Witness the Birth of Kermit the Frog in Jim Henson’s Live TV Show, Sam and Friends (1955)

Long before “green” became syn­ony­mous with eco-friend­ly prod­ucts and pro­duc­tion, an 18-year-old Jim Hen­son cre­at­ed a pup­pet who would go on to become the color’s most cel­e­brat­ed face from his mother’s cast-off green felt coat and a sin­gle ping pong ball.

Ker­mit debuted in black and white in the spring of 1955 as an ensem­ble mem­ber of Sam and Friendsa live tele­vi­sion show com­prised of five-minute episodes that the tal­ent­ed Hen­son had been tapped to write and per­form, fol­low­ing some ear­li­er suc­cess as a teen pup­peteer.

Air­ing on the Wash­ing­ton DC-area NBC affil­i­ate between the evening news and The Tonight ShowSam and Friends was an imme­di­ate hit with view­ers, even if they ranked Ker­mit, orig­i­nal­ly more lizard than frog, fourth in terms of pop­u­lar­i­ty. (Top spot went to a skull pup­pet named Yorick.)

Watch­ing the sur­viv­ing clips of Sam and Friends, it’s easy to catch glimpses of where both Ker­mit and Hen­son were head­ed.

While Hen­son voiced Sam and all of his pup­pet friends, Ker­mit wound up sound­ing the clos­est to Hen­son him­self.

Kermit’s sig­na­ture face-crum­pling reac­tions were by design. Where­as oth­er pup­pets of the peri­od, like the tit­u­lar Sam, had stiff heads with the occa­sion­al mov­ing jaw, Kermit’s was as soft as a foot­less sock, allow­ing for far greater expres­sive­ness.

Hen­son honed Kermit’s expres­sions by plac­ing live feed mon­i­tors on the floor so he and his pup­peteer bride-to-be Jane, could see the pup­pets from the audi­ence per­spec­tive.

Unlike pre­vi­ous­ly tele­vised pup­pet per­for­mances, which pre­served the exist­ing prosce­ni­ums of the the­aters to which the play­ers had always been con­fined, Hen­son con­sid­ered the TV set frame enough. Lib­er­at­ing the pup­pets thus­ly gave more of a sketch com­e­dy feel to the pro­ceed­ings, some­thing that would car­ry over to Sesame Street and lat­er, The Mup­pet Show.

By the 12th episode, Ker­mit has found a niche as wry straight man for wack­i­er char­ac­ters like jazz afi­ciona­do Har­ry the Hip­ster who intro­duced an ele­ment of musi­cal nota­tion to the ani­mat­ed let­ters and num­bers that would become a Sesame Street sta­ple.

And sure­ly we’re not the only ones who think the Mup­pets’ recent appear­ance in a Super Bowl ad pales in com­par­i­son to Ker­mit and Harry’s live com­mer­cial for Sam and Friends’ spon­sor, a region­al brand of bacon and lunch meat.

Sam and Friends ran from 1955 to 1961, but Kermit’s first per­for­mance on The Tonight Show in 1956, lip sync­ing to Rose­mary Clooney’s record­ing of “I’ve Grown Accus­tomed to Your Face” and mug­ging in a blonde braid­ed wig, hint­ed that he and Hen­son would soon out­grow the local tele­vi­sion pond.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Jim Hen­son Cre­ates an Exper­i­men­tal Ani­ma­tion Explain­ing How We Get Ideas (1966)

The Cre­ative Life of Jim Hen­son Explored in a Six-Part Doc­u­men­tary Series

Watch The Sur­re­al 1960s Films and Com­mer­cials of Jim Hen­son

Jim Hen­son Teach­es You How to Make Pup­pets in Vin­tage Primer From 1969

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine, cur­rent issue #63. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Paul Simon Deconstructs “Mrs. Robinson” (1970)

There’s noth­ing like hav­ing a dead­line. When Simon and Gar­funkel were called on by direc­tor Mike Nichols to pro­vide music for his 1967 com­e­dy The Grad­u­ate, the film was already being edit­ed, and the duo were work­ing on the movie stu­dio clock. To hear Simon tell it in this inter­view with Dick Cavett (from the same inter­view we fea­tured ear­li­er this week), it was that crunch time that pro­duced one of their best songs, and their biggest hit, “Mrs. Robin­son.”

