Huckleberry Finn (Power Records, 1970s)

You know, I love Power Records.  For many of us, it returns us to the lost form of entertainment from our childhoods, the book and record.  While that is a good thing, this one is pretty awful.  Fortunately for our purposes here, that means it is still completely entertaining.

Often, Power/Peter Pan had some great voice talent, and that's not really the problem here...I would call it more of a "production" problem.  For example, somebody's fooling with the speed controls the entire time, to get Huck and Tom Sawyer to sound younger, but they come off somewhere between "chipmunk" and "Oz midget."  I was going to use the word "creepy," but instead I saved it for the character of Jim, the "runaway" "slave" (neither of which are actually true, it turns out).  Words fail me to describe what they attempted to do to his voice.  I can only assume there were no middle-aged black men around, so instead they tried to use some sort of filter to make the guy they HAD sound older and deeper-voiced....instead it comes off synthesized, scary, and downright demonic....exactly like this:

Starring the Decepticon Scourge as the voice of Jim, the runaway slave!

I really shouldn't go into the fact that the plot is a mishmash of ridiculousness...I should probably be fair and say that it is a very difficult thing to condense part of a Mark Twain novel into a short book-and-record.  But there are plot holes aplenty, and people are pulling random crap and switching costumes* left and right like Bugs Bunny. But hey, there isn't one racial epithet to be found. So there's that.

[*I mean it literally with the costume thing...the discussion with the con men is, "Hey, let's do Romeo and Juliet, since we're broke," and the subtext is, "Sure, since we have it completely memorized, have all the costumes, and have rented a theatre with the money we don't have." It's stuff like that.]

And then there's the part where Jim transforms into some sort of flying boat-thing and shoots everybody. Somehow, I think that A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court would have made a much better Power Record. 

Thank you, Power Records, for all of the great recordings you gave us while you existed.  This isn't one of them.

Enjoy, and I dare you to try NOT to think about Decepticons while you do.