B-Sides: A Skunk Sings a Love Song to a Parrot
Steve Barton
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You are not drunk and you are not high. Well, maybe you are right now. Not like I’m peeping in your windows. What you are about to witness is not a chemical-induced hallucination. A skunk really does sing a love song to a parrot, and it’s not a cartoon either.
With today being Cinco de Mayo, I thought it only fitting to bust out a B-Sides from South of the Border. Sadly, there are no El Santo musicals that I know of. However, there are insane Mexican musicals like 1960’s Little Red Riding Hood. You know, the movie version of the classic fairy tale where the bumbling big bad wolf and his high-pitch voiced sidekick Stinky the Skunk scheme to devour Little Red Riding Hood, but she has even bigger problems because she has to venture into an ominous cave to confront the demon that has been kidnapping children from her village. I’m guessing you’re probably not overly familiar with this insane version.
There was a period of time in the Sixties when an enterprising film distributor named K. Gordon Murray was making quite a name for himself with his foreign-import, badly dubbed, Saturday matinee kiddy movies, such as the Mexican Little Red Riding Hood series, of which there was a trilogy and even spin-offs starring the Wolf and Stinky. In fact, Stinky the Skunk became sort of Murray’s own Mickey Mouse.
Today we will bear witness to a particularly peculiar scene from Little Red Riding Hood in which a dwarf in a skunk costume stands in the rain beating on a mandolin as he sings a love song to Little Red Riding Hood’s pet parrot. Not another little person in a parrot costume – an actual parrot. Don’t worry; as the lyrics of his song indicate, he only wants to love the parrot like a daughter. Somehow that sounds even more disturbing.
When it came to dubbing the musical numbers in his international imports, Murray was notorious for being more concerned with the lyrics looking more like they match the movements of the non-English speaking actors’ mouths than actually properly translating the lyrics into English. Not that it will matter much with Stinky since you can only comprehend about 25% of what he says anyway since his warbling voice sounds like Woody Woodpecker after inhaling a full canister of helium.
Happy Cinco de Mayo! Viva la Mexico! A skunk sings a love song to a parrot.
As Uncle Creepy would say, “Some things cannot be unseen”.
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Categorized:B-Sides