In fact, the song stitched togeth­er two unre­lat­ed sketch­es. The first was the gui­tar fill that starts the song, which was Simon just riff­ing over a chase scene. “But it wasn’t work­ing,” he says. The oth­er, the cho­rus, was a frag­ment: “And here’s to you Mrs. Robin­son, Jesus loves you more than you will know.”

“For no par­tic­u­lar rea­son, the words just came into my head,” Simon tells Cavett. The next line men­tioned Mrs. Roo­sevelt, and who knows where Simon might have gone with the song if Mike Nichols hadn’t told him to ditch any­thing polit­i­cal and keep with just the one char­ac­ter.

If you have the sound­track to The Grad­u­ate, you’ll notice that the ver­sion of “Mrs. Robin­son” only has scat singing in the vers­es, just mak­ing it up as they went along. There was no time to flesh out the track, and it fit in the movie bet­ter than any of the songs Mike Nichols had licensed already from the duo. It would be one of many pre­scient choic­es for the clas­sic com­e­dy, includ­ing cast­ing the unknown Jew­ish 30-year-old Dustin Hoff­man for the main role instead of the very white choic­es the stu­dio was try­ing to push on the direc­tor.

It was only three months after the film came out that Simon and Gar­funkel record­ed the full ver­sion with the lyrics in the vers­es. It became their sec­ond num­ber one sin­gle in 1968 and was the first rock song to win a Gram­my for Record of the Year. But true to the orig­i­nal sound­track ver­sion, it keeps its open­ing verse word-free.

And it’s an odd song. Simon describes the writ­ing as stream of con­scious­ness. Though Mrs. Robin­son is indeed a char­ac­ter in the film, played by Anne Ban­croft, the lyrics rarely ref­er­ence the film, except for “It’s a lit­tle secret just the Robin­son’s affair/Most of all you’ve got to hide it from the kids.” (And even here Simon seems to be singing about hid­ing pre­scrip­tion drugs). Instead Simon cre­ates an ellip­ti­cal nar­ra­tive for Mrs. Robin­son, plac­ing her at the cen­ter of a sto­ry set…at a san­i­tar­i­um, per­haps? The sto­ry jumps all around, but Mrs. Robin­son remains con­fused, out of sorts, suf­fer­ing the alien­ation of the sub­ur­ban wife, nos­tal­gic for an imag­i­nary past. It’s where Joe DiMag­gio comes in, called out like a sav­ior (“a nation turns its lone­ly eyes to you”) when the “Jesus loves you” exhor­ta­tions don’t work. Lat­er, Simon would explain the DiMag­gio ref­er­ence as, “I thought of him as an Amer­i­can hero and that gen­uine heroes were in short sup­ply.” (Simon was more of a Mick­ey Man­tle fan, but DiMag­gio had bet­ter syl­la­bles).

The good thing about writ­ing in this stream of con­scious­ness, Simon tells Cavett, is “You find out what was in your mind was rel­e­vant even though at the time it didn’t seem so.” The song sounds chip­per, but those lyrics are the sto­ry of a soci­ety about to come apart, which it would do sev­er­al months lat­er in 1968. Like The Grad­u­ate, with its satire about sub­ur­bia, loos­en­ing morals, hypocrisy, and “plas­tics” both as a career choice and a way of describ­ing soci­ety, the song is a rev­e­la­tion of a world to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Art Gar­funkel Lists 1195 Books He Read Over 45 Years, Plus His 157 Favorites (Many Free)

Watch Simon & Gar­funkel Sing “The Sound of Silence” 45 Years After Its Release, and Just Get Haunt­ing­ly Bet­ter with Time

Paul Simon Tells the Sto­ry of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” (1970)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

4,000 Priceless Scrolls, Texts & Papers From the University of Tokyo Have Been Digitized & Put Online

