Word: pogo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...animals in Walt Kelly's Pogo books are more human than most people I know, and this makes even their most sinister remarks about politics seem whimsical and charming. The Jack Acid Society Black Book is, as they say, a document for our troubled times; but when you're through reading it, you may wonder what all the trouble is about...
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...
Obviously this is not the Mucky Spleen (Pogo's phrase for him) of old. The hero -not Mike Hammer but a creep named "Deep" for short and "Old Deep the Cannon Boy" for long-is splattering a man. Hammer seldom bothered with anything so tame; he ka-powed naked blondes in the stomach with his blue-glinting .45. Such parlor pleasantries accounted for the sale of 32 million paperback copies of Spillane's seven previous titles. The new boy, a hardrock who shows up to take over his neighborhood gang after 25 years of mysterious absence, will never...
...book's Anna Vorontosov was an interestingly unbalanced woman whose salvation came from the joyous dangers she found in teaching; the movie's Anna alternates between being cute and fighting for her virtue. One moment she plods through a witless musical routine about Pogo, the next she is braining Hero Harvey for ripping open her blouse (with cretinous whinnies of "Open sesame!"). And where it was right for the hero to blow his brains out in the book, it seems pure melodrama for him to rage off in the film to obloquy and oblivion on his trusty green...
...squad's sneakers, and the home team shows a sudden bounce-clear to the roof of the gymnasium. Does the villain (Keenan Wynn) try to steal the hero's secret? The prof discreetly adds a lift to that low heel, leaves him bouncing like a pogo stick till the nutty putty is recovered. Do the Army, Navy and Air Force consider his conquest of gravity a subject of levity? The prof goes whooshing off to Washington, circumflivverates the Capitol dome, lands on the White House lawn and triumphantly reveals the latest wonder of science to a "flubbergasted" world...