Just as Masha in Chekhov's Three Sisters cannot get a snatch of poetry about a golden chain around an oak tree out of her head, I cannot stop thinking about Creepella Gruesome's first words to Wilma Flintstone: "You may call me Creepy, Cookie." And like Masha, I don't know why. Is it the eagerness for intimacy expressed by the unconventional Creepella to the conformist Wilma? Is it the fact that Creepella looks exactly like a drag-queen version of Cher? Is it the introduction of a horror-show neighbor to the Flintstones because The Addams Family and The Munsters were flooding the airwaves?
The Gruesomes were pretty much forgotten among the 1960s monster families that invaded America's living rooms. These Halloween nightmare creatures were substitutes for the hippies and weirdos creeping into the suburban consciousness of middle-class USA. They were safe versions of the scary challengers of the two-car garage. In an interesting development when the Flintstones introduced the freeloading Hatrocks to the Gruesomes in order to scare the pesky hillbillies, they took to the weirdos. It took a conspiracy of all three Bedrock families--the Flintstones, the Rubbles, and the Gruesomes--imitating a prehistoric version of the Beatles to finally get rid of the Hatrocks. You would think the red-state yokels would want to shoot to long-haired Gruesomes on sight.
Maybe Creepella was really a tranny hiding her bizarre secret from Wilma and Betty.
How funny is that. I was just talking to my gay roomate about Creepella and he said he wss convinced that she was a Tranny. And from one Tranny to another I miss her over the top Queen ways!!
ReplyDelete" You can fool some of the people some of the time, and most of the people most of the time, but you can never fool a witch" (Endora, Bewitched)