The phrase “open­ing of Japan” is a euphemism that has out­lived its pur­pose, serv­ing to cloud rather than explain how a coun­try closed to out­siders sud­den­ly, in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry, became a major influ­ence in art and design world­wide. Nego­ti­a­tions were car­ried out at gun­point. In 1853, Com­modore Matthew Per­ry pre­sent­ed the Japan­ese with two white flags to raise when they were ready to sur­ren­der. (The Japan­ese called Perry’s fleet the “black ships of evil men.”) In one of innu­mer­able his­tor­i­cal ironies, we have this ugli­ness to thank for the explo­sion of Impres­sion­ist art (van Gogh was obsessed with Japan­ese prints and owned a large col­lec­tion) as well as much of the beau­ty of Art Nou­veau and mod­ernist archi­tec­ture at the turn of the cen­tu­ry.

We may know ver­sions of this already, but we prob­a­bly don’t know it from a Japan­ese point of view. “As our glob­al soci­ety grows ever more con­nect­ed,” writes Katie Bar­rett at the Inter­net Archive blog, “it can be easy to assume that all of human his­to­ry is just one click away. Yet lan­guage bar­ri­ers and phys­i­cal access still present major obsta­cles to deep­er knowl­edge and under­stand­ing of oth­er cul­tures.”

Unless we can read Japan­ese, our under­stand­ing of its his­to­ry will always be informed by spe­cial­ist schol­ars and trans­la­tors. Now, at least, thanks to coop­er­a­tion between the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo Gen­er­al Library and the Inter­net Archive, we can access thou­sands more pri­ma­ry sources pre­vi­ous­ly unavail­able to “out­siders.”

“Since June 2020,” notes Bar­rett, “our Col­lec­tions team has worked in tan­dem with library staff to ingest thou­sands of dig­i­tal files from the Gen­er­al Library’s servers, map­ping the meta­da­ta for over 4,000 price­less scrolls, texts, and papers.” This mate­r­i­al has been dig­i­tized over decades by Japan­ese schol­ars and “show­cas­es hun­dreds of years of rich Japan­ese his­to­ry expressed through prose, poet­ry, and art­work.” It will be pri­mar­i­ly the art­work that con­cerns non-Japan­ese speak­ers, as it pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned 19th-cen­tu­ry Euro­peans and Amer­i­cans who first encoun­tered the country’s cul­tur­al prod­ucts. Art­work like the humor­ous print above. Bar­rett pro­vides con­text: 

In one satir­i­cal illus­tra­tion, thought to date from short­ly after the 1855 Edo earth­quake, cour­te­sans and oth­ers from the demi­monde, who suf­fered great­ly in the dis­as­ter, are shown beat­ing the giant cat­fish that was believed to cause earth­quakes. The men in the upper left-hand cor­ner rep­re­sent the con­struc­tion trades; they are try­ing to stop the attack on the fish, as rebuild­ing from earth­quakes was a prof­itable busi­ness for them.

There are many such depic­tions of “seis­mic destruc­tion” in ukiyo‑e prints dat­ing from the same peri­od and the lat­er Mino-Owari earth­quake of 1891: “They are a sober­ing reminder of the role that nat­ur­al dis­as­ters have played in Japan­ese life.” 

You can see many more dig­i­tized arti­facts, such as the charm­ing book of Japan­ese ephemera above, at the Inter­net Archive’s Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo col­lec­tion. Among the 4180 items cur­rent­ly avail­able, you’ll also find many Euro­pean prints and engrav­ings held in the library’s 25 col­lec­tions. All of this mate­r­i­al “can be used freely with­out pri­or per­mis­sion,” writes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo Library. “Among the high­lights,” Bar­rett writes, “are man­u­scripts and anno­tat­ed books from the per­son­al col­lec­tion of the nov­el­ist Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), an ear­ly man­u­script of the Tale of Gen­ji, [below] and a unique col­lec­tion of Chi­nese legal records from the Ming Dynasty.” Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Mak­ing of Japan­ese Wood­block Prints, from Start to Fin­ish, by a Long­time Tokyo Print­mak­er

Watch Vin­tage Footage of Tokyo, Cir­ca 1910, Get Brought to Life with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Down­load Clas­sic Japan­ese Wave and Rip­ple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japan­ese Artists from 1903

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Surface of Mars Shown in Stunning 4K Resolution

Could you use a men­tal escape? Some­thing that trans­ports you beyond the con­fines of your pan­dem­ic-nar­rowed world? Maybe a trip to Mars will do the trick. Above and below, you can find high def­i­n­i­tion footage cap­tured by NASA’s three Mars rovers–Spirit, Oppor­tu­ni­ty and Curios­i­ty. The footage (also con­tributed by JPL-Cal­techMSSSCor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty and ASU) was stitched togeth­er by Elder­Fox Doc­u­men­taries, cre­at­ing what they call the most life­like expe­ri­ence of being on Mars.

