“You know, if you grow up with one version of something, any other version is going to strike you as ersatz.”
“Even if it’s the original. Put that on your blog.”
We were talking about the television series Lassie. The Lassie of my childhood is the Timmy-Ruth-Paul version. I’ve never really cottoned to the Jeff-Ellen-Gramps version, which came first. Indeed, without Jeff-Ellen-Gramps, there’d be no Timmy-Ruth-Paul: Timmy came on the scene as a runaway orphan hiding in the Jeff-Ellen-Gramps barn. Ruth and Paul bought the farm from Ellen and adopted the runaway. COZI TV is running four hours of Lassie this afternoon, two hours of which are Timmy-Ruth-Paul.
Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
All OCA Lassie posts (Just a handful)
[Did you know that before there was June Lockhart, there was Cloris Leachman? She was a tightly wound Ruth Martin, something like the Phyllis Lindstrom of just-outside-Calverton.]
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Domestic comedy
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
comments: 2
I was actually thinking of the word "Ersatz," though the proper German word for the original of something would be "Urtext." It wouldn't apply because a television show is not a text. Ursatz vs. Ersatz would make an interesting pun in this context, but Schenker, who I guess coined the word, uses Ursatz to mean the underlying structure of a piece of music.
Please remember: I am still a Professor of English. Everything is a text. :)
Post a Comment