Thursday, February 29, 2024

Dinoco, here we come!

In his February 20 post "There's a hole in my bucket-face! AND Harry Marsh and the Sorcerer's Stone," William Wright devotes considerable space to Dinoco, a fictional company appearing in Pixar's Cars and Toy Story franchises. He includes images of two different versions of the Dinoco logo and, following his usual MO, tries to interpret the name as Elvish. I've never seen any of these movies, except the original Toy Story back when an all-CGI movie was a revolutionary idea, but William's post cemented the name Dinoco in my memory.

Today I was in a restaurant that always plays obscure royalty-free music, and they played "California, Here I Come" -- not the 1939 pop standard by Jewish (and therefore not racist) blackface performer Al Jolson, but a bluesy number by a female vocalist, with the same repeated line and presumably the same title. I tried to look it up on my phone but got distracted by one of the search suggestions:


Apparently there's a scene in one of the Cars movies where a truck says "California, here we come!" and then Lightning McQueen, the racecar, corrects it to, "Dinoco, here we come." That's it. Maybe it's funny in context or something, but for whatever reason this run-of-the-mill line of dialogue is vying for search attention with the King of Blackface.


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