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I have been a very bad boy in updating this puppy. Sigh. All that changes today! Regular posts! I promise!

As today is Father's Day (oughtn't it be Fathers' Day?), let's start with an early '60s teen pop tribute to dads. Here are two rather unsettling paeans to papa:

Paul Petersen - My Dad

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Paul Petersen was best known as the one of the two children, along with Shelly Fabares, on The Donna Reed Show. For the third season of the show, the producers forced Petersen and Fabares to record music that would be incorporated into the show. Fabares ended up with a #1 hit with "Johnny Angel," while Petersen released the sublimely ridiculous single "She Can't Find Her Keys." I've slowly been collecting all of Petersen's LPs, including this 1963 Colpix record that includes his biggest hit, "My Dad," a backhanded compliment about loving your father despite his mediocrity.

Marcie Blane - Who's Going to Take My Daddy's Place?

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In 1962 Marcie Blane scored a huge success with her first single, the excellent "Bobby's Girl" about her desperate unrequited love for a boy. After that hit, poor Marcie never really got to sing a happy song. Either she was feeling sorry for herself and her loneliness ("Why Can't I Get a Guy"), getting her heart broken ("Little Miss Fool"), feeling scared about her new boyfriend's unwanted sexual advances ("What Does a Girl Do?"), getting taunted by other girls for dating a player ("Told You So"), or discovering her boyfriend has freely offered her up to all his friends ("You Gave My Number to Billy".) Even when she finally gets to date Bobby in "Bobby Did," the followup single to her hit, she is quickly dumped by him! In her 1963 b-side "Who's Going to Take My Daddy's Place", she muses about finding a strong boyfriend to serve the same function as her father in her life: "I need someone to scold me whenever I am bad!" It's sure to make you tap your feet, and sure to make you queasy.

One of my favorite subgenres of teen pop/teen movies of the '50s and '60s are the feeble attempts to force kids into adopting new crazes. In trying to mimic the success of "The Twist" and "The Loco-Motion," most of the pop songs had accompanying dances. The songs are always kind of pushy, because instead of simply introducing the new dance, they instead declare that the dances are already the next big thing that all the kids are doing. It's interesting also how much the songs must have depended on television appearances to ensure their popularity (though I guess I don't actually know what the "Loco-Motion" dance is). The teen films tended to exploit familiar fads (surfing, dragracing etc.), while also branching out to new ones. The Frankie & Annette Beach Party series was really good at this: Beach Blanket Bingo was all about skydiving, Muscle Beach Party had bodybuilding, and Pajama Party was about, uhh, pajamas.

There are countless examples of these, but I've been recently introduced to a couple really bizarre ones that I like a lot. One is the 1957 film Bop Girl Goes Calypso, which is about how a scientist with some fancy machine is "proving" that rock 'n' roll is on the way out, predicting that calypso will be the big new craze! There were a few films that came out at this time all with the same hypothesis, including Calypso Heat Wave which features Maya Angelou(!)

And in the music realm, how about this great song performed by Eddie Hodges, the child star best known as Huck Finn in the 1960 adaptation directed by Michael Curtiz? "Mugmates" suggests that what "everyone does" now to indicate they are going steady, instead of giving someone their pin, is simply have... matching coffee mugs.

Eddie Hodges - Mugmates [mp3]

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