Big Heads, Tiny Bodies

Here's a Nightmare

First, let me says that I've never had anything against Lucile Ball, the I Love Lucy show or Desilu productions. But when I was a young child, stricken with the flu and allowed to lay on the couch watching TV, I distinctly remember screaming my lungs inside out when seeing the opening credit sequence for the TV show, Here's Lucy.

Was it the fever? The animation? The peculiar head-to-body ratio? It scared the bejesus out of me. My mom came running with a soup spoon in her hand. "What's wrong?!" Just take a damn look! It's a monstrosity, in color, no less!

All of this came back to me while watching the 2006 MLB All Star Game. Modern special effects allows adult heads to be grafted onto children's bodies, as shown in a commercial for Gatorade and the feature film Little Man. This technology impresses the adult in me, but it makes the little kid in me scream in terror!

Back in the day, when our family would watch something frightening on TV, I would need reassurance from my mom or dad that what we were seeing was not actually blood, but ketchup. They might try to explain to me that it was neither, but a special formulation blah blah blah. I didn't want to hear it. Ketchup was a household material; it was one of my mediums.

Hollywood special effects of the mid-'70s were sufficient to freak me out and now the art, by comparison, is more realistic by leaps and bounds. I can't imagine what it must be like for a kid today to have to parse out the reality from all the convincing images we throw around our media.