Donga or Dunga?
Today’s new-run of For Better of For Worse explores a strip with the theme of Elly looks at the something the kids have done and has no idea what happened. In this case we see 8 solid panels of young Elizabeth playing with a horse and rider toy, that leads into Elly seeing the toy followed by a trail of dirt coming out of a planter. Does Elly think:
a. I wonder how that horse and rider managed to ride out of the planter?
b. I wonder if the horse and rider are really alive, as in Toy Story?
c. I wonder how long it will take to clean up this mess?
d. I wonder if the horse has left a trail of horse feces after it visited the planter?
The clue is the use of the phrase, “Donga” by Elizabeth to indicate the horse motion. “Donga” is not the term typically used by Patterson kids when playing horsey as you can see in these three strips with April. You may be thinking that those strips were April and not Elizabeth, so let’s look at the one strip with Lizzie playing horsey. In this strip, you can clearly why it is that Elizabeth stopped plying horsey. As for the phrase “Donga”, my first thought is of a bell ringing. As you can see from this strip and this strip, this is the way Lynn Johnston thinks of it also.
Why “Donga”? I think it is because “Donga” is close to “Dung-a” and Lynn is subtely trying to tell anyone viewing the comic strip, Elly is really thinking horse dung. In other words, I think (d) above is the correct answer. Lynn Johnston loves animal poop jokes and apparently that extends to toy animal poop jokes. As for the strip itself, it could have easily been done in the daily with 3 panels. Lynn is really horsing around to stretch all that horseplay through so many panels to fill a whole Sunday strip.
As for the strip itself, I could comment again on Lizzie’s language regression or her matching “heart” outfit, but those are well-worn comments from me. Suffice to say, Lynn Johnston has no idea how old Elizabeth is or how children should talk or dress at that age, or even how she used to have the character talk or dress at that age.
a. I wonder how that horse and rider managed to ride out of the planter?
b. I wonder if the horse and rider are really alive, as in Toy Story?
c. I wonder how long it will take to clean up this mess?
d. I wonder if the horse has left a trail of horse feces after it visited the planter?
The clue is the use of the phrase, “Donga” by Elizabeth to indicate the horse motion. “Donga” is not the term typically used by Patterson kids when playing horsey as you can see in these three strips with April. You may be thinking that those strips were April and not Elizabeth, so let’s look at the one strip with Lizzie playing horsey. In this strip, you can clearly why it is that Elizabeth stopped plying horsey. As for the phrase “Donga”, my first thought is of a bell ringing. As you can see from this strip and this strip, this is the way Lynn Johnston thinks of it also.
Why “Donga”? I think it is because “Donga” is close to “Dung-a” and Lynn is subtely trying to tell anyone viewing the comic strip, Elly is really thinking horse dung. In other words, I think (d) above is the correct answer. Lynn Johnston loves animal poop jokes and apparently that extends to toy animal poop jokes. As for the strip itself, it could have easily been done in the daily with 3 panels. Lynn is really horsing around to stretch all that horseplay through so many panels to fill a whole Sunday strip.
As for the strip itself, I could comment again on Lizzie’s language regression or her matching “heart” outfit, but those are well-worn comments from me. Suffice to say, Lynn Johnston has no idea how old Elizabeth is or how children should talk or dress at that age, or even how she used to have the character talk or dress at that age.
posted by howard at 12:37 PM
9 Comments:
All good points, and yet to me the truly Epic Fail to this one is - how could Elly get "?!!" (or is it "!!?") out of this? I mean, what the hell else could it be? And we've seen Elly loose the dogs of Existential Rage for minor messes like this before, so why not now? Is this just another in the series of "When I showed Elly as a faintly-abusive, slightly unhinged, borderline-negilgent, incompetent mother all those times I was only kidding." post-dead-Sparky strips?
But, yeah, the whole "donga" thing baffledme until you explained it. Dungariffic!
Dungarrific! Thanks!
I know that I have seen a strip where Elly sees something strange and responds with a "?!!" as she does today, but I cannot find it. However, I was a little surprised that seeing the mess on the floor did not elicit an immediate outrage from Elly for having to clean it up. Maybe the difference this time is that Elly realized that unhinging her jaw at a toy would do no good, until she found the guilty party, who created the mess with the toy.
As for the strip itself, it could have easily been done in the daily with 3 panels. Lynn is really horsing around to stretch all that horseplay through so many panels to fill a whole Sunday strip.
I know; the way I see it, we could start with her picking up the toy, going donga-donga-donga in the potting soil and end with Elly's reaction.
And here is what it would look like.
Absolutely. That's all you needed. It even has the requisite Donga-Donga.
I know that I have seen a strip where Elly sees something strange and responds with a "?!!" as she does today, but I cannot find it.
This one comes to mind. It lacks the punctuation o' confusion, but Elly's facial expression serves the same purpose.
I know there have been other strips of the formula "child does something out of parent's sight; parent sees results of those actions and is baffled." This one, with Dee, is nearly a carbon copy of the above-linked, and this one is complete with "?!!"
Clearly the artistic improvement over the years is the "?!!", since the storyline is virtually the same between the 2 strips. The 1980 strip part with Michael dancing is clearly ripped off from a Snoopy dance in Peanuts, so it's easy to see why latter day Lynn did not duplicate that. The propeller-like enthusiasm of Robin in the later strip makes him seem a little more demented than gleeful. Lynn seemed to delight in portraying Robin with some kind of learning disability. Even though she had Michael do the same thing as Robin, I don't see the strip in the same light.
http://www.e-castig.com/index.php?r=w1SYW
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