Peer Pressure, Peer Pressure, Peer Pressure! ™
March 22, 2022The Tropic of Oknaton
January 29, 2023There used to be a television show called (Mutual of Omaha’s) Wild Kingdom. It was a wildlife and nature documentary show where every action and activity of every life form would be continuously-described/narrated by it’s host Marlin Perkins. Waldo Dave started doing impersonations of Marlin Perkin’s wildlife narrations. But then Dave started narrating what the Waldos were doing, as though they were simply a specimen of nature.
Other Waldos joined in after Waldo Dave and started narrating what other Waldos were doing at any time. And then it broke open and spread, and we comedically narrated what strangers were doing from a distance.
Two of these narrations were noteworthy and repeated often …with a Waldo narration catchphrase included.
One of them was the ‘tiny mind’ narration. For example, we would be at a tourist spot looking at the Golden Gate Bridge. We would see a tourist looking at it and narrate about him, ‘his tiny mind takes in the scene of the orange bridge.’ Or at a to-go restaurant, ‘his tiny mind figures out which burrito to order.’ Almost every narration of every activity comedically included what their ‘tiny mind’ was up to.
Another Wild Kingdom-Waldo narration was about ‘baiting’. To be able to film the wild animals on the Wild Kingdom television show, they had to get the animals to show up. And they did so by putting out or ‘baiting’ them with food. For example, host Marlin Perkins would narrate, “we baited the lions with some zebra meat.”
And of course, the Waldos took that further with the narration of what it would take to film the Waldos… “we baited the Waldos with Colombian Gold!” (a strain of weed in the 70’s).