My friend, Kaia, and I were sitting at a picnic table beside a lake, struggling to gain access to a Google account.
It was making us a little crazy. It shouldn’t be so hard.
At one point, I entered the requested code and said, “You can do it, Duffy Moon.”
Then I said, “Who the hell is Duffy Moon?”
I had no idea where that odd phrase had come from or why I had just said it.
So I paused our attempts to access the Google account to instead ask Google, “Who is Duffy Moon?”
I didn’t expect an answer, but instead, I found something surprising.
“You Can Do It, Duffy Moon!” is a motivational phrase from the 1976 ABC Afterschool Special, “The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon. ” In the show, Duffy is a sixth-grader who is teased and bullied for his size. Searching for solutions to his plight, he buys a magical book called “Cosmic Awareness” that teaches him to “Think Big”.
By chanting the self-motivational mantra “You Can Do It, Duffy Moon!” to himself, he develops confidence and the ability to overcome his challenges.
And apparently, I watched this after-school special at some point — maybe in 1976 when I was five years old, but more likely a couple of years later when it was rerun — and Duffy Moon’s motivational phrase had lodged itself in my brain, only to be released four decades later on a picnic table by a lake when frustrated over something that shouldn’t have been so difficult.
Crazy. Right?
The brain is a mysterious and wondrous thing. It contains almost everything we’ve ever seen or heard, but much of it remains unavailable to us until something prompts our recall. In this case, my frustration over a bit of technological stupidity, technology unlocked this motivational phrase from the archives of my brain and spat it out.
Who knows that my brain may fire off next? So much content, waiting to be remembered, restored, and repurposed for today.
I found “The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon” on YouTube, preserved by the Pennsylvania Public Library Film Center.
Of course, I watched it.
I have no recollection of this after-school special. Not a single iota of recognition. But I found it to be a fascinating relic of the 1970s, where bullying was rampant, children wandered the world blessedly unsupervised, and storytelling was far less sophisticated.
It’s not great, but it’s amusing. And apparently, I watched it when I was a boy.
