Our Collection#
At home, we have two pre-school kids. It’s difficult to keep them occupied all the time, so we have some carefully-selected collection we’ve been building since our first newborn, for over 5 years.
The collection is mostly names, since many of the works are on streaming services these days. Yet, still, it’s a very nice collection for someone with kids.
- It has some masterpiece movies, like The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2022) or most of Hayao Miyazaki works.
- It includes some very good movies, like Klaus (2019), Soul (2020), Wolfwalkers (2020), Zootopia (2016) and alike.
One day (later), I’m going to write down all the decent pieces, for other new parents to have the names at hand. But this story isn’t about the entire collection, but one piece of it, The Pink Panther Show.
Names#
According to Wikipedia, over its 10 years on various television networks, The Pink Panther Show had a variety of names:
- The Pink Panther Show (1969–1971, also considered the umbrella title of the series)
- The New Pink Panther Show (1971–1975)
- The Think Pink Panther Show (1975–76; 1977–78)
- The Pink Panther Laugh and a Half, Hour and a Half Show (1976–1977)
- The All New Pink Panther Show (1978–1979)
- The Pink Panther Show (1980, Syndicated)
I’ve seen it earlier as La Pantera Rosa, I guess it’s just a Spanish name for the whole thing.
Good Ol’ Days#
We’ve been enjoying The Pink Panther Show for over a year now. We have the whole 6 disks Blu-Ray collection of 124 episodes + some bonuses. It’s a thing you can keep for your grandkids, easily. (If no ruzzian missile would destroy the house.)
The episodes are written to be from 1964 to 1980.
- Volume 1, 1964 — 1966
- Volume 2, 1966 — 1968
- Volume 3, 1968 — 1969
- Volume 4, 1971 — 1975
- Volume 5, 1976 — 1978
- Volume 6, 1978 — 1980
Hnat adores the ‘Pena’ as he named her. We have some fan stuff, including cars, toys, and (a lot of) stickers. Even in his Kindergarten, Hnat has Pena printed on his private folder with his things, including his arts and other items.
Over this year, we developed this tradition, that before sleep, we usually watch Pena, a couple of episodes. Whatever we do during the day, the night Pena is some tiny tradition. It’s not too aggressive to excite the kids, yet it’s some cartoon to calm them down and do our night preparation procedures.
YouTube#
I had this little chit-chat with Hnat’s best friend’s dad, mentioning Pena. It went like ‘oh, Hnat adores The Pink Panther cartoon, the old one, from sixties, you know.’
The dad bought special tablet for his son (3 years old!), so his son would spend some time in clinic. ‘Everyone had them’ he said. So his son, he watches YouTube. He even knows how to write (what to write) to find his favourite cartoons! While all this is impressive, considering our kids do not know how to read or write yet, I’m scared about this fact. Having a tablet at 3 years old, it’s just wrong. It’s terrifying!
And YouTube, it’s just a rubbish bin, it’s a trash. Especially for kids. It’s filled with super-low quality content. My wife’s mother, she does not have any subscription services. Well, she had Netflix briefly, for not a long a while. She has no disks, and she doesn’t want to have anything for kids. For our kids, as she uses to say. (Apparently, she doesn’t have grandkids.) When we are at hers (thankfully it’s couple of times a year at best, and I just hope we’d lower down that excessive amount of her-time in our lives), so, when we’re at hers, the kids are exposed to You — oh, for fuck’s sake, give them something to watch, so they’ll say away from me — Tube. They watch all the shitty shit in there, including these weirdo Indian advertisings of some weirdo musical pop-culture clips of theirs. I have no idea why they have these clips, we never have anything similar at home.
That’s how we got to know that Tom & Jerry are in Singapore already. Well, while Tom & Jerry isn’t for style in the first place, I won’t call the newer adaptations are many times worse. They are, but it’s not that bad, I believe. Or, maybe I just like Singapore.
Different#
This one is different. A couple of days ago we found this Pink Panther. The new one. The modern one. The mediocre one.
Hnat asked me for a Panther with washing machine, and I wasn’t sure which episode is that.
He meant the Episode 3, named ‘We Give Pink Stamps (1965)’
I was near him with my MacBook, and googled which episode is that. Apparently, the classical show does have some washing machine episode. I found this one. I opened it, and it wasn’t what I expected.
Hnat, being near me, demanded this Pena to be broadcasted on our TV. I politely declined, as it was evening, and I wasn’t too much willing to excite him before sleep. But the next day, he reminded me of this washing machine Pena. I obliged and opened this YouTube channel for him.
We watched the classical Pink Panther many times, every single episode. Usually, I start scrolling through the series, and Hnat comments ‘not this one, we’ve seen it already, not this one, not this one, no, no, no, not this one’ until we reach the episode 124, and there are no more episodes left.
I myself remember every single one of them. I even recognise them by their number, mostly.
- I can tell you that the crazy used car, Pink Pistons is the episode 16th, from disk one.
- And my favourite one of all is named Pink, Plunk, Plink and its number is 19, Volume 1.
