arcane references

Before there was Jack LaLanne, there was a health club chain run by Vic Tanney. So, in one episode, Dudley Do-Right is shamed when his girl friend, Nell Fenwick, beats him at arm wrestling. Dudley decides to build himself up by going to a gym called Vic Snidely run by you-know-who. When Dudley finishes the training program at Vic's, he is an emaciated skeleton.

Another episode: Snidely discovers that Nell is such a terrible singer she puts people who hear her to sleep. Snidely convinces her she's great and has her travel throughout western Canada singing at his medicine shows. When the audience falls asleep, Snidely picks their pockets. Naturally, Nell hasn't a clue about what's going on while she sings. The RCMP has no idea who the singer responsible for this crime wave is because she wears a mask, probably a reference to Joseph White, the Silver Masked Tenor, on radio in the 1930s. She used the name Ginny Lynn which was obviously a take off on Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale brought to America by P.T. Barnum and promoted heavily by him as the greatest most glamorous singer of all time. The big brass of the Mounties send a chief inspector to call on Inspector Fenwick to see what he is doing to capture the pocket picking gang. Inspector Fenwick explains his plan to send Dudley out to find the crooks and arrest them. "But", says the chief inspector, "won't he fall asleep when he hears her sing?" Inspector Fenwick says "Watch. Oh, Dudley, what do you think of Lawrence Welk?" Dudley smiles broadly and starts a little jig. "Oh, sir. That's toe tapping music!" Inspector to chief inspector "See." I assume this is arcane because who nowadays could know that Lawrence Welk had the squarest polka band show on television in the 50s and 60s?

Rocky and Bullwinkle inevitably come across Boris and Natasha who are wearing disguises. You might not consider them effective disguises but Rocky and Bullwinkle are always fooled. Only when Boris starts to speak does a dim little bulb light up in Rocky's brain. "That voice", he says, "where have I heard that voice?" After about the 15th time this scene occurs, Bullwinkle has finally had it. He complains "You hear more voices than Joan of Arc!" Joan was a peasant teenager who heard voices that told her to go see the king of France and tell him the voices wanted her to lead the French army against the English. He bought the story and she did.