In a 1994 episode of Rugrats, the cartoon series’ one-year-old protagonist Tommy Pickles insists on taking off his clothes and not putting them back on. He soon convinces his twin playmates Phil and Lil DeVille to do the same, just before they’re picked up by their mother Betty, a stocky, voluble woman never seen without her athletic headband and Venus glyph sweatshirt. Scandalized at this scene of infant nudism, Betty explodes at Tommy’s mother: “I don’t know what kind of baby commune you’re trying to run here, but it’s time to face facts. The sixties are over, and we lost!” This line went over my head when I first watched the episode, as it must also have done for the rest of the show’s elementary school–age viewership, but it haunted me nevertheless, hinting offhandedly at a period of bitter, possibly violent sociopolitical turmoil not so very far in the past.
Yet I daresay I had a more vivid sense of what “the sixties” were about than most members of the generation yet to be labeled millennials, and for a reason not entirely unrelated to Rugrats. Even before that show premiered, I was a fan of Philip Proctor, who voiced Phil and Lil’s ineffectual stay-at-home father Howard DeVille. A stage actor who had also played countless one-off television parts, Proctor was then best known as a member of the Firesign Theatre, a four-man comedy troupe that had, from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, put out a series of record albums densely layered with elaborate sonic production and laced with topical, esoteric, and absurd countercultural humor. Or so Proctor was known, at least, to a certain turned-on segment of the baby boomer generation to which my father belonged.
Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.