American Pop (film)

What do I look like, man? A soda fountain?

When my wife and I first started dating we were both in our mid-20s, and there seemed to be something going on in the Gen X zeitgeist. A rediscovery of our shared youth, which had been overlooked due both to the overwhelming cultural dominance of the Baby Boomers, and our own all-too-early desire to discard the trappings of childhood and move as soon as we could into maturity.

Pre-eBay it was not easy to locate and reacquire the actual totems of the 1970s (toys, trading cards, magazines) but a few corporate offerings were popping up; the re-airing of Schoolhouse Rock shorts and recordings like Saturday Morning: Cartoon's Greatest Hits, a CD of contemporary artists covering theme songs from all our favorite shows.

My new love and I compared notes and found to our delight that we both loved Ralph Bakshi’s 1981 masterpiece, American Pop.

Yeah, I already knew about Bakshi when I was twelve. I have older brothers. They brought me to see his epic Lord of the Rings in the theater when I was ten. It tanked at the box office, but I watched it again recently and it’s just amazing. That film inspired me to read Tolkien's entire trilogy when I was in fifth grade.

We had a movie night of the 1977 film Wizards, one of the guys had a laser disc machine, which is a bit of a mindbender for a pre-teen, this mashup of fantasy and postapocalyptic imagery. But I got it – Fascism will always return, and must always be defeated. Heard.

"Danke."

Now, I didn’t see American Pop in the cinema, not that my folks wouldn’t have taken me to an R-rated film, that happened several times – or at least, to unrated foreign films. But it played on cable later that year, and like movies on cable, it played a lot. 

I was intrigued by the animation; I was familiar with rotoscoping from his mother movies, which is when you film actors and then trace their image onto animation cells, which provides a much more realistic image of a human – but that’s also weird to see, when you are accustomed to the fluid, smooth figures of cartoons.

And neither my wife nor I had seen it since it had been on cable, it wasn't available on Laser Disc, VHS or DVD until 1997, primarily due to the wide variety of copyrighted music that figures prominently or plays in the background of the entire film. The rights were too prohibitive. The day it was final released was a celebration and we pre-ordered a copy from the late B-Ware Video on Madison to watch it together as soon as it was available.  

The plot is the evolution of American popular music through the 20th century, or the first eighty years of the century, anyway. Bakshi is not terribly self-aware in his telling, regarding issues of cultural appropriation, for example, he focuses on the story of four generations of men, each of whom aspire to create music.

The first, Zalmie, is a Russian immigrant, and Jewish, who wants to sing but suffers a throat injury entertaining troops in France during the Great War. He fathers a song named Benny, who is a talented pianist, but is killed in World War Two. He and his Italian-American wife had had a son named Tony, who becomes a disillusioned poet and wanderer in the 1960s (this Baby Boomer character’s saga takes up a much, much more self-indulgent part of the run time, because of course it does) becoming the lyricist for a San Francisco rock band.

The tale ends abruptly as his son Pete, the product of the one-night stand with a blonde Midwestern woman, puts it all together – the voice, the keyboard and the lyrics – to become a blonde, blue-eyed rock superstar.



Last week, I was interviewed for the recently rebooted Cleveland Stage Podcast, and host Tyler Whidden asked about the father thing in my play The Right Room. And it’s true, fathers figure heavily in the piece, sons trying to figure out who these odd men are who sired them, as I have tried to understand my father, and his fathers – the one he knew, and the one I only recently learned anything at all about.

However, unlike in American Pop, the mothers figure even more prominently. The mothers in Bakshi’s films are minor, tragic characters; victims of industrial tragedy or gang violence, disappointed or an easily abandoned conquest.

"The Right Room"
Convergence-Continuum (2026)

One of the elements of production director Jasmine Renee was able to push further in the production of The Right Room at Convergence-Continuum (which wrapped up last night) takes place during the moment when each couple takes a verse singing “If You Were a Train.” For a brief moment, the couples become aware of each other, and take the opportunity, as if in a dream, to see each other, and to connect.

And it is the women, the mothers, who see and who take in what they have done, and what they have created. My biological grandmother never knew what happened to that baby she left behind in Kansas City, and maybe she never wanted to know. But for a moment, as part of this play, she did. Because of her, I have this life, in this place, with these people. And that by itself is so much.

American Pop is an American saga told through the voice of one American family. I made one of those, too.