Comic #180: Pavlovian Peter

April 16, 2012

Like many things in this comic, this is yet another element taken straight out of my childhood. Whenever I would stay home sick from school as a kid, my mom would always put me up on the couch with a blanket, game controller/remote, a bowl of soup, and our old VHS of Willy Wonka.

To those who don’t know, Pavlov was a behavioral scientist who was able to make a dog associate a bell with feeding time (discovering the sound of the bell would make the dog salivate, even if food was not presented). For me, the repeated viewings of the movie whenever I was sick reached the point where Willy Wonka actually had a subconscious healing effect, that I still sometimes feel even today as an adult. Every time I get sick I have this strange desire to pop in the DVD of the film. I rarely do anymore, but that association (sick time = Wonka time) still exists.

The Gene Wilder one, of course. We are the music makers... and we are the dreamers of the dreams. Come on, it doesn’t get any better than that.

And yes, Seth apparently is also a fan of CSI: Miami. Or he just follows internet trends. Hard to tell.