The Calico Dragon

I’ve recently been thinking about doing some patchwork quilting.  This is something I’ve not done before and unlike knitting, sewing or crochet, isn’t anything I’m aware of anyone in my family doing when I was little.

However it did trigger a memory of my father who sadly is no longer with us.  While growing up I would often go and hide under the table in his den while he messed about with his cine projectors.  When he died and we finally managed to do an inventory (including the ones he hid in the garage) he had almost 200.  To go with these was a large collection of films, the majority of which were early animations, Warner Bros, Disney, Hanna Barbera, MGM, Walton and many others.

Many happy evenings of my childhood were spent cross legged under that desk watching these cartoons.  One of his favourites (which took him quite a while to find) was called The Calico Dragon.

It’s about a little girl with a patchwork quilt who reads a fairy tale about a dragon to her toys at bed time.  Then, when she falls asleep, the toys come alive.  The Knight, his horse and dog decide to go off into the land of Calico to fight the Calico Dragon.

This memory took me by surprise and led to a flood of others, all based around my father.  By the time of his death he was very ill with both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.  If fact for the last few years of his life it was hard to believe that the increasingly incoherent shell of a man actually was my father.  Even after all these years those memories quickly reduce me to tears.

But the memories of those cartoons are associated with him as a younger healthier man.  So I decided to go online and look up The Calico Dragon.  I even found a copy of the film which, (if I’ve done this correctly) should be embedded below.  I hope you like it.  For me this will forever symbolise some of the happiest memories of my childhood.

The Calico dragon, par Rudolf Ising
Uploaded by jedall. - Full seasons and entire episodes online.