All the children had to wear a gas mask in case of a gas attack by the Germans. They tried to make the masks like Mickey Mouse faces so the children would like them. But I didn't. They had big ears on them.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
And when Roger talks about the frightened ones running away from the bombs, I immediately thought of my days when I was young and I had to wear these gas masks.
Children had a special status - protected from the outside world - and they dressed for the part in a way that made that special status immediately visible to themselves and the adults.
So, I created these creatures called The Frightened Ones which in the film you see do have mask like kind of heads and they run beneath the ground to hide. Which is what in fact we did during the war.
The New York Times published the guest list on the front page. The masks were a brilliant concept.
It wasn't fun to go to school, because we had to wear these blue things around our necks. We had to join the Pioneer Society, and we had to salute with our hands over our eyes. Even then, I was thinking for myself. I thought this wasn't so different from the way the Nazis had conditioned people.
Those things don't happen today. I feel sorry for the kids in the industry today. They have on sunglasses, eat caviar in jet planes, but they'll never know the true feeling that we did.
And the young people in the 1960's identified with it immediately, because, I guess the young people had been having years of repression really. They felt that the, you know, after the war everything was very austere, particularly in Europe.
I remember Nazi election propaganda posters showing a hateful Jewish face with crooked nose.
The main concern was making sure the kids didn't get caught in the middle.
Kids flew B-17s in daylight bombing raids over Germany in World War II. Kids fought in Korea and Vietnam.