No Soup For Moon
September 17, 2019 5:08 AM   Subscribe

I have a very strong childhood memory of a song/video/poem that features the following couplet: Animal crackers in the sky / Moon nibbles one, and so do I. It is not the Shirley Temple song "Animal Crackers in my Soup." The melodies are similar, but the one I am thinking of is almost lullaby-like - gentle and light - whereas "Soup" has a sort of galumph to it. It is also associated with an illustration of a mouse, just black lines on a white background, with a simple efficient style, like Boynton, Silverstein or Lear. Leads and possibilities inside.

Some leads/possibilities:
1. I generally have a terrible memory, but I am fairly confident that I have the lyric correct. Unfortunately, an exact Google search turns up nothing.
2. That may be because Google searches for this are greatly impacted by a) the Temple song b) the existence of firecrackers, and c) a brand of marijuana called "Animal Crackers" sold by the Sky High Dispensary.
3. Born in 1976, grew up in the Boston area watching a good deal of PBS.
4. It's quite possible that I am not remembering an actual song or video, but just a poem in a book that my parents read in a sing-songy manner. The fact that I can only picture a still image of the mouse (in profile view) lends some credibility to this theory.

In closing, please do not suggest the Shirley Temple song.
posted by Rock Steady to Media & Arts (10 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Response by poster: Oh, I forgot to ask a question. What is this song/poem from?
posted by Rock Steady at 5:09 AM on September 17, 2019


This blog post from someone else looking for it sounds really similar.
posted by flod logic at 5:49 AM on September 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Anne Murray did a gentle version of the Shirley Temple song which feels quite different to me.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 5:56 AM on September 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


I also tried searching for "little mouse crackers" based on that blog post and only found a couple vaguely relevant results (a former blog with that name, someone saying "Love you to the little mouse crackers in the sky and back" in an Instagram post.) - haven't been able to find anything else about the book, but maybe try getting a hold of the blogger to see if they managed to figure it out?
posted by flod logic at 6:09 AM on September 17, 2019


Best answer: Google Books has an infuriating tiny snippet from Ms. Magazine in 1982, that confirms the "little mouse crackers" lyric. Anyone have access to a library archive of Ms.?
posted by serathen at 7:11 AM on September 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Unfortunately, it looks like from the mangled table of contents that this was a scan of all the issues from 1982, with no page numbers.
posted by serathen at 7:17 AM on September 17, 2019


Best answer: Looks like from the other context clues in the scan that serathen posted, the book you're looking for may be Oink and Pearl by Kay Chorao.
posted by sparkling at 7:39 AM on September 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


Best answer: And looks like it was also on the BBC.
posted by serathen at 7:56 AM on September 17, 2019


Best answer: I can't view it, but Ms. v.11 no.1-6 1982. returns two results for "mouse crackers" in HathiTrust.

Oh! Good point, sparkling. Here's a read-aloud of Oink and Pearl; the text is shown at 4:04.
posted by teremala at 8:24 AM on September 17, 2019


Response by poster: It’s definitely Oink and Pearl! I must have conflated it with the song at some point. I don’t think I ever saw the BBC video (the melody is “wrong”), but my mother definitely would have been reading Ms. in the 80s, so that’s a plausible way she would have found out about it. Thanks gang!
posted by Rock Steady at 11:29 AM on September 17, 2019


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