Van Johnson – Flim Flam Floo
An evening pause: This song comes from the first full television movie, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, first aired on NBC in 1957, and then subsequently re-aired almost yearly for the next decade. If you want to watch it, it is available on the internet archive here.
I post it today because it is a perfect expression of the hopeful culture of the 1960s that made possible the Apollo 11 lunar landing that occurred fifty-three years ago today. As the song says, “The world is filled with wonderment and magic,” and then insists “You can find the beauty in all you perceive/Just believe that it’s there in view.”
I recently rediscovered this movie of my childhood, and was astonished to discover that though I hadn’t heard this song in more than fifty years, I remembered its message as if I had only watched it yesterday. Its message was what my parent’s generation believed, and tried with all their might to pass on to their children. Their belief made the Apollo 11 landing possible. Sadly, most of my baby boomer generation decided to reject this hopeful vision, thus producing the increasingly gloomy society we have today.
Let us work to recapture that wonder and hope. Only then can our children breathe free to achieve some true wonders of their own.
Thanks to Wayne Devette for clipping this song from the full movie for me.
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Then too, this and Trek may have gotten kids hopes up too much.
Strangely dressed adults using Flim Flam to lead kids astray?
We already have that with drag queen story time.
The old FDR era school tests were humorless, but competent. I wish I had taken vocational school.
That would have served me so much better.