Tenticular Gesticulation

The Elephant Walk

I love this clip, I've seen several different versions. Here is one set to appropriate music:

When I first saw it, though, it reminded me of something I couldn't quite place.

Finally, after staring at it on and off for two days, I finally remembered where I had seen that octopodinal strut before -- from one of the Disney Sing-A-Long videos that my son Ben watches over and over again. (If you want to know more about Ben, autism, and Disney, you can check out my main blog over at Shmoolok.com.)

On the "Under the Sea" Sing-A-Long tape there is a cartoon that he absolutely loves that is done to the tune of "At the Codfish Ball", which was originally a Shirley Temple song from the 30's. The cartoon features pretty much every fish-related visual pun you can imagine, and at around the one minute and twenty second mark it features a parade of octopodes doing a classic elephant walk. I don't know if elephants even do that kind of thing in the real world, but it's a pretty common cartoon trope in any case. Over the past twenty years I have seent that cartoon umpteen-bajillion times (that's a technical term), owing to the mystical power of autism and hyper-focused repetition. I always took it as just a silly sight gag, which it definitley is, but check out the video below and then tell me if that dang amphioctopus marginatus at the start of this post isn't strutting in almost exactly the same way. The embed won't let me set a start point, so just skip ahead to 1:21 to see the cephalapod shuffle.