I was thinking of fairy tales the other day. Shared mythology and how we use it. All of that. I realized though that when I think about shared mythologies I don’t stop at … well a lot of the normal mythologies first. I stop at them a step removed. At pop culture from when I was a kid.

When I was a kid I didn’t get read a lot of the normal kids books, and I didn’t pick them up once I could read them myself. Dr. Seuss happened a bunch but after that it was on to Simak and Heinlein and whatnot. You grow up with a father who writes SF and see how you fare. So I never read Oz or Pan or the original Pooh or Alice and so on. I heard some fairly tale type stuff, Brother Grimm whatnot but that was all from TV.

My mythology was Birdman and Thundarr the Barbarian, The Galactic Trio and the Smurfs. That was what I was raised on, in terms of those things. Now as I got older I grew more and more interested in mythology and the whole children’s book idea and I read all of the classics. I just read them when I was 18. I’ve never seen Alice, except the cartoon, through the eyes of a small kid, I’ve only understood it as a much older kid. The same goes for all of them. Sure I knew the Oz movie but I never got the joy of Oz until much later.

And since then I have delved deep into various mythologies and fairy tales and belief systems. I love them and dig into them with relish. But at my core if I want to connect with someone else, and deliver a shared experience I will go to the pop culture of my youth first and big shared things second. Something gets lost? St. Anthony might be popular but for me it’s all about yelling:

Bobby! (bobby, obby, obby…) Cindy! (cindy, indy, indy…)

Like when they were lost in the Grand Canyon, ya know? I can’t let a friend go to Hawaii without cautioning them to never take a little cursed tiki statue. Just for a few quick Brady examples. The Bradys, man they were like the Greco-Roman Gods for me. They really were. Just this huge system of rules and interactions that wove myth out of itself.

So yeah. My myth is Superman, and Greg Brady and the Beav and Gilligan. It’s Muttley and Speed and Johnny Quest. That’s how I phrase my world and from there I integrate all of the other myths that those are echoes of. And somehow it makes sense in my head.

Now. Where did I leave Kitty Karry-All?