Safe trav­els.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Presents Six Lec­tures on Earth, Mars & Our Solar Sys­tem … For Kids (1977)

Mars Rover, Curios­i­ty, Will Face Sev­en Min­utes of Ter­ror on August 5

NASA Releas­es a Mas­sive Online Archive: 140,000 Pho­tos, Videos & Audio Files Free to Search and Down­load

Leonard Nimoy Nar­rates Short Film About NASA’s Dawn: A Voy­age to the Ori­gins of the Solar Sys­tem

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Watch Chick Corea (RIP) Perform Intimate Acoustic Performances with Bobby McFerrin, Gary Burton, Hiromi Uehara & Others

It seems impos­si­ble to talk about key­boardist Chick Corea, who passed away from can­cer on Feb­ru­ary 11 at age 79, with­out also talk­ing about Miles Davis. Davis hand picked him for the ground­break­ing albums In a Silent Way and Bitch­es Brew, and as a mem­ber of those ensem­bles, Corea helped shape the future of music and helped divide the jazz com­mu­ni­ty into those who embraced the psy­che­del­ic “fusion” of jazz, rock, and oth­er world musics and those who were fierce­ly pro­tec­tive of tra­di­tion.

Corea, how­ev­er, “had already gone through ear­ly explo­rative phas­es of his career,” writes Jim Bur­long at Jazz Views, before his “brief but not always hap­py” stint with Davis. He was on his way to the avant-garde direc­tion he would take with his lat­er group, Return to For­ev­er. Yet no mat­ter how far out there he went with Davis or the ridicu­lous­ly accom­plished RTF and hun­dreds of oth­er musi­cians he played with, Corea always stayed con­nect­ed to the music’s roots.

“Through­out his career,” Gio­van­ni Rus­sonel­lo writes at The New York Times, Corea “nev­er aban­doned his first love, the acoustic piano, on which his punc­til­ious touch and crisp sense of har­mo­ny made his play­ing imme­di­ate­ly dis­tinc­tive.” We hear it in com­po­si­tions like “Spain” (at the top in a beau­ti­ful­ly spare ver­sion with Bob­by McFer­rin), “500 Miles High,” and “Tones for Joan’s Bones,” all of which have “become jazz stan­dards, marked by his dreamy but bright­ly illu­mi­nat­ed har­monies and ear-grab­bing melodies.”

We hear Corea’s “dreamy” acoustic piano through­out Return to Forever’s 1976 Roman­tic War­rior, an album that fea­tures 29 or so addi­tion­al instru­ments among its four musi­cians, includ­ing a Min­i­Moog, Micro­moog, Poly­moog, Moog 15, ARP Odyssey, and an alarm clock and slide whis­tle on the quirky, medieval “The Magi­cian.” This descrip­tion alone might make purists cringe, but charges that jazz fusion albums are over­stuffed and over­ly busy don’t tend to stick to Corea’s best record­ings.

The sound of Return to For­ev­er on Roman­tic War­rior, an album that influ­enced “bands to come on both sides of the Atlantic,” is “nev­er crowd­ed,” Bur­long writes, “and the over­all ambiance from all com­bi­na­tions of the thir­ty some­thing instru­ments used is most­ly one of con­trolled urgency.” Graced with a finesse that shines equal­ly in weird, Sci­en­tol­ogy-inspired elec­tric albums and tra­di­tion­al acoustic trios, Corea’s “ver­sa­til­i­ty is sec­ond to none when it comes to the jazz world,” says his long­time friend and col­lab­o­ra­tor, vibra­phon­ist Gary Bur­ton.

