Thunderboomerbangensplatzen

[altivo]

After a whole day of dull skies, we're having a spectacular light show with sound effects, but still not much actual rain. I'm afraid, though, that the power is likely to fail at any moment.

We enjoyed a 1950 episode of The Cisco Kid this evening that featured a dog actor. He/she looked like a mix of sheepdog and collie perhaps, and was pretty clever. A handsome shaggy guy too, which always pleases me. They called him Kino, which may or may not have been the name of the actual dog, but I intend to check. I'm more and more amused by the recycling of the same actors and actresses, and even the same plot ideas over a very short period. Of course, as a seven year old I wasn't aware of such details and mostly watched the show for all the galloping about on pretty horses who never got sweaty.

Two new bird sightings for this year: this morning I saw a brown creeper going up the oak trees in the front of the house. These funny little guys land on the trunk near the ground and walk right up the side of the tree, looking for bugs in the bark I guess. Once they get to ten or twelve feet above the ground, they fly back down and start up again on the same or an adjacent tree.

The other was a pair of wood ducks. Friday while we were having breakfast, I noticed a couple of large birds flapping around high in the oaks out back. At first I thought they were crows, as we have quite a few of those. But they had a distinctly different profile. Though I didn't hear the distinctive "oooooo-ICK!" calls through the closed windows, I immediately suspected wood ducks as I've seen them here before in the spring. A quick look through binoculars confirmed it. There's nothing odder looking than a duck sitting in a tree, thirty feet above the ground. They are looking for nesting cavities, though I'm sure we have nothing large enough for them. The wood duck lays her eggs in a tree hollow 25 to 35 feet above the ground. One day after hatching, the ducklings bail out of the nest and crash to earth, even before they have feathers. Then they march off in search of water to swim in. Obviously this had some kind of survival advantage, but on the whole it probably produces a pretty high mortality rate I think.

Ok, thunder getting closer, so I'll stop for tonight.

Comments

[hrrunka]

Given some kids like hearing the same stories again and again, I guess the predictability of plots might have been a positive point for at least some of the target audience?

[altivo]

Had it been a kids' television series, you might be right. The original shows were aired from 1950 to 1956 in an adult evening time slot, I'm quite sure. The reruns that I saw in the late 1950s were on in the late morning hours that were usually reserved for children's programming at that time. Of course, this is very early television production and our expectations have changed quite a lot. The Cisco Kid had previously featured in radio serials and as motion picture serials. I believe the movie serials were often done along these lines, so the producers may well have simply been doing what they had always done. The shows were filmed (in color) and distributed to the stations in that format. Networks and cables were unknown at the time.