*Pop*
Beware of the Blob
It creeps and leaps
And glides and slides
Across the floor
Right through the door
And all around the wall…
And only Steve McQueen can save us…
We have returned with the latest installment of Buttkickin’ Halloween Songs, and this evening you and I are taking a ginormously gelatinous leap back to 1958. Ah yes, the late 50s, when movie monsters were radioactive and teenagers all looked like they were pushing thirty. I mean wasn’t Stockard Channing like 34 when they were filming Grease? Listen I love both her and the movie. Ne’er-do-well Rizzo may have been, but a teenager? Perhaps not…
(Yes I know that was Frenchie’s song. I sing it at karaoke religiously. Just go with me here…)
But alongside the radioactive ghoulies and mid-life-crisis zippy teens, the late 50s also reminded us that the greatest threat to humanity was a gigantic glob of strawberry Jell-O with a voracious appetite for human flesh. That’s why our selection today is The Blob, performed by The Five Blobs.
That’s right; this is the gloriously goofy theme song from the 1958 sci-fi horror classic of the same name, starring the aforementioned Mr. McQueen. I mean, a younger Steve McQueen. Years before Bullitt, The Great Escape, and becoming the coolest goddamn human being on the planet.
But what makes things really interesting is that The Blob was written by BURT FREAKING BACHARACH! How many other Halloween playlists have Burt Bacharach tunes? Ehh? Ahh? I’ll wait.
Yet it’s true. The man responsible for “Walk On By,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” and countless other pop masterpieces (alongside co-writer Mack David) also composed a bouncy little number about a murderous mound of pudding. And I love every goshdarn second of it.
Ostensibly the song isn’t all that much. It only has one verse, repeated three times. And The Five Blobs weren’t actually five guys. They were just one dude, a cat named Bernie Knee, whose voice was overdubbed to simulate an entire group.
The song itself is an infectious little slice of late-50s novelty rock, complete with goofy harmonies, a bouncing saxophone, and absolutely nothing remotely frightening about it. Which, considering the movie features an ever-expanding mass of alien goo literally devouring people whole, makes the whole affair that much more hilarious to me.
I mean honestly: this is the soundtrack of a late 50s/early 60s Tiki Lounge in mid-October. Lots of guys with pipes and shimmying women in cocktail dresses and repressed sexuality and rigid conformity and more than one lampshade on someone’s head.
But there you have it. Two minutes of delightfully ridiculous monster-movie madness, courtesy of one of the greatest pop composers who ever lived. So what if The Blob isn’t exactly a nerve-shredding exercise in ever-growing terror? Sometimes, and perhaps often, Halloween calls for a catchy song about a carnivorous glob of space slime. With a bouncy, sax-driven grab-bag of lounge lizardry.
Wait, is “Lounge Lizardry” an apt descriptor? It is now. Nobody rush out to patent anything, I’m still trying to lure a possum out of my house…
A splotch, a blotch
Be careful of the Blob
*Pop*...
