January 24, 2006 (revised May 22, 2006)
The Blupps was an animated cartoon about a rock band called, you guessed it, the Blupps, four teenage brothers from a family named Blupp, on an unnamed planet: Blapp (lead singer), Blepp (lead guitar), Blipp (bass guitar), and Blopp (drums). They looked human, like lobotomized beach bums, but with green skin. They wore tight white jumpsuits, except for Blopp, the painfully-obvious comic relief, who was fat and wore black shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. Each episode the boys would somehow stumble upon the latest plan by their arch-enemy, Drool the Cruel (Caucasian, with top hat and tails and an eight-foot moustache he actually twirled), to take over the universe. These plans would involve some sort of ray--an anti-gravity ray, a monster-creating ray, a music-eliminating ray, etc.--at Drool's latest hideout, always a medieval castle on some craggy mountain. The boys would battle Drool's monster henchmen, defeat them, and blow up the castle as Drool escaped, vowing revenge. Each episode ended with an original tune, performed by the boys before the same stock footage of cheering green girls in skimpy dresses, with the same garish dots and smears and flowers swirling around on screen for that hip psychedelic vibe.
The show ran for just 13 episodes on a few stations in 1970, the year of my birth, and pretty much disappeared from the airwaves. I caught the show in reruns several years later and found it compelling in a car-crash sort of way. I haven't seen that show since childhood, but I can still vividly recall what I loved about it: the blatant cheesiness, the idiotic catchphrases (Blopp would say "Rotten-roo!" 809 times an episode), and the psychopathically-sunshiny songs, none of which has ever appeared in any recording format...other than on the actual one-sided 45-rpm record on the back of the Blupp Puffs box.
That brand of cereal (small greenish globs, judging from the box art) had appeared only in a few stores on the West Coast. I paid 334 bucks on eBay for two emptied and resealed boxes--one to save and one to cut apart for the record. ("My hep can wait," I told my dumbfounded eventual-ex; nostalgia comes first.) The record had three songs, sung by the high-pitched guy who did Blapp's singing voice: "We're the Blupps (And We Love You)"--"We really do do do"; "Blupp Party"--with "groovy marshmallow girls" and "space squeezers" who want "world peace"; and "Sugar, Sugar"--an inept and hyperactive cover of the Archies tune, where the line "the loveliness of loving you" becomes, you guessed it, "the bluppiness of blupping you." At the office pre-Super Bowl party (yeah, yeah, go Steelers) my eventual-ex had dragged me to two weeks before his ex-communication, I annoyed him by asking his coworkers (in a slightly flamboyant manner) if they'd ever enjoyed the bluppiness of blupping, for you see, yuppie blupping is the bluppiest blupping of all.
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Willie the Duck! Does anyone remember the 1970s Pittsburgh children's show character Willie the Duck?...Fiction, Home.
� 2006 David V. Matthews