it's a bird

[calimac]

Today's xkcd cartoon, a features list for bird/plane/Superman, is one of the funniest I've seen lately. It also rings something in my head that I can't identify. I hear in my head a voice - and it's without visuals, so this isn't a movie/tv show, nor a book, but either radio or a record - saying:

"It's a bird! It's a plane! *yccch* It's a bird."

I hear it distinctly, but I'm drawing a blank on remembering where it's from.

Probably it'll hit me the next time I hear whatever it is.

This has happened to me twice before with lines that popped into my head. In each case I did not, at the time, own a copy of the source, so it was years before I happened to see/read that source again (one was a book, one a movie), and I suddenly remembered: ah, that's where that comes from.

One was:

"We are the chorus, and we agree. We agree, we agree, we agree."

which is from the parody of Galadriel's lament in Bored of the Rings, and the other is:

"Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?"

which is spoken by Bedevere to King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail after a little experiment involving a witch and a duck.

Comments

[onyxlynx]

Hmmm...sounds like it ought to be Stan Freberg, but there have been further comedians since his heyday.

[sovay]

"It's a bird! It's a plane! *yccch* It's a bird."

What is that sound effect representing?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It's a sound of disgust, and, though nothing is said explicitly, it's clearly supposed to indicate that we now know it's a bird because it has just done something that birds are known regularly to do and planes not so much, something identified in the next-to-last feature on the xkcd list.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Coulda sworn it was MAD Magazine (I remember it from when I was a teen)

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

You beat me to it: I also associate it with MAD.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That would be interesting, because I distinctly *hear* it being said, and not in my own voice. (I've tried saying it aloud, and I can't reproduce the tone or pacing adequately.)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I hear it, too, but that's because it was popular at school among the nerd set for a while. But it could very well have come from a TV show like the Smothers Brothers or suchlike. But MAD leaped to mind immediately; I see an image of a guy wiping his eye, in MAD illo style. But that could easily be false memory.

[(Anonymous)]

Spike Jones?
--JDR

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

If there aren't any gongs or cuckoo sounds in my mental recording of something, I don't think of Spike Jones.