The tape is well, worn, the cardboard box covering it bleached by sun and barely holding together. Singalong Weasel, copyright 1985. The animation is very limited, and hundreds of plays have given the picture a fuzzy, lived-in quality. The songs, all nursery rhymes, are warmly and full of the vibrato that comes with lost media. As the tape plays on, the lyrics seem oddly wrong. Words are dropped here, replaced there. Was the song always about a burglar in the straw? Surely the three blind lice did not have their scales cut off with a pruning knife. The box says 35 minutes, but the VCR timer is at two hours. Did they even finish the animation here? It seems too slow, the pitch of the voice is all wrong, it seems too low. The lyrics sing of a turnkey with a cause, how Mary had to lift a hand to crease the time that flows. A door opens in the distance, even as the singing continues, lower and slower, lower and slower. Something is coming through. Pattycake, patty cake, on the way a cursed man, make your E S C A P E as fast as you C A N

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