For the Winter Solstice, a snowy parody starring Zippy:
(#1)
Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, taken into many strange places: Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, Skeeball, Fleer’s Dubble Bubble gum, a gondolier, William Blake’s poetry, a strip mall, Joe Biden (Vice President of the U.S.), and a laundromat.
The original:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The poetic form of Frost’s poem is reproduced exactly in the Zippy parody: four stanzas of four lines each, each line in trochaic tetrameter. The first three stanzas have the rhyme scheme AABA, with the B of one stanza serving as the A of the next, and the last stanza has four lines with the B rhyme of the third stanza:
AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD
where A is /o/, B is /ir/, C is /ek/, D is /ip/
Of course, the Frost actually makes sense, while the Zippy is surreal, and also has a lot of pop culture references. Three notes:
Moe. This is Moe Howard of the Three Stooges:
The Three Stooges were an American vaudeville and comedy act of the mid–20th century (1930–1975) best known for their numerous short subject films, still syndicated to television. Their hallmark was physical farce and slapstick. (Wikipedia link)
Skeeball. From Wikipedia:
Skee ball (also spelled skeeball or skee-ball; sometimes called skee roll) is a common arcade game and one of the first redemption games. It is similar to bowling except it is played on an inclined lane with fist-sized balls and the player aims to get the ball to fall into a hole rather than knock down pins. The object of the game is to collect as many points as possible by rolling balls up an incline and into the designated point value holes.
(#2)
(As a child, I was an enthusiastic Skeeball player.)
Fleer pink bubblegum. On this blog, a posting “Dingburg bubbles” of 4/29/14 about the Fleer company’s Dubble Bubble gum, the first commercially successful bubblegum.
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