Give that cognitive dissonance back to the chicken

[mmcirvin]

Ultimately via kip_w: Chicken Fat (The Youth Fitness Song).

In my youth, I heard secondhand tales from my mother of a horrible thing called "Chicken Fat", a record played in PE class that drove kids through a grueling workout to the barking refrain "give that chicken fat back to the chicken". It was also referenced, I believe, in the Judy Blume novel Blubber, in which it was described as one of the many humiliations of PE class for an overweight kid.

This is the first time I've actually heard it, and, my God, it's a Meredith Willson song performed by Robert Preston! And while it sounds like it describes a pretty exhausting routine, it's also highly entertaining in its own way. Yet, at the same time, I can easily imagine coming to hate it when subjected to it under its intended purpose.

It was a Kennedy-era commission (part of the infamous Presidential Physical Fitness Program), so my mom probably encountered it via one of her several younger siblings.

Comments

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I remember just enough of it that I know the catch phrases but can't fit it together with any semblance of meter. I remember it being performed at a camp talent show, where one of the kids just did push ups over and over while the others switched out.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It's also an example of that strange, momentary phenomenon of the JFK years, the ability of the government to command brilliantly made yet utterly sincere works of propaganda from the best and brightest in the entertainment world. A while back in one of WHRB's Orgies, they played a long excerpt from this all-star jazz revue the Kennedy administration commissioned as an act of goodwill ambassadorship from American culture to the world; I remember Louis Armstrong figured prominently. It was utterly strange, technically excellent and charming and sort of creepy all at the same time.

You could draw an analogy to the immediate post-Sept. 11th period, but the quality level of the propaganda then was nowhere near as high.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Mind you, I'm also perfectly aware that the DoD has had hooks into the entertainment industry for the past few years, but the resulting propaganda is both more underhanded and cruder. The Kennedy-era stuff seemed to be utterly proud that it was propaganda, as if you could get the most brilliant composers and poets and performers in the world today to make the equivalent of Lee Greenwood records.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Yikes, I heard Tom Servo sing that years and years ago on MST3K and had no idea what it was, besides weird and catchy.

I am still working on dereferencing things from that show.

[hemlock-martini.livejournal.com]

I remember this song and being utterly humiliated by it in third grade, and irritated that we were being forced to run around the gym and do wearying calisthenics just because a record was telling us to. The gym teacher was, I think, balancing his checkbook and looking up at us about once every thirty seconds to make sure none of us had broken anything.