February is the month for love, so I thought I’d post this bizarre children’s album featuring one of the craziest pairings ever. As you can gather from the title, Clyde is an elephant that can play guitar with his trunk. He’s in love with Phyllis, but their love is doomed because Phyllis is an ant. Phyllis spurns Clyde’s advances, so he volunteers to be shot into space after hearing that the space program was looking for volunteers, ”height and weight don’t matter”.
When Clyde’s rocket lands on the Moon, he hears a strange voice. It’s the Man in the Moon, and he wants to eat Clyde(!) After he tells the Man in the Moon of his plight, he takes pity on the poor pachyderm and promises to think of a way that Clyde and Phyllis can get back together. When he hears Clyde’s tale of woe, he suggests that Clyde and Phyllis live in space together because they’d both be weightless and Clyde couldn’t accidentally crush little Phyllis.
Clyde rushes back to Earth to tell Phyllis the news, she loves the idea, and the two go off to live among the stars. (I would have put a Spoiler Alert here, but they give away the ending on the album cover!) I’m not quite sure how they’re supposed to breathe or how they’ll survive in the vacuum of space without exploding. I guess love will keep them together. (Or maybe I should repeat to myself, “It’s just a kids’ album. I should really just relax.”)
And while the story is pretty crazy, this really is a neat bubblegum-tinged album. In fact, the guy playing Clyde sounds very familiar to me. Can anybody here place him? Give this a listen. Trust me, my retelling didn’t come close to doing the story justice. Happy late Valentine’s Day, and I’ll see you here again next month!
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