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

[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.