![]() What struck me, listening to the songs, is how many of the lyrics I was able to come up with unprompted. The whole list is here.)Īnd yes, I’ll know the letters. V’s violet velvet vest was changed to a vegetable vest, which makes no damn sense.) Here we can spot a generational gap: if you call a Letter Person one thing and I call it another, we may have gone to school more than a few years apart. D’s “delicious donuts” were replaced by a “dazzling dance.” (I have no idea why Mr. C went from being the “cotton candy” guy to having a “colossal cap,” and Mr. X, known for being “mixed up and all wrong,” was described as “different.” Oh, and they came for the junk food, too: Mr. H’s “horrible hair” became “happy hair,” while Mr. All of the characters designated by negative adjectives got a facelift. The later one came in 1996, when it was decided that girls could be consonants, too, and the representation of gender was more evenly divided than the 21-5 ratio we had as kids. This was the first “cleaning up” of the program. Miss O is no longer obstinate she’s now an “optimist.” Miss I isn’t continually itchy, either she’s an inventor. I should point out that this is the 1978 update, which is a little different. The whole album is on Youtube, thanks to user Uncommon Ephemera. I have to wonder how much the repeated listening to these tunes at the age of six left an imprint on my pop music preferences. The horn section has a definite Blood Sweat and Tears vibe to it. ![]() ![]() No, really, it’s that good (although the version I linked has a different vocalist). ![]() If nothing else I’d like to find out who the bass player was, because these tunes have more than a little funk to them. The LP jacket (I’m working off copies online I don’t possess an actual copy) does not credit anyone for their performance. I’d love to talk about the musicians on these songs, but I can’t find anything about them. I’ll say that it was some damned fine music. We had Califone phonographs in the classrooms, though, and met The Letter People through those songs. Tinley Heights School – where I attended kindergarten through second grade – didn’t have such fancy things as televisions on carts in 1975, so I never saw the videos. Louis to a national audience – at least in schools – by 1972, and The Letter People were available for classroom use, with cards, stickers, and an LP called Songs Of the Letter People featuring a tune for each letter of the alphabet. You can find most of these on Youtube: they look like a sort of drugged-up Sesame Street with less-polished puppets (see the Mr. Louis, KETC, about producing a series of short videos to bring the letters to life. Alan Pratt, an educational developer, approached the public television station in St. The vowels were women: Miss O was characterized by her obstinence, which is a word we don’t teach kids anymore and probably should. T had tall teeth (and not a mohawk that’s a different guy), etc. Elayne Reiss-Weimann and Rita Friedman came up with the idea for The Letter People, a way to bring letters to life by giving them alliterative personae based on characteristics that began with those letters. An explanation is in order.īack in 1968, around the same time that educators were working to harness the power of television in shows like Sesame Street and Misterogers Neighborhood (which later got a spelling change), a few were wondering if pop music could help young school-aged children to learn their letters and therefore improve their reading skills. If you’re a Gen X-er, now of a certain age, you just started singing along. M With the Munching Mouth got stuck in the recesses of my brain. (It also taught an entire generation the wrong way to spell “hamster,” sadly.) The hook ended up in dance tracks, but sadly did nothing to help Roger Miller’s “ Whistle Stop,” which is what the song is but in sped-up fashion.įor me, though, sometimes the damned things just come out of nowhere, which was the case last night, right before bed, when the song of Mr. In many cases the worse the song is, the more likely it is to stick: in 1997, when the Hampster Dance was one of the first viral sensations on a baby Internet, the song that accompanied it stuck with people for, well, in my case 20 years. Usually, they happen when you hear a song, and then the whole tune (or a piece of it) stay on repeat in your mind. I’m susceptible to earworms – those bits of music that get inside of your head and stay there.
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