Monday, July 10, 2006

One Got Fat 1963 Bicycle Safety This will creep you out. It was made by three film-makers, one of whom was my artist father, in 1963. Nick board artist Dave Cunningham had nightmares for like EVER after seeing this in the second grade.

5 comments:

Kevin Koch said...

Steve, you neglected to mention that both your little brother (Mossby Pomegranate, the pathetic monkey without a bike) and your mother (carrying groceries and knocked into the tree) are among the actors in the film.

I also think your Dad should have gone after the folks who made Planet of the Apes a few years later. Clearly the same disturbing concept.

Steve Hulett said...

I post this because today, strolling through Nickelodeon, I came across a picture of all the monkeys (masked kids) taped to the front of Dave Cunningham's cube. I looked at Dave and said: "Oh. A picture of 'One Got Fat'."

Dave was amazed I knew from where the picture came. I explained that, forty-three years ago, my father Ralph Hulett and two partners made "OGF" for their small company, "Interlude Films," and that they filmed it in August and September of '63, in La Crescenta. (Dad's day job was painting backgrounds for Walt Disney Productions' animated features.)

Dave said he saw the film in the mid-seventies as a second grader, and that it terrified him. He told me he had nightmares for a long time afterwards.

YouTube not only has this flick on its site, but a music video that some enterprising soul created from it called "One Got Fat Redux."

Has all the best stuff from the longer version, and is pretty bizarre.

C.Edwards said...

STOP! Once they showed the monkey faces -- I'm done. That would've FREAKED ME OUT as a kid! (Hell, it's kind of freaking me out now.)

Dave said...

I remember watching this film in the school auditorium horrified, trying as hard as I could to avert by eyes from the screen. For weeks (hell, years) after I couldn't sleep through the night without these images popping into my head. 30 years later, I still get a flashback every once in awhile. And for a long time I began to think I had imagined the whole thing, because no one I knew had ever heard of it. Then a few weeks ago I did an internet search for "monkeys on bikes" after sitting at my desk and thinking of it yet again. Thanks to the glory of internet video, I can now relive the one of the darkest chapters of my childhood once or twice a week now.

Ryan said...

The Remix was good, but there's a very funny mashup of the video synced to Tori Amos. It's way creepier.

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