Cristina D'Avena
Fivelandia, Volume 8

Don't come and bust my balls because it's Zion's fault. In reality, it's always Zion's fault, but let's move on.

Quick note: if you are around 40, fine, if you are older you probably don't even know what I'm talking about. There was a time, between the late '80s and '90s, when Fininvest (Mediaset for the younglings) used to pester us morning and night with all sorts of cartoons. The one and only requirement: they all had to suck big time. Back then, Miyazaki had already churned out two or three masterpieces; Otomo had come out, a long time ago, with "Akira", and so on—while we were forced to watch the warehouse leftovers the Japanese wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole. We've always been the periphery of the Empire: best to understand that from childhood. Amid this chaos of terribly drawn animations, the theme songs were kind of the side dish. I’d come home from school, turn on the TV, and tune into Bim Bum Bam, just waiting for the iconic theme song by the legendary Cristina D'Avena, then I'd turn it off—the cartoons themselves never interested me in the least (also because they were almost always some unwatchable tragedy). The people before us had "Ufo Robot" and the "Barbapapà", fun stuff, then came all the bad luck in "Heidi" and "Remi e le sue avventure," one of the unluckiest guys in the whole universe (abandoned as a baby; his father left paralyzed; he's snatched away from his family; at one point he's left all alone and starving, only accompanied by three useless little animals he really should have slaughtered and eaten at least to try to survive, but no, idiot, he keeps them as friendly company, well, you deserve all the bad luck in the world).

The aforementioned "d'avenose" theme songs were released every year on MC. I could have picked any of them (there are over 20), I choose number 8 because it's the only one I sort of remember at least somewhat decently.

Ah, the beginning. Ladies and gentlemen, the beginning. The first trumpet fanfare is "Al circo, al circo", theme song of the TV show "Sabato al circo" (which I actually watched as a kid: I was a circus nut) broadcast from Piazza Udine in Milan and boasting as many as three seasons, hosted by all the famous Fininvest faces of the era: Gigi e Andrea; Massimo Boldi; Francesco Salvi; Enrico Beruschi; Susanna Messaggio and Gerry Scotti. Gorgeous (so to speak) Saturday night entertainment where, among lobotomized lions and tigers, acrobats who would have died after two episodes without a net, clowns that weren’t funny, horses dumbed down by some (very) powerful barbiturate, there were the deadly Cipollino skits with jokes like: "La signora Pina Scalop, aka Scaloppina, had a baby at 71: given the mother's advanced age, she gave birth to a 34-year-old engineer." Oh, the wild laughter. Then the TV would go off, off to bed, and by morning, thanks to the sleep that cures all, you’d have forgotten those jokes. But not me—sleep didn't work on me.

"Le avventure di Teddy Ruxpin" I don’t remember at all, who knows, it seems it was about a plush teddy bear's adventures. But next up, Oh My God, there's "Dinosaurcers": this is a museum piece. There were some kids who had talking dinosaurs as friends (and this was before the "Jurassic Park" craze): these come from the galaxy of Reptilion and travel in spaceships. Can you picture a brontosaurus driving a spaceship? Well, looks like the driving school on Reptilion is pretty easygoing. They live through a ton of adventures—seriously, total chaos, you can't make sense of anything, but that's actually better: at least your sanity is safe. But that theme song was cool ("Stammi ad ascoltare perché ho una sorpresa per te davvero sensazionale"). Then there’s the theme song for a trashy TV show starring D'Avena who, never being Katharine Hepburn, did her thing: "Cri Cri", that’s the title. No idea what it was about, but normally the plot was simple: Cristina lived in a sort of loft in Cologno Monzese, people came in every minute, mostly guys, she flirted with everyone, everyone flirted with her, love triumphed and everyone ran off down Corso Europa toward happiness (Corso Europa is in Cologno, where Mediaset is based, and these sitcoms were filmed there).

"Grande piccolo Magoo" well, it's the blind old man, but I can't tell you anything about the cartoon. I must have been blind myself at the time. Yet another Smurfs song, "Amici Puffi". But friends to who? I've always found the little blue men annoying, blue like Viagra by the way, and maybe now you can see why in the whole village there was just one female, poor Smurfette, prey to the insatiable sexual urges of all the Smurfs (especially Papa Smurf, and he was "big" not just because of his age) and also the evil Gargamel, who... well, let's not go there.

Lost in the depths of memory emerges "Niente paura c’è Alfred", which was also one of the few decent things we actually got to watch. The duck Alfred was indeed a remarkably progressive duck: he helped foreigners, talked about democracy, at one point I even remember him taking part in a kind of UN meeting. All right, which explains the song’s line: "C'è sempre un Alfred in ogni bambino". Wish that were true, but we probably killed him, growing up. So much nostalgia. Of course, there had to be the theme song for "Super Mario", the mustachioed plumber. Now, aside from the fact that if I call a plumber today, minimum two weeks’ wait, and I’d gladly take a clean-shaven one, but this Super Mario was truly a pest: he was everywhere. Wherever there was a pipe, he was there. Then the Super Mushroom, the Mega Mushroom, the Mini Mushroom: all hallucinogens, obviously. But he didn't care, jumping around here and there with total disregard for anti-drug laws—imagine if he'd met Salvini...

Well... "Jenny Jenny" was a tennis player, a kind of Sinner in a skirt. Totally forgotten. Anyway, tennis wasn’t big back then, the Panatta era had ended a while before and the Federer/Nadal era was still to come. There’s "Una spada per Lady Oscar", the first trans person us late-20th-century kids came in contact with. I get that at the court of the Sun King they didn’t use soap, but damn, at least realizing she was a woman and not a man didn’t seem too hard to me. Nope, nothing—they went on for a thousand episodes pretending not to notice. See, if they'd had the bidet, sooner or later they'd have picked up on something: everyone washes up. Oh wait, sorry, there was no soap. Right, a bunch of French idiots. Of course, you couldn't miss the most famous love triangle in history. "Jules et Jim" by Truffaut? No way, small fry. "Kiss me Licia". "Un giorno di pioggia Andrea e Giuliano incontrano Licia per caso": three thousand episodes to make up their minds. Either she's with Andrea, or she's with Giuliano. Or with both. Or—much spicier theory—since there was always a cat in the house, she fools around with him. The series would have taken quite the zoophile twist to match Lady Oscar: 18th-century drag queens and sex with animals. Move over YouPorn.

Damn you Zion, now I feel like listening to the other Fivelandias too. Oh well, better than nothing: in summer, killing time is a given, even well (well!) past the age limit.