Songs Of The Day 10/25/2014: Bob McFadden & Dor - "The Mummy" + "Son of the Mummy"

Halloween Week: This is the third year I've put together a block of Halloween music. To tell you the truth, except for the increased availability of chocolate which I unfortunately take full advantage of, I have a harder time getting excited about Halloween than other people. Obviously I never did it as a kid because we didn't celebrate any holidays at home, but even after I cast off the shackles of The Religious Upbringing Halloween was still a hard sell to me. I don't dig fear, man. Can't get with it. I prefer my holidays to be soothing, relaxing, positive reinforcements of my fixed place in the infinite humanity of the world. You know. Labor Day. Flag Day. Boxing Day. Administrative Professionals' Day. I dig on love, brotherman. I get down with the flow of the ethereal, ya dig?

Hold on, I see a slug on the kitchen rug -- where's my ice pick? Or should I use the tooth extractor? I know! I'm gonna get some lighter fluid and teach that hapless mollusk the meaning of "feel the burn!" Okay, I'm back into it. Let's get started.

Bob McFadden & Dor have been featured here before. In fact, this is kind of like a repeat, which I hate to do, but I'm throwing in another song so I don't look like a cheapskate. I, and probably all of my friends from KAOS in Olympia, first discovered "The Mummy" on RE/Search magazine's compilation Incredibly Strange Music, Vol. 2, which came out in 1995. Compared to the amount of flotsam that's come our way since downloading exploded, "The Mummy" from 1959 isn't all that incredibly strange anymore. Now it's just a cute novelty. I've paired "The Mummy" with "Son of the Mummy," which came out the next year. The primary difference between the Mummy and the Son of the Mummy is that the Mummy only had a crude bicycle horn, whereas it sounds like his progeny has copped himself a nice little primitive synthesizer. The difference is far greater than you'd think.

By way of biography, Bob McFadden was a voice-over actor whose credits included Cool McCool and Snarf from ThunderCats. Wikipedia, that wellspring of necessary data about Administrative Professionals' Day and whether slugs are mollusks, also says McFadden was the voice of Franken Berry in the cereal commercials, and the parrot who said "Ring around the collar!" in ads for Wisk detergent. You had to be there. Dor was, no joke, poet Rod McKuen, for whom it just never got better than this.