- my 2nd favourite is Pink-A-Rella, 56, 16th of Volume 3.
New Pena#
We watched this new Pena, because there are new episodes we haven’t seen. Not all, but many of them. And they’re not just bad, they’re mediocre. It’s not our Pena. It’s a completely different beast, a copycat. Yet, it’s Official Pink Panther, with 20M of subscribers and 125M views, right?
That’s just sad.
Here, I’d like to grumble. In our good ol’ days … it wasn’t that bad!
With this new Panther, I see no difference to any other toddler’s movies. They do run, and hit each other, and make weird mimics, and the scenario has some meaning at best. At worst, it’s all just completely meaningless. (As our perishable life.)
Tom & Jerry#
By the way, I had similar expectations of the classical Tom & Jerry cartoon collection from 40s (from 1940 to 1958). Which we have now too. It’s not that bad. It’s not as genius as The Original Pink Panther, but it’s not as bad as these modern feces. They do run and hit each other indeed, but it’s just something that makes the whole series not that sad.
I may wish to write some piece on this original Tom & Jerry, but they’re not that special to me as The Pink Panther is.
My Grumble#
I’m grumbling about good ol’ days, but you might noticed that I’m not that old. I’m not from 60s, not even 70s. All of these episodes were made long before I was born. Yes, I watched some of these episodes during my childhood on TV, but for me it’s not some kind of nostalgia.
I don’t believe I have any nostalgia in me, to be honest. I would even say that too much of nostalgia scares me too much. It’s difficult for me to see some people of my past, who are deeply in this feeling themselves. I really truly am getting scared. I afraid of nostalgia, to me it’s equal to stagnation.
For me, it’s just the quality of the material. If you’re curious, you can compare it all yourself. They do have classical Pena collection on their channel. The quality is worse than that on the Blu-Ray disk, but it’s watchable. After all, its first episodes were created over 60 years ago!
If some person who helped creating them was just 20 at the time, one would be 80 today!
While I can easily understand why that degradation happened, it’s still a very sad thing. By creating these new Penas, they humiliated the original Pena. In a way, they deprecated the old classical one.
If someone wouldn’t know of the classical Pink Panther, and I believe the dad of my son’s best friend — being in his 20s — more likely he had never seen or heard of that Panther, the original one. He might not understand what’s so special with that Panther. Until he takes a deliberate action to explore. Which most people would never do.
That effectively murders the eternal being.
The Classical Pink Panther, I would say, it earned its place in eternity. It’s out of time. I’d prefer it to be modernised, as in ‘redrawn in vector graphics’ for example. But without changing a single frame. It’ll stay stylish, and for me it’s an example of style. People who made it, I bet they were not only ahead of their time, they were out of time. Many episodes of this cartoon can be watched many years later, and they’ll stay mostly relevant.
Cherry On Top#
As a cherry on top, there are weird bloopers. Look at this episode. To spare you time on watching it, I’ll explain. The Pink Panther wears a smartwatch that can help her travel in time. She’s in the past, the time frame of the ancient Roman Empire, the watch falls on the sand, and someone else (a gladiator or whatever he is) takes the watch. The Panter has no watch on her left hand, yet some frames later, she has the watch. The whole meaning is that she is watchless for a while, till she takes her watch back.
You want to watch 10 seconds before the timeframe and 10 seconds after it, to get the context.
It’s just embarrassing. It shows the attitude. While the original work, you can clearly see that each frame was taken careful thought of. This one, it bears ‘Fuck it, ship it!’ approach. As there was not a single person who just watched the episode before shipping it.
Final Notes#
Solomia, my wife, she says we cannot show that1 to children. The music is awful2, the style is awful, it’s all just pathetic. I second this. It’s just a bad taste.
By showing the Classical Cartoon to our kids, we show them the example of great style. I bet those couple of episodes I watched in my chilhood, they influenced me as a professional. In a positive way. I can never measure that, but the more I know about everything design, the more I can enjoy the original Pink Panther. It has many layers, invisible to many. Yet, we can read them with our subconscious, as always.
The new Pink Panther. It’s not renewed. It’s not ressurected. It’s like coming to someone’s grave, dancing on it, and claiming you’re them, while you’re clearly not. You’re not even close.
I’m just wondering what’s up with that. Why this level of incompetence? Will it bring much money to speculate on some pretty niche cartoon’s name? If you replace the main character, the Panther, for anyone else, would many things change? What if that be some boy? Some girl? A lion, not panther. Or a puma. A leopard. I mean, no need to get deeper into these cats and how they relate to each other. Just rebrand the Pink Panther as the Pink Jaguar3, call it a spin-off and don’t ruin the old series that can be sold indefinetely as a super-classical cartoon instead? I don’t know, that’s beyond me.
I won’t be able to protect my kids from this all-coming YouTube shit. As much as I won’t be able to protect them from the real world. And more likely, there’s no need in doing that. But I just hope that by having some talented pieces of work at home, they’ll learn to distinguish what’s a great work and what’s not early in life.
I believe style is not some fancy abstract thing, but actually4 it shows at least one thing: how much do they actually care.