The Electric Suffragettes' Ice Cream Social were a cartoon band created by Allied Farmers to compete with General Foods, whose line of cereal box records by ‘The Archies’, ‘The Jackson 5’ and ‘The Banana Splits’ had drastically increased their market share in the sugaring up the pre-teen set at breakfast.
They were a somewhat-derivative bunch of teenage mystery-solving musicians, including:
- cravat-and-Roger-McGuinn-glasses-wearing guitarist / singer MacArthur Parker;
- mini-skirted blonde bombshell bassist Jane Fender;
- keyboard player Abbey Rhodes, (who was possibly the prototype of ‘Ghost World’s’ Enid); and
- eternally-hungry, love-bead-and-fur-vest-wearing drummer Lenin McCarthy.
They were assisted on tambourine by their comic relief canine companion, Scooby Tuesday, which made no sense to my learned six year old mind, since a dog obviously would have no skill at percussion. Why I didn’t take this logic further and realise he wouldn’t have been able to talk either, (admittedly, with an obvious speech impediment that meant every word started with an ‘R’), is still beyond me.
They were obviously a poor imitation of the real thing, but upon reading the cereal box that promised that if I sent in five box tops I’d not only receive a copy of ‘a full-length comic adventure!', but also an ‘extra-groovy’ vinyl record, I put such apprehensive thoughts out of my mind, and proceeded to make myself sick by eating the rest of the box in one sitting, so my parents would have to buy more.
They really made you work for it too. Boxes of ‘Cap’n Ellis Dee’s Rainbow Melts’ obviously respected the laws limiting sugar content in breakfast cereal aimed at children by being at least a whopping couple of micrograms under the limit. They were fortified with fruit, (‘Real Chunks of Haight-Ashberries’), and to this day, my excessive binging turned me off eating the bright, multicoloured berries for life, though I occasionally find myself daydreaming fondly of them.
I sent the required box tops away, and spent what seemed like months dying each time the mailman went past without delivering anything package-sized. Of course it finally turned up after I’d written it off, and switched my allegiance to the more prosaic Rice Bubbles, who were promising me my very own ‘unbreakable Skippy plate’, (which, incidentally, wasn’t).
Of course, I read the comic first, where the gang solved the groovy mystery of the ‘Kandy-Koloured Klown Ghost’, and, having saved the day, spent the last panel preparing to play a song. To my eyes, this would seem rather anticlimactic after wreaking havoc through a Candy Factory and foiling a villain disguised in a Day-Glo bedsheet’s perfect scheme in a somewhat pesky fashion, and also somewhat presumptuous a measure of your average candy production line worker’s fondness for cheesy teenybopper music, but they picked up their instruments regardless and froze in mid-frame in that 'We're rocking out' pose I recognise from bands that simply don't. The - patronising - type underneath hyped the multimedia experience: ‘Now play the record and you too can hear their fab song!’
The record was multicoloured vinyl, and still is a beautiful sight to behold. My sister and I immediately ran to my room, put it on the portable record player, and proceeded to dance around like idiots. I was doing what I thought rock stars did, which was basically pretending to play a tambourine in a two-second, limited-animation loop. My sister had perfected a similar two-second shimmy from watching Kitty Jo from ‘the Cattanooga Cats’. Who needed anything else? Based upon their illustrated instrumentation, Josie and the Pussycats didn't even have a bassist, which in retrospect makes me think they would have sounded more like the White Stripes.
Whilst to the untrained eye we might have seemed like stupid kids being stupid, we were both well aware that we were training for our obvious futures as Rock Stars. We weren’t concerned with such mundane trivialities as fame, groupies, drugs and alcohol! Could a Grammy Award or a drunken blowjob compete with the thrill of being chased by a werewolf down a seemingly-endless hallway in a spooky house after midnight, constantly passing strangely similar bookcases and paintings, whilst our latest Top 10 groovy hit played in the background, emitting from some ill-defined aural source?
The record was an acceptable prediction of our obvious future to the pair of us, being totally far out to our pre-teen ears, so we immediately put it on again and started singing it loudly to each other as we danced.
Without warning, the bedroom door slammed open, and my furious-looking father stomped across the room and ripped the needle off the vinyl with an enormous screech that was probably heard by the musicians who originally recorded it.
“Awwww!” we both said, putting the whine in ‘Why?’
He looked down as us, so very tall. I hadn’t seen him this mad since he found me reading the comics that were hidden in bedroom cupboard, which seemed to involve some fuzzy-haired siblings who were obsessed with lawn clippings, for some unfathomable reason.
“You are never,” he said, with ‘never’ almost literally appearing etched in bold type into the air between us, “to sing that song again!”
Then he stomped out with the record in hand, leaving us obviously confused, but we both knew better than to question him. We retreated to the safety of the Stone Pony’s ‘Different Drum’, but That Record That Made Dad Mad became family legend.
My sister reminded me of this the other week, so I searched through his old boxes of vinyl records and turned it up. My jaw hit the floor as I played it, so I just had to rip it from the vinyl. What were they thinking? No wonder the ‘soon to be a NBC Saturday Morning Cartoon!’ didn’t eventuate.
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