators meet with a baffling kind of sympathy. Pogo-helps them by adding his name to the blacklist, as do the other animals. Soon everybody is on it, except Mole, who begins to feel threatened. Pogo's gesture is typical, the kind of stintly, reasonable thing you would expect...
...unquenchable, American boob, Albert the Alligator (who "leads a life of noisy desperation"). For all the politics and satire that appear in Pogo, the swamp is really a wonderfully apolitical sort of place. Politics, the booted and shifted movements, are left to a few moral hoodlums and bullies like Mole...
This is Walt Kelly's weakness as a satirist; he is always shading off into whimsy and gentleness. With humorous exceptions like Mole and Deacon, or Wiley Catt and Sarcophagus MaCabre, the swamp creatures want only to live quietly and be kind, to play, and to indulge in their uniaersal passion for telling each other the oldest hoariest American chestnuts. (Even the Deacon succumbs to the weakness: Mole sombrely admonishes him, "Remember forewarned is forearmed," and Deacon sniggers "I suppose an Octopus is twice as well off?" As they walk away, Mole snorts with disgust and Deacon is tee-heeing...