Animal crackers out of the soup

Well, there’s another childhood icon gone—Shirley Temple Black died Monday night, aged 85.

I experienced Shirley Temple strictly through television. Her movies must have been really cheap for local TV stations to broadcast, because they seemed to run them right much when I was growing up. She had to be one of the first stars to be merchandised; and Shirley Temple dolls are still manufactured today.

Later, while studying history, I came to understand how she could be such a phenomenon, because people in the thirties really wanted to escape from reality, and her movies delivered the biggest doses of sweetness and light you could get for the price of admission. They never seemed that remarkable to me as a child, but I can see why folks would line up and pay their $.15 to watch her overcome all manner of problems with a few songs and a dance.

Black’s movie career didn’t go beyond childhood, but she went on to marry (badly the first time round; for life the second), raise a family and build a creditable public service career under the Ford administration.

The quintessential Shirley Temple moment for me is her dance with Bill Robinson up and down the plantation house staircase in The Little Colonel. I don’t remember one damned thing about the plot or anyone else in the film, but that sequence is just terrific. So here it is: