Il piccolo Gino
Ehi Gino

THE REVIEW

Yes, I know, you were busy doing something else and maybe you didn't watch "Mai dire Tv" in the early '90s, and you don't even know who Mago Gabriel, "Mister Uccellone" Donato Mitola, the Piedmontese telenovela ("come sei volante!"), the know-it-all, the Mago di Monopoli, Lorenz, Rosina Lazzarino, Totuccio Savoca, Michele Giordano ("fetentoni!"), the preacher Giralico, Alfredo Castro the Sicilian inventor are. But today I don’t want to talk to you about these misunderstood geniuses who had the bad luck of being noticed while the negligible grunge of some semi-underground band like Nirvana was exploding in the world. I want to talk to you about the one who, out of all the masterpieces gifted to us by the Gialappa's (three, today two, absolute geniuses, yes, fortunately, utterly understood), stayed with me the most from that show: Piccolo Gino, whose existence this ill-fated website didn’t even mention.

He was a child (now an adult, presumably “swallowed” by cholesterol as he already weighed 80 kg at 9 years old) from Romagna who stormed onto the scene with a catchphrase (making even Gianni Drudi and his timeless "Fiky Fiky" jealous) called, in the most unselfconscious of ways, "Ehi Gino," where he sang about himself. But are you still here? Go immediately to Facebook, kind souls (unlike you), have cum guadio posted it. It’s a wonderful track, worthy of the best Miles Davis, or of the best garbage collector from Rimini after a long Ferragosto night spent picking up trash everywhere. The lyrics talk about him, Gino, little Gino, to whom the girls in class shout "non hai l'età neanche per il motorino" (you're not even old enough for a scooter), but who are ready to stand up and celebrate the brave hero. He says he wants "un Porsche o un Cabriolet," but—plot twist, dear viewers—he is madly in love, totally head over heels, with the English teacher, who appears in the video too in a cheeky little dress and sexy glasses, in pure '70s Italian risqué comedy style. Sure, he could have lovvato the toothless punk girl (another character from the show), but our guy—introduced by the host in a beige suit as the new Bruce Springsteen—loves the English teacher ("...voglio una che pensa a me...," I don’t know English, but clearly Gino never had any luck with Italian grammar either).

He’s dressed in a leather jacket meant to make him look tough, but he doesn't even scare the English teacher who, boldly, in the video, even seems to be interested (look, we're talking about a 9-year-old kid and a nearly 30-year-old woman, I don’t want to say anything but...), and still not satisfied with such a performance, convinced the teacher hasn’t really “gotten” the message, he sings to her, without mincing words but with hairs in other places, "Fiky Fiky", as documented here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCF0s01IQJoo. The "big kid", whom Gialappa's ironically claimed was a sort of Jovanotti gone bad, moves, as you can see, with a grace typical of the best first dancer at La Scala, winking with elephantine gestures both at his classmates and the proffa. All together, he wants to have them all.

Whatever happened to Gino? Who knows, but he will always be the Piccolo Gino of "Mai dire Tv". Some legends have to stay forever young, they can't just grow old like any other “debaseriano”, as Elton John once said, a guy who spent years trying to "chase" Gino’s class and technical sophistication: "comic book characters never grow old."

Bye Gino, wherever you are, keep trying with the English teacher, who today must be at least seventy, but maybe still quite charming.