Corea resist­ed the idea that funk and rock instru­men­ta­tion in pro­gres­sive jazz meant the inven­tion of a new sub-genre. “It’s the media that are so inter­est­ed in cat­e­go­riz­ing music,” he said in 1983, “the media and the busi­ness­men, who, after all, have a vest­ed inter­est in keep­ing mar­ket­ing clear cut and sep­a­rate. If crit­ics would ask musi­cians their views about what is hap­pen­ing, you would find that there is always a fusion of sorts tak­ing place… a con­tin­u­al merg­ing of dif­fer­ent streams.”

His advice to fel­low musi­cians who might feel con­strained by tra­di­tion or the stric­tures of the mar­ket is price­less (or “cheap but good,” he wrote), includ­ing the advice he gave a grad­u­at­ing class at Berklee Col­lege of Music in his home state of Mass­a­chu­setts in 1997: “It’s all right to be your­self. In fact, the more your­self you are, the more mon­ey you make.” As a musi­cian, Corea was nev­er any­thing less than him­self, though he didn’t seem in it for the mon­ey, shar­ing com­po­si­tion cred­it equal­ly among the musi­cians on many of his ensem­ble albums.

Corea’s ver­sa­tile musi­cal approach won him 23 Gram­mys (“more than almost any oth­er musi­cian,” writes Rus­sonel­lo), three Latin Gram­mys, and the endur­ing respect and admi­ra­tion of fans and fel­low musi­cians. See more of his flaw­less chops in the inti­mate live per­for­mances above, includ­ing a Tiny Desk Con­cert with Bur­ton, a full con­cert in Spain from 2018 with his acoustic trio, and a duel­ing piano per­for­mance of “Spain” live in Tokyo with pianist Hiro­mi Uehara, just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Chick Corea (RIP) Offers 16 Pieces of “Cheap But Good Advice for Play­ing Music in a Group” (1985)

The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learn­ing to Play Jazz & The Cre­ative Process

Miles Davis’ Bitch­es Brew Turns 50: Cel­e­brate the Funk-Jazz-Psych-Rock Mas­ter­piece

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Open Syllabus Project Visualizes the 1,000,000+ Books Most Frequently Assigned in College Courses

The Prince, The Can­ter­bury Tales, The Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo, The Souls of Black FolkThe Ele­ments of Style: we’ve read all these, of course. Or at least we’ve read most of them (one or two for sure), if our ever-dim­mer mem­o­ries of high school or col­lege are to be trust­ed. But we can rest assured that stu­dents are read­ing — or in any case, being assigned — these very same works today, thanks to the Open Syl­labus project, which as of this writ­ing has assem­bled a data­base of 7,292,573 dif­fer­ent col­lege course syl­labi. Great­ly expand­ed since we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured it here on Open Cul­ture, its “Galaxy” now visu­al­izes the 1,138,841 most fre­quent­ly assigned texts in that data­base, pre­sent­ing them in a Google Maps-like inter­face for your intel­lec­tu­al explo­ration.

If you click on the search win­dow in the upper-left cor­ner of that inter­face, a scrol­lable rank­ing of the top 100 most fre­quent­ly assigned texts opens imme­di­ate­ly below. Num­ber one, appear­ing on more than 15,000 of the syl­labi col­lect­ed so far, is Strunk and White’s clas­sic writ­ing-style guide.

Click on its title and you’ll find your­self in its cor­ner of the map, and you’ll see high­light­ed oth­er pop­u­lar read­ings that tend to be assigned togeth­er with it: Diana Hack­er’s A Writer’s Ref­er­ence (at the moment the sec­ond-most assigned text), Aris­totle’s Rhetoric, Mar­tin Luther King Jr.‘s “Let­ter from the Birm­ing­ham Jail,” Jür­gen Haber­mas’ The Struc­tur­al Trans­for­ma­tion of the Pub­lic Sphere.

