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In ‘The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast’ cartoon, that singing frog is Ronnie James Dio!


 
You learn something new every damned day. My TIL? Remember “The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast,” that great cartoon many of you reading this—perhaps the majority, even, since it’s had such a very long shelf-life—will recall from when you were a kid? Why that’s Mister Ronnie James Dio hisself who was doing the frog’s singing.

Good god! (or “Hail Satan!” if you prefer) Imagine if the Christian Right would had known this at the time: The evil genius heavy metal master many say was personally responsible for introducing the “devil horns” salute into the culture was worming his evil way into the ears of millions upon millions of kids from 1976 onwards! What kind of backwards-masked Satanic subliminal messages were inserted into this childhood classic?

What will Alex Jones say when he hears about this???
 

 
Yesterday when I was posting about the CIA-funded animated Animal Farm, I did a search on the couple, John Halas and Joy Batchelor (”Halas and Batchelor” was the name of their revered production company) who made it, to see what else they had produced (short answer = tons of stuff) and I took particular note of one of them: The almost psychedelic animated short they made to accompany “Love is All,” a track from The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast, an ambitious rock opera by Deep Purple’s Roger Glover and some of his famous friends. (When the show was staged—and filmed—for a one-off 1975 performance, the cast included members of Deep Purple, Twiggy, the guy who later played “Sgt. Apone” in Aliens and it was narrated by Vincent Price.)

The short film, part of what was intended to be a full-length project, was widely seen on television the world over for over fifteen years. In America, we saw it on The Electric Company and Nickelodeon from the 1970s well into the 1990s, and it was frequently seen in France, Australia, New Zealand, and especially in the Netherlands, where the song went to #1 and evokes such strong childhood associations that the Christian Democrats used the cheerful ditty for their 2006 general campaign ads.

It was directed by Lee Mishkin and based on the work of famed illustrator Alan Aldridge, who had previously put out his own 1973 book (based on the famous poem by William Roscoe, one of history’s first abolitionists) that served as the inspiration for Glover’s project.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.12.2013
01:33 pm
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