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

[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.