"Rock 'N' Roll Is King" by ELO

1983 / #19

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"Come along with me...To a Land of Make-Believe..."

At some point in our childhood, we all stop watching children's TV shows and start looking at them as objects of ridicule.

In my day, there was a trifecta of PBS kids' shows that aired each weekday afternoon: Sesame Street, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, and The Electric Company. When I was 9, I started making fun of these shows constantly. I made up tasteless Sesame Street fanfic. I was shocked when I entered 5th grade and they had us watch The Electric Company in the classroom, as I had outgrown it years before. Wawwwww...wokka! Wawwwww...wokka! Waw waw waw waw waw wurma wurma wurm, waw waw waw waw waw wurma wurma wurm...splat! (I never knew how to spell that until a vulgar America Online troll talked about it. And no, it wasn't me who made those posts. That would have been pretty hard, because I was on a big vacation out west when some of them appeared, and that was before motels had Internet access.)

When I was 9 or 10, any popular song risked having the words changed to mention a Sesame Street character. "Overkill" by Men At Work became "Groverkill." "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me" by Culture Club became "Do You Really Want To Bert Me." There's another song like that which is crying out to be profiled here as a lost hit sometime soon, but I'm warning you ahead of time that it's going to be another trip into adult contemporary land.

But for now, let's talk about a high-energy lost hit from ELO!

The timing was perfect for this hit, because this was right when my ridicule of the aforementioned TV shows was going strong. When I first heard this song, some of the lyrics caught my ear: "Come along with me...To a Land of Make-Believe."

I burst into laughter, because I thought it was a reference to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. That was where the trolley emerged and they had all those puppets and the Museum-Go-Round. It also starred Betty Aberlin, who was one of these celebrities like Dick Clark who seemed to never age. Probably the reason she never aged was that they kept showing episodes that were at least 10 years old.

An online commenter said he got a toy version of the trolley when he was too old for it.

Now all we need is something from Zoom.