Music Break - Songs From My Younger Days

Here are some songs I enjoyed back when I was a Littlefoot.  I guess you could call most of these "bubble gum", but I still like them anyway.

One of the first songs I ever heard on the radio was Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron by The Royal Guardsmen.  Snoopy, in case anyone out there doesn't know, is a cartoon dog in the comic strip Peanuts and a series of TV movies inspired thereby.  With his vivid imagination, Snoopy creates several alter-egos, including the World War I Flying Ace, who faces his nemesis the Red Baron in aerial combat.  The Baron is inspired by the real-life Manfred von Richtofen, the German ace who shot down 80 Allied pilots in the First World War.  In these fantasy sequences, Snoopy's doghouse becomes the Flying Ace's sopwith camel.  In the TV special It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, we see Snoopy flying off to fight the Red Baron, only to be shot down and stranded behind enemy lines.  These dogfights, if you'll pardon the pun, appear to be the inspiration for the song.  There are many YouTube videos which include the song, but I found one that combines the song with footage from the TV movie, thus showing how the movie would have incorporated the song, and then finishes with some live footage of The Royal Guardsmen.

This, if you ask me, is how the "Flying Ace" part of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown should have been done.

Every once in a while, my elementary school would put on a roller skating party.  My favorite song to skate to was Chewy Chewy by the Ohio Express.  This was some time before "Chewy", or its homonym "Chewie", became the shorted form of the name of a certain Wookiee.

Like many youngsters, I used to watch Archie on Saturday mornings.  Five of the show's characters played in a cartoon band named The Archies.  Every week, the show would introduce a new dance step and a song to dance to with the new step.  In reality, The Archies were a group of studio musicians including lead vocalist Ron Dante.  In 1969, they released Sugar Sugar, which became the #1 song of that year.

After a character named Sabrina, known as "the teenage witch", was introduced into Archie, she was spun off into a new series called Sabrina and the Groovie Goolies.  This show included several cartoon music groups, including the Rolling Headstones, who sang the song Chicka Boom.  This song was later recorded by the pseudonymous group Daddy Dewdrop, who made some lyrical changes that rendered it, shall we say, quite a bit less appropriate for children.  This is the Groovie Goolies version, introduced by Wolfie, one of the title characters.  If think that if I tried dancing like he does, my knees and hips would suffer permanent damage.

Another popular Saturday morning cartoon was The Jackson 5ive, based on the real life Jackson brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael.  Their only involvement with the show was their music and pictures of them that appeared in the opening credits.  I don't know if it was used in the show, but my favorite Jackson 5 song was Little Bitty Pretty One, which had been recorded by several artists during the 1950s and early 1960s.  Three different Jacksons share the lead vocals.  In contrast to Michael's famous high range, there is also a catchy bass vocal, possibly by Tito.