Childhood.... favorites?

A while back I was home sick from work and I was thinking back to a couple of cartoon movies that I watched repeatedly in my early childhood.  It occurred to me that you can find anything on the internet nowadays, so that's exactly what I did... big mistake! Fleeting segments of these movies had stayed burned into my brain for years although I couldn't really remember what they were about until I spent the whole morning watching them in their entirety on the the computer.  Seeing them some 30 years later, I sat amazed wondering what I could've ever liked about them.  It's just funny because much of the time when we look up childhood memories we remember what it was that attracted us to them.  I do remember what I liked, but e-freakin'-gad, they really were awful and I can't remember how they held my attention for over an hour.  It must have been a blessing and a curse for my mother.  And I wonder how they've effected me on a subconscious level all these years.

Dot and the Kangaroo, 1977.  It's about a girl that gets lost in the Australian outback and a Kangaroo finds her and helps her find her way home.  Sounds sweet enough, but this movie was so unnecessarily sad and just an over all downer.  The Kangaroo had lost her own joey and speaks of it often as her reason for wanting to find the child's parents.  It even indicates in certain parts that she may yet find her own joey.  She finds Dot's home at the end, which seems like a happy ending too, right?  Well, when she leaves Dot at her farm, Dot is heartbroken and cries out for her to come back while the kangaroo hops away crying because she'll miss Dot like she continues to miss her own joey who it looks like she will never find.

I can't find too many clips on YouTube.  Some of the songs and an upload of the entire one hour and eleven minutes of the movie which I wouldn't share here because it's really not worth the time to watch.  I remember liking it because it used live action and animation at the beginning and end.  When the kangaroo hops away it melds from and animation to a real kangaroo running across a field.  Also one song still stays in my mind - The Pouch of a Red Kangaroo, which actually is pretty catchy.  I was thoroughly depressed after watching it again as an adult, however.  I sometimes wonder if this movie is partially responsible for me having such a pessimistic view on life.

Next I watched The Water Babies (1978), which I only found in segments, but I got them all.  And honestly I couldn't watch all of them.  Holy cow this has got to be the most annoying movie ever made.  I think I vaguely remember my mother being exasperated every time I wanted to see it.  Now I know why.  It's a mix of live action and animation as well.  It's a full length movie and the live parts are longer.  And they're boring.  I didn't remember them being that awful.  Bad actors, and the story was absolutely nonsensical.  The boy works for some corrupt chimney sweeps who steal from the houses they "clean" and meets a little rich girl in a house while the men steal from the house. They get caught and they blame him and he has to run from them and falls into a river where it turns to animation.  He has to help some "water babies" escape from some shady ocean characters before he can get back to the surface.  In the end he becomes the hero because he got the burglars caught and gets to show his little rich girlfriend that his story about the water babies is true.  One part has nothing to do with the other.  And you can't understand a lot of the characters who do a lot of shouting and singing unmemorable songs.  It's enough to make anyone crazy.

The reason I remember it so well is because of the one song High Cockalorum.  It's just as idiotic as everything else, but the tune is catchy for small children and I never forgot it.  Like I said, I ended up just fast forwarding through a lot of segments as I watched that morning.  I would rather be depressed by Dot and the Kangaroo than listen to the utter insanity of this one.  However, this one may have planted the seeds of my love of British stuff.  That's a rough planting though. Lol.