"Gotcha"

Watching all these American classics of animation last week, was a great experience. They are so deeply ingraned in people's memories and are part of the culture. Most of these animations were totally new to me. I grew up watching Hungarian folktale adaptations on TV and occasionally a Czech or Slovak or Russian (from the Soviet era) animation. As I got older, more and more programs from the West started popping up on TV. Sunday afternoon, 3 to 4 pm was Disney hour. And I watched it every weekend. And I had to take a nap beforehand, which I hated. But, it was worth it just to see Ducktales, Captain Balu otherwise known as TaleSpin, Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers and Aladdin... (any of this familiar to anyone besides Aladdin? Just wondering...The links lead to the Hungarian versions of the intros.)
And then when I was in fourth grade (or somewhere around that time), my mom and I got a satelite dish. Now, this thing was very sensitive. It was on our roof and it had to be turned with a clicker from the room the TV was in. As you clicked the clicker, left or right, the dish would follow. And that dish could get amazing channels! Like Eurosport and BBC. One day as I was playing around with the clicker and was trying desperately to get it back to where I started from, I stumbled onto Cartoon Network. And I was smitten with Cartoon Network. Someone told me a story about this girl, who learned English just by watching it. I told my mom that so she would let me watch more if it, but she didn't go for it... Anyhow, it was then that I saw Tom and Jerry, and Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd the first time. I loved them all! Especially the ones with lots of visual gags, because my English at the time constituted of "Vatsi yor neim?" and "Tank yu". Later on, after hearing "Gotcha" a hundred times and a dozen futile attempts to find it in my dictionary, I finally got it!
Just last night, I had one of those "gotcha" moments that made me ridiculously happy. I watched an early episode of 30 Rock and Liz Lemon's phone goes off and it is the "Kill the Wabbit" song! The joke is on the snobbish art dealer because she is not familiar with the reference and asks her if she likes Wagner. And I got it. And the joke wasn't on me. (It made me almost as happy when I read the Phantom Tollbooth and was figuring out the wordplays. Pretty exciting if I think about how I first read Goodnight Moon when I was a freshman and halfway through "Make way for ducklings" I had to finally ask if these Mr and Mrs Mallard were birds, and I am still not through all the Dr. Seuss books.)

Posted by Eszter