Michel Fou­cault holds by some mea­sures the record for the great­est num­ber of cita­tions in the human­i­ties. If you’ve read only one of his books, you’ve prob­a­bly read Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish, his 1975 study of the penal sys­tem — and cur­rent hold­er of six­teenth place on the Open Syl­labus rank­ings. But zoom in on it and you’ll find plen­ty of rel­e­vant books and arti­cles you might not have read: Alan Elsner’s Gates of Injus­tice, William Ian Miller’s The Anato­my of Dis­gustSoledad Broth­er: The Prison Let­ters of George Jack­son. Sim­i­lar­ly, an excur­sion in the neigh­bor­hood of Bene­dict Ander­son’s Imag­ined Com­mu­ni­ties brings encoun­ters with oth­er inves­ti­ga­tions of coun­try and cit­i­zen­ship like Ernest Renan’s What Is a Nation? and Dun­can S.A. Bel­l’s Myth­scapes: Mem­o­ry, Mythol­o­gy, and Nation­al Iden­ti­ty.

In every sense, the results to be found in the Open Syl­labus Galaxy are more inter­est­ing than those offered up by the stan­dard you-may-also-like algo­rithms. Back in col­lege you may have enjoyed, say, Edward Said’s Ori­en­tal­ism, but the range of texts that could accom­pa­ny it would have been lim­it­ed by the theme of the class and the intent of your instruc­tor. Here you’ll find Noam Chom­sky’s Failed States on one side, John R. Bowen’s Why the French Don’t Like Head­scarves on anoth­er, Hans Wehr’s Dic­tio­nary of Mod­ern Writ­ten Ara­bic on anoth­er, and even Mes­sages to the World: The State­ments of Osama bin Laden on anoth­er still. If we want to under­stand a sub­ject, after all, we must read not just about it but around it. In col­lege or else­where, you might well have heard that idea; here, you can see it. Enter the Open Syl­labus Galaxy here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Lit­er­a­ture Syl­labus Asks Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Works, Cov­er­ing 6000 Pages

Lyn­da Barry’s Won­der­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Syl­labus & Home­work Assign­ments from Her UW-Madi­son Class, “The Unthink­able Mind”

Don­ald Barthelme’s Syl­labus High­lights 81 Books Essen­tial for a Lit­er­ary Edu­ca­tion

Junot Díaz’s Syl­labi for His MIT Writ­ing Class­es, and the Nov­els on His Read­ing List

“Call­ing Bull­shit”: See the Syl­labus for a Col­lege Course Designed to Iden­ti­fy & Com­bat Bull­shit

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Why Does The Karate Kid Persist as the New Cobra Kai? A Critical Consideration by Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast (#82)

Did any­one sus­pect that the beloved 1984 film The Karate Kid (and its decreas­ing­ly beloved sequels) would now be not just remade but revived as the YouTube-Red-turned-Net­flix hit Cobra Kai? Is this new show actu­al­ly good, or just liv­ing unhealth­ily on nos­tal­gia and the fas­ci­na­tion of watch­ing teens and mid­dle aged peo­ple fist­fight and fall in love.

Your Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark-san, Eri­ca-san, and Bri­an-san sur­vey the show and all the films for non­sen­si­cal plot­ting, vil­lain moti­va­tion, ques­tion­able act­ing, and more. It’s almost as if PMP is the best… around… and noth­ing’s ever gonna keep it down.

Care for some arti­cles with more info about these shows?

If you haven’t seen the noto­ri­ous Karate Kid III, watch this.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

Peter Gabriel Re-Records “Biko,” His Anti-Apartheid Protest Song, with Musicians Around the World

Wis­dom, humour, com­pas­sion, under­stand­ing, bril­lian­cy of intel­lect, unselfish­ness, mod­esty, courage—he had all these attrib­ut­es… The gov­ern­ment quite clear­ly nev­er under­stood the extent to which Steve Biko was a man of peace. He was mil­i­tant in stand­ing up for his prin­ci­ples, yes, but his abid­ing goal was a peace­ful rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of all South Africans.

—Don­ald Woods

When South African police mur­dered Steve Biko in deten­tion on August 18, 1977, they thought they were rid­ding them­selves of a thorn in their side, that in killing him, they could for­get about him. Senior TIME edi­tor Tony Karon, who grew up in white South Africa, record­ed what the Min­is­ter of Police said when announc­ing Biko’s death to “a con­fer­ence of the rul­ing par­ty”: “I am not glad and I am not sor­ry about Mr. Biko. It leaves me cold. I can say noth­ing to you. Any per­son who dies… I shall also be sor­ry if I die.” Then, writes Karon, “they laughed. Like B‑movie Nazis.”

