Hockey as a martial art

[igenlode]

Sometimes it seems that everyone else is watching/reading Heated Rivalry.
Meanwhile YouTube presents me with Soviet Russia doing this:

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[paserbyp]

https://youtu.be/mj_jwF-m8J4?si=bnyuZP-9ikhXWIFs

[igenlode]

That was... not at all what I was expecting :-O
(Not least because I was subconsciously mistranslating the name as 'Trousers-Fall-Down', and since the previous video featured circus performers I was envisioning clowns...)

I assume Василёк is a slang term with which I'm unfamiliar; I do know 'blue' in general as a term for 'homosexual', thanks to awkward disclaimers at the start of slash fics. But this sort of thing is way outside my comfort zone. (According to Wikipedia, it's a parody of a Madonna number!)

It does occur to me in consequence that quite possibly the reason why I apparently enjoy the genre of Soviet light entertainment is the same as the reason why I'm drawn to pre-war English films/novels; it's the product of a highly socially conservative society with strong censorship, which means first of all that the level of sexual attraction, for example, is covert enough to be appealing rather than offputting, and secondly that it requires rather more subtlety and ingenuity to work within externally-imposed limits, especially when you *can't* simply go for the lowest common denominator in order to grab audiences. (Hollywood lost me in its attempts to out-compete the TV networks in the 1970s by showing ever more and more gore, grime, and meaningless grind.)

I'd already realised that musically the product was about twenty or thirty years behind British pop charts at the time, which meant that from my point of view it was still much closer to the genre of music that I had actually enjoyed. But I suspect also that the fact that there were a lot of things that you *couldn't* show overtly in terms of drama or plot may have meant that the themes that were focused on and the treatment of those themes were more along the lines of the ones from the era that appealed to me...

[paserbyp]

https://youtu.be/6pSzKFKE5lE?si=b6SeSVtWvM-gYWCK

https://youtu.be/U4CKQKqrm2I?si=O-_dX15JoSFKUzt-

https://youtu.be/PJeWSacXrnw?si=2nZVSSXaBGLveu4T