"Well, here we are: Pismo Beach and all the clams we can eat"
"What a way for a duck to travel -- underground!"
Cue the music: "We're in the Money"
"I have a feeling Pismo Beach ain't quite this wide..."
"Well, what do you know... a poil!"
"Down! Down! Down! Mine! Mine! Mine!"
Looney Tunes cartoons play like the soundtrack of my childhood. I can remember coming home from school every day and watching Bugs Bunny cartoons at 4:00 on Channel 5 until I could recite the dialogue by heart. Throw in a Ring Ding or two and you've got yourself one happy kid. When we were traveling on the California coast last spring, I saw an opportunity to visit a place I had no reference to, other than a Bugs Bunny cartoon. In "Ali Baba Bunny," Bugs and Daffy Duck are vacationing together and Bugs is presumably doing the driving, navigating by underground tunnel to their holiday destination, Pismo Beach. A missed "left toin at Albecoikie" puts them somewhere in Arabia, inside a cave with mountains of gold, jewels and treasure, bringing out vile greediness in Daffy. Bugs eventually does make it to Pismo Beach, as does Daffy, albeit in a comically altered state. Bugs' line, "Well, here we are, Pismo Beach and all the clams we can eat" has been in my mind ever since those days, and I finally got the chance to say it and mean it when we passed through last May. It's a pleasant seaside community, with restaurants, gift shops, and bustling surfers making the scene. Our visit wasn't very lengthy, just long enough to pick up a delicious lunch at eat it by the shore and there were no clams for me, due to a clam-intolerant stomach. That's all folks.
3 comments:
I LOVE those cartoons! I really need to get a collection of them on DVD so I can watch em all over again. This same cartoon you are talking about is where I learned the phrase "Open Sesame" as a kid. I would love to go to Pismo Beach, it would be a day trip for me. I'd like to see how it compares to my own lil' beach town. Nice Post!
Hey Amber...what town do you live in?
Mel Blanc, who voiced the Looney Tunes characters, is buried at Hollywood Forever cemetery. We've visited Mel a couple of times, and he has an interesting quote on his gravestone from one of his characters.
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