The Originals: A Short Film About Bygone Brooklyn
This is delightful: a group of five friends who grew up on a predominantly Italian block of Union St. in Brooklyn reminisce about their childhood and the neighborhood in this animated video.
Imagine a whole block where 75-80% of the kids spoke Italian. We all lived there.
A lot of families were first generation Italians in America. Everybody was poor.
It was an open concept where, in the evening, the mothers and the grandmothers would take their chairs, sit outside, while we’re playing in the street. People were out the window watching their kids from the fourth floor. It was tight-knit.
And whenever a stranger walked on the block, like the whole block knew that there was a stranger on the block. That’s how tight-knit it was.
We’ve been together since, forget about it, since we were infants. Like brothers. Paisanos.
The names of the games they played in the street are amazing; I’ve only actually heard of a couple of these: stoopball, cracktop, red light green light one-two-three, ringolevio, buck buck, old mother witch, slapball, skelsies, boxball, stick ball, and hot peas & butter. The rules for hot peas & butter, which Eddie Murphy remembers playing as a kid:
It involved a long leather belt with a sharp edge. As kids gathered on the stoop or base, one person was selected from the group to hide the belt in our community’s parking lot. The belt was usually tucked away in a car bumper or under a loose hubcap or something.
After hiding it, the child returned to base and said, “Hot peas and butter, come and get your supper!” With that call, dozens of eager children ventured out to find the belt. The person who hid it constantly screamed who’s “hot” or near the belt and who’s “cold” or far away from it. This could go on for 15 even 20 minutes, and then the climax! The person who located the belt got to whip and thrash every child until they ran hurriedly back to base.
When I was a kid, we played a game with a homophobic name where one kid would have the football and the rest of us would try to take it from them using any means necessary; it was a violent version of keep-away. Being a small bookish sort, I don’t think I ever got the football and if I did, I threw it down the second anyone got close.
Anyway, back to the video…it’s really charming; here’s how it was produced.
The result is a vivid film that plays out on an intricately detailed model of a single block of brownstone Brooklyn. The childhood friends, now in late middle age, remember not just the games they played but also the prevalence of organized crime that shaped the neighborhood, and, to some degree, their own lives. And they talk, of course, about how the neighborhood has changed, laughing about the influx of “yuppies” who don’t return hellos on the street.
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