As a child, I was really into the Cotton commercial jingle. That’s not really what I set out to write about, but it is related. I’d imagine most people of a certain age (and I say that because…I really have no idea how long the Cotton jingle persisted as central to its branding; I seem to remember a Zooey Deschanel version, which suggests that it lasted pretty far out of my childhood, but…who knows) would recognize it, or be able to supply it based only on a prompt of “The touch/the feel/of ….”
I keep fumbling on the keyboard–let’s blame the polar vortex for stiff fingers–and typing “cotton jungle,” which is not a terrible image. I mean, I would walk through one, at the least. I imagine it referring to the clothing displays at department stores, those racks that kids always find their way into the center of, amidst the curtains of shirts. I assume that kids still do that because, duh, ready-made fort, but I also assume it’s a fairly universal cultural touchstone for people my age. It usually held a pretty low penalty, too, unlike running around on the furniture at Olan Mills while your parents pored over the photos of you they were paying for. Not that I know any ill-behaved former children who did that.
After my roommates stopped questioning why I had shipped 200 pounds of middle-grade fiction to our apartment (I’d like to add a middle step here of them admiring my speed and impressive arranging abilities in getting them all shelved, but alas), they started looking at the spines of the books in the living room and exclaiming, “Hey! My Teacher is an Alien–I remember that! I read that whole series…Oh man, Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher?” (they were in the Coville section). “When we were kids and we had no internet, I kind of thought I was the only one reading these…”
While it’s not true that you can find any book/video/cassette/tv show from your childhood on Amazon or eBay (I had to deflect the argument “but you can find anything…” a number of times when justifying my book shipment), it is true that it’s much easier. I wrote years ago about the eidetic memory of YouTube, where I was able to find all of the cartoons I watched as a child, and I brought this up to my roommates when we were talking books. They remembered Eureka’s Castle and Noozles and Little Koala but not Mysterious Cities of Gold, which I remember being called “Children of the Sun,” but I may have just been influenced by the theme song. I’ve watched snippets or episodes of all of these in the past decade, because they’ve been preserved indefinitely online. However, I only found out today that Mysterious Cities of Gold was based on a novel by Scott O’Dell–a novel that I’ve never heard of, called The King’s Fifth, which seems odd since I have Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Black Pearl, and Zia on the same bookshelf as my Bruce Coville books.
The Scott O’Dell IMDB page (which, weirdly, includes entries for the novels he wrote that DIDN’T get adapted for film or TV, like it’s a card catalog or something (ETA: I was incorrect; the two books that were listed were in fact adapted for TV–it’s just that Scott O’Dell’s entries specified “novel”) also informed me that there’s a second season of Mysterious Cities of Gold that was never released during the 1980s in America…and that it was released in 2012, 2013, and 2016. So…I clearly have more research to do.
I’m still waiting, though, for someone else whose favorite book growing up was The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Wolff. I know you’re out there somewhere…
