A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

Gary & The Hornets predated the boy-band craze by a couple of decades, at least, and the three brothers may have pioneered the 1960s/early ’70s “family musical group” trend that included The Osmonds, The Jackson 5, and The Cowsills (apparently the inspiration for The Partridge Family).
All of their hits were covers, which you could get away with back then, but they had enough success to get this Oscar Mayer gig and at least one appearance on The Tonight Show:

You’ve got to admire that they’re not just some polished, choreographed dance troupe ala contemporaries like The Osmonds, or over-produced synthesized corporate product like whatever the kids have today, what, The Jonahs Brothers? These kids look and act like little kids putting on a show, especially in this, the earliest clip I could find:

I like a couple of their covers more than the more famous versions, even if they seem inappropriate for a 12-year-old to be singing in 1966. Hi Hi Hazel sounds almost like an ode to child molestation when The Trogs do it; with a pre-adolescent singing, it’s just quaint and weird.
Of course, the real appeal is the old Oscar Mayer ad itself. Between this and the famous B-O-L-O-G-N-A tune they have probably the two most recognizable jingles in television history. The ad is short and sweet– here’s somebody famous, they sing the jingle, the kid says “Groovy!” and the same announcer who must’ve done every commercial voice-over through the ’60s and ’70s names the product as it spins into view. And notice that the package of hot dogs looks just about like a package you’d buy today? A can of Pepsi or a box of Tide from that period is virtually unrecognizable to a kid today. With the jingles, the Wienermobile, and that dedication to brand recognition, Oscar Mayer must have one of the most successful marketing departments ever.
Through the magic of youtube, here are a couple of animated spots they did in the ’50s and ’60s:

I remember that second one, and siding with the kid who didn’t want to march off to the death camp with the other kids to become “all-meat wieners.” Even if it’s as catchy as all get-out, the lyrics to that jingle are a little creepy, especially when the kid adds his own “…there’d be nothing left of me” line at the end. Still, it’s a really cute Peanuts-inspired little spot. The first one has such masterful design– how do they get those geometric characters to be so expressive? And the voice work is so great. What do we have now? A wiseacre badly-CGIed talking baby hawking insurance or something? Sigh…

Long Before Peter Frampton and Jim Henson, big band leader Alvino Ray mastered the talking guitar effect and well as the super creepy puppet. This clip is another of of those things that makes me yearn to wear a bad sports coat and giant Gatsby cap with a bow tie and pretend the last 60 years never happened. To live in an age free of irony– today, you couldn’t imagine anything like this being produced without an ironic smirk– the suits, the production, the monogrammed bandstands, the expertly-crafted and animated puppet, they were all intended to entertain with the best level of showmanship they could muster. All we get today is half-witted hipster stars doing a lame dance number on Yo Gabba Gabba in a sweatshirt. The pikers.

Alvino Ray is all but forgotten now, but he must’ve had some lasting influence since some beatnik villains on the ’60s Batman TV show shot everybody up with an “Alvino ray gun” that turned them into cardboard cutouts.

I know, of course, that the past wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I don’t want to go back, really. I yearn for the pop culture and the design of the mid-20th century, but others, and I think mainly a religious-right part of society, really think life was better in the past. Or, at least, they think we’re morally worse off today, but they water the argument down to Victoria’s Secret commercials and videogames. Are those the signs that we’re going down the tubes?

They’ve forgotten a world dominated by blatant racism and sexism, where our PC “domestic violence” was a routine staple of situation comedies, where teenage sex and pregnancy were really the norm (my parents would’ve been a headline on FARK today, besides possibly being jailed or labeled sex offenders for life), alcoholism was another comic standard (and you were a putz if you were afraid to drive home drunk), doctors advised patients to smoke more, wars of imperialism were still being fought, our government experimented on unknowing subjects with drugs and diseases, nuclear weapons were tested in the open, regularly…

I found this article fascinating, about how the pop-culture image of the ’50s was really an invention of the late ’60s by some college kids who became Sha-na-na and created the whole American Graffiti/Grease/Happy Days fad. They popularized a decade devoid of things like polio and communist scares, the beat poets (and beatniks), and wholesale segregation. Sure, the one black guy in all of Milwaukee happened to show up on Happy Days. Real enlightened.

I like to think George Orwell was right in 1984 to some degree, but he didn’t foresee that it wouldn’t be the government that controlled the truth and our history, but that it would be the media. It’s inherent in most people to want that revisionism on some level, to make life bearable personally (I can forget about 50 bad golf shots after 3 good ones) or on a collective social level (let’s ignore those lynchings and pretend the south is really like The Andy Griffith Show), so it works without any real manipulation. When George Bush said “Oh, it’s never been Stay the Course!” after we’d heard him say “Stay the course!” a dozen times previously, the Newspeak wasn’t his fault. He probably had to go back and correct that at some point, explain what he meant, but the news outlets all played the clip and millions believe that it’s never really been “stay the course.” It doesn’t even involve partisanship, and I’m not even sure what it means, but it just happens, and it changed some people’s view of history in a small way.

Next: more cheap youtube posts that I hope won’t ramble on so badly. Enjoy the clip, though, I think it’s great.