Despite the apartheid state’s best efforts to destroy him, Biko’s death made him a mar­tyr. “I didn’t know Steve Biko,” writes Karon, “but his death made clear to me, and hun­dreds of young white peo­ple like me, what mil­lions of black South Africans knew from expe­ri­ence…. The fight to end apartheid had claimed many thou­sands of lives before his, and many thou­sands more would be killed after Biko’s mur­der. But no death shook my world, and the coun­try all around me, more than Steve Biko’s.”

Biko helped found the South African Student’s Orga­ni­za­tion (SASO) while study­ing med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Natal, and he found­ed the Black Con­scious­ness Move­ment to advo­cate “self-aware­ness and self-reliance for Black peo­ple,” writes Mohammed Elnaiem at JSTOR Dai­ly. It was a move­ment to cen­ter the expe­ri­ences of Black South Africans. Yet as Biko under­stood the term, “Black” was a polit­i­cal class: his was “a move­ment for peo­ple who are oppressed,” he said, includ­ing so-called “col­ored” and Indi­an South Africans. “We believe,” says Biko in the inter­view above, “in a non-racial soci­ety.”

The gov­ern­ment “soon real­ized,” Karon writes, “the rad­i­cal move­ment was a threat to racial hier­ar­chy in the coun­try,” with its legal divi­sions of caste and class. They could not stop Biko’s mes­sage from res­onat­ing around the world. News of his arrest and death spread quick­ly and remained a pow­er­ful sym­bol of the regime’s bru­tal­i­ty. In the music world, the news took the form of Peter Gabriel’s “Biko.” Released in 1980, the song became a major hit. It was, wrote crit­ic Phil Sut­cliffe, “so hon­est you might even risk call­ing it truth.” Gabriel him­self, on the 40th anniver­sary of Biko’s death, wrote that “both music and lyric are sim­ple but writ­ten to be direct and emo­tion­al.”

He did not need to embell­ish, espe­cial­ly in the song’s final line: “the eyes of the world are watch­ing now, watch­ing now.” Indeed, they were, as they are now, even in our states of pan­dem­ic iso­la­tion, watch­ing the con­tin­ued police bru­tal­i­ty of gov­ern­ments built on racism, colo­nial­ism, slav­ery, apartheid, and exclu­sion. It’s an ide­al time for Gabriel to re-release “Biko,” and re-record it with Play­ing for Change, the orga­ni­za­tion gath­er­ing famous and non-famous musi­cians around the world in remote col­lab­o­ra­tive cov­ers of famous songs with uni­ver­sal res­o­nance. “Biko” belongs in their com­pa­ny.

At the top, you can see the per­for­mance, which opens with the stun­ning voic­es of The Cape Town Ensem­ble choral group. Then bassist Meshell Nde­geo­ce­lo, Beni­nese singer Angélique Kid­jo, and cel­list Yo-Yo Ma join in with a Japan­ese per­cus­sion group and oth­er musi­cians as Gabriel deliv­ers the lyrics with as much con­vic­tion as he did over forty years ago. Just above, see a mov­ing live per­for­mance of “Biko” from 1987, in a video direct­ed by Lol Creme. Intro­duc­ing the song, Gabriel calls the activist “a man who preached non­vi­o­lence in a state that has racism enshrined in its con­sti­tu­tion.” Or as the lyrics put it in their dev­as­tat­ing­ly direct way: “It was busi­ness as usu­al / in police room 619.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Grate­ful Dead’s “Rip­ple” Played By Musi­cians Around the World (with Cameos by David Cros­by, Jim­my Buf­fett & Bill Kreutz­mann)

Musi­cians Around the World Play The Band’s Clas­sic Song, “The Weight,” with Help from Rob­bie Robert­son and Ringo Starr

Musi­cians Around the World Play “Lean on Me,” the Uplift­ing Song by Bill With­ers (RIP)

 

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.