During the building of this web site’s design, which it’s taking a few months of work, I’m using temporarily a template design from an old blog of mine. The header illustration is a humble tribute that I paid this year to the artists that illustrated the children’s books of my childhood. The original blog in Spanish used to be called “Generación Chiripitiflautica”. It was about personal memories from my childhood and it’s name was inspired by a popular children TV show in Spain in the early 70’s called “Los Chiripitiflauticos”.

The figure of the boy is supposed to be myself, wearing a Daniel Boom hat just as I used to when I was four years old, after the popular TV show. I had this Daniel Boom costume that I got for Christmas which included a jacket and a plastic knife. Terrific!

The wall paper is inspired by the same I used to have in my own bedroom during the 70’s, in blue. It’s curious to think about how popular these op art and pop designs invaded every home in the 60’s and 70’s. I still think they were pretty cool.

The image of the castle in the back represents a popular toy in Spain in the 70’s: Exin Castillos. It was a sort of Lego construction of a Gothic castle, with plastic figures. In my painting you can see the figure of the ghost on top of it. A modern version of this same toy is still on sale in Spain and is very popular. In Spain, almost every kid owned one of these amazing castles in the 70’s.

Exin Castillos

In my hands you can see an action figure called Madelman, probably the most beloved toy for kids. This was the very first action figure produced in Spain. The one that I painted I used to love so bad, it was the North Pole expedition.

Madelman

And what about the TV? At the time was in black and white. Most of the Spanish families didn’t have a color TV at least until 1974. In the illustration I’m watching one of the most stereotypical images from my generation: La Familia Telerín. It was a little cartoon that they used to show every evening to send the kids to bed. A very nice cartoon by the way, as you can see in the video.

La Familia Telerín

I have a funny memory about it, by the way. A good friend of my family called Emilio Salas was the owner of a night club in Madrid. It was one of this night clubs with red lights and sexy girls in night gowns serving drinks that became popular in the 70’s. They were called “American bars”. So I was four years old and this particular morning Emilio took me to his club on the way to a football match, I guess he needed to do something important and the thing is that we had to stop by. And when I got in I thought it was the coolest place in the world. There was this tiny DJ booth and he asked me if I wanted to hear some music to keep me amused and then he played for me this single I loved so much of La Familia Telerín singing “Vamos A La Cama” -Let’s go to bed-. And he had the single there because he used to play this children thing every night in order to send the clients home at the closing time!

So, I closed down this blog, “Generación Chiripitiflautica” and translated some of the old articles to English in order to bring them to a new home in this my personal web site. When I started the blog I didn’t have my own web site yet, so now it looks logical to move all the stuff here. I hope you find interesting some of articles about the memories of my childhood and my generation.