When that pipe burst in my basement that cold December night and the resulting flood damaged the Amazon.com box filled with photos of my ex-boyfriend and me, I didn’t much care; near the end of our two-year relationship, he’d grown even more straight-acting, even wearing the neckties and American flag lapel pins that the right-wing, badly-Botoxed commentator on the local news would wear. However, when I discovered the flood had ruined my Blupp Puffs box (the so-called indestructible acrylic display case had had weak seams), I almost cried, and not because I’d planned to sell that box on eBay to help pay for my hepatitis-C treatments. (I couldn’t rely upon my ex’s health insurance any more.) That box had nostalgic value for me—well, more specifically The Blupps did.
The Blupps was a syndicated Saturday-morning cartoon series about a rock band called, you guessed it, the Blupps, four teenage boys from a family named Blupp, from an unnamed planet: Blapp (lead singer), Blepp (lead guitar), Blipp (bass guitar), and Blopp (drums)—all green and hunky, except for Blopp, the green and tubby comic relief. (He wore a Hawaiian shirt and black pants, while his brothers wore tight white jumpsuits.) The boys would travel (sans parents or other adults) in their van-shaped rocket, the Bluppmobile, to gigs on other planets, where the boys would always run into their nemesis, Drool the Cruel, a Caucasian with melodrama-style top hat and tails and eight-foot moustache. He would capture the boys, tell them his latest plan to control the universe (mind-control rays, giant fire-breathing komodo dragons, etc.), and imprison the boys in the dungeon of his castle headquarters. Needless to say, the boys would escape and use their superhuman powers (concentric circles emitting from the boys’ heads) to foil the plan. Drool would always say “Curses!” and escape in his own spaceship, vowing revenge. The boys would then end each episode with an original tune performed in concert before an unseen audience, with giant candy-colored circles and hearts and splatters superimposed over the boys to communicate a feeling of grooviness.
The show lasted for 13 episodes on a few stations in 1970, the year of my birth, and pretty much disappeared from the airwaves. I caught the show in reruns a decade later and loved the amusing cheesiness, the idiotic catchphrases (“Rotten-roo!” Blopp would say 809 times an episode), and the psychopathically-sunshiny songs, none of which has ever appeared in any recording format…other than on the actual one-sided 45-rpm record on the back of the Blupp Puffs box. That brand of cereal (large green puffs, judging from the front of the box) had appeared only in a few stores on the West Coast; I paid 334 bucks on eBay for two empty and resealed boxes–one to save and one to cut apart for the record. (“My hep can wait,” I told my dumbfounded eventual-ex; nostalgia comes first.) The record had three songs, sung by the high-pitched guy who did Blapp’s singing voice: “We’re the Blupps (And We Love You)”—“We really do do do”; “Blupp Party”—with “groovy marshmallow girls” and “space squeezers” who want “world peace”; and “Sugar, Sugar”—an inept and hyperactive cover of the Archies tune, where the line “the loveliness of loving you” becomes, you guessed it, “the bluppiness of blupping you.” At the office pre-Super Bowl party (yeah, yeah, go Steelers) my eventual-ex had dragged me to two weeks before his ex-communication, I annoyed him by asking his coworkers if they’d ever enjoyed the bluppiness of blupping, for you see, yuppie blupping is the bluppiest blupping of all.
April 12, 2006
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 