The Gentle Giant

Today, out of the blue, a friend of mine posted on Discord a link to the Vimeo channel of Paul Lally.

https://vimeo.com/user368498

Mr. Lally's work is very familiar to me.  Me and my brother enjoyed watching it quite a lot when we were younger, particularly a series titled "The Gentle Giant".  This show was completely unrelated to the similarly-named progressive rock band, but for decades whenever I would mention them to my brother he would instinctively bring up Paul Lally.

"I'm not talking about Paul Lally!" I would respond, somewhat frustrated.  "Nobody else but you even _remembers_ Paul Lally!"

I am glad, at last, to be able to prove my younger self wrong.  There are no episodes of "The Gentle Giant" on his Vimeo channel - IMDB does not so much as acknowledge its existence, though Lally's thumbnail Wikipedia page does.  However, there are some other shows he worked on featured on the page.

I am watching the show featured at the top of his page, "Teletales: Paka'a".  This does bring back memories of 1980s PBS for me, something lost found that I don't get from old tapes of Sesame Street no matter how many I watch.  Lally belonged to a different, more sedate branch of children's television, exemplified by Fred Rogers (and he did in fact work on many episodes of Mr. Rogers' neighborhood).  I realize that this is making me sound exactly as old as I am, lamenting the loss of slower-paced, gentler days gone by, and I don't mean to do that exclusively. Sesame Street was not a slow-paced show.  A lot of the slow-paced shows I did watch, in fact, were garbage, like the sermonizing religious show "Davey and Goliath".  I watched a lot of crap because I had nothing better to do.  Those days are long gone from me now.  I still watch a lot of crap, but now I watch it _because_ I have better things to do.

The first thing that strikes me about Lally, besides the glasses - I had a air rather like them - the visible chest hair under the open collar, the thick sheen of the hair - this was what adult men looked like in those days - no, the first thing that strikes me is his pronunciation of "Hawaii", with the "w" pronounced rather as a German would, a sort of NPR pronunciation.  It might be more correct to pronounce it that way.  I don't know.

The thing it reminds me of most, though, is an early episode of "Space Ghost: Coast to Coast".  In that episode, the creative team got a storyteller to retell the stories of some earlier SGC2C episodes, the way Lally does here, accompanied with drawings very similar to those of Rae Owings.  At that time the episode seemed a resurfacing of an impossibly old, archaic lost tradition.  Weird to think that this episode was far closer in time to "Teletales", which I do believe was from the 1980s sometime, than it is to our day.

I have a fondness for storytelling, actual storytelling, which I've seen once or twice as part of my brother's high school debate competitions.  Because it is different every time, I think.  I can say that each time I watch a TV show, each experience is different, and it is true, but that is so much more apparent with a story.  Telling stories, I feel today, is my favourite sort of performance.