The Big Red Room (1 of 4)
All I’ve ever really wanted to do was skirt the boundaries of this reality. I mean, without risking any kind of permanent damage to the brain or body. If possible.
The living room in our tiny house had red carpet. A dark-ish red, maybe burgundy or maroon. Somehow, when I was a child, the redness in that room covered more space than that occupied by the carpet. It seeped into the air, into the mind, so that it became a state of being, full of trap doors and portals to other states of existence.
That space, red space, became ground zero of my imaginative world and its many small explosions.
One of those early explosions was triggered by a set of View-Master reels featuring characters from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Just in case you’re unaware (hey, don’t wanna assume anything, somebody mentioned Pogs to me the other day and I had no idea what they were talking about) View-Master was a popular kids toy in the seventies (maybe it still is, apparently it’s still being manufactured) that consisted of a small mechanical device, kind of like a set of binoculars, into which a circular reel was inserted, allowing the viewer to see 3-D images of cartoon characters, wildlife and geographical images or still frames from popular tv shows and movies.
Those Peanuts View-Master reels were downright surreal. Rather than direct lifts from the strip, or flat stills from the Peanuts TV cartoons, Charlie Brown and pals were brought to life via three-dimensional action figures, arranged in front of fully-decorated background sets. It looked something like claymation or stop-motion animation, only with no movement. The atmosphere created by these scenarios, if one allowed it to, could arouse a strangely disquieting mood. It still can.
Something about the figures - blank-faced, motionless yet on the verge of motion - was eerily off. They suggested department store mannequins that might suddenly, threateningly, spring to life. And the backgrounds, full of shadows and ominously deep colors, as in the pure red wall of Schroeder’s music room that mirrored the red of my own living room, deepened the sense of being on an alternate plane of existence. Looking at these images was good training ground for a future in serious David Lynch appreciation.
I wanted to get into that place, hang out with those mystery figures. They seemed like they were probably nice enough. And if things got scary, like maybe if Lucy suddenly decided to hurl that bust of Beethoven directly at me, finding a way out might prove an adventure. Maybe Snoopy could help.
The Peanuts gang would turn up again as key figures in the hot-wiring of my young imagination.
to be continued
