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To Read Content, You Must Write Content
Jul. 6th, 2012 06:17 pmAnd my apologies to all my readers who haven't seen much of me lately.
This blog, and likely the ones after it, will only be personal by degrees. I'm still dealing with the aftereffects of the death of my mother back in April; life with Dad is kind of strange. It's hard to tell when Brave ends and Numb begins. Neither of us is self-medicating, but aside from brief bursts of humor we are neither happy nor super-depressed.
I'm trying to remember how I coped long ago when my grandparents died. But that was decades ago. I don't know how different I am today.
* * *
I'd had this grand idea to poke through Wikipedia at the history of television and about my own relationships and fandoms with the shows. I realized that making it a regular series, year by year, would take quite a piece and a lot of text. So I'm going to take something of a middling approach.
I'm starting with the season BEFORE the first one I was old enough to watch primetime programming: 1972-'73. Lots of shows that were in primetime that year became staples in syndication, of course. Also, there was a mechanism between primetime and syndication that the networks had well into the Eighties but dropped when syndication companies got big enough to produce so much of their own content. They re-ran primetime show episodes in daytime (or late-night) slots, often only the following year from initial broadcast. This was how I saw things like Sanford & Son, The Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch and some others before my parents would let me stay up past 8PM. In fact, my elementary school used to let us students watch some shows between classes, while the teachers and their aides graded papers.
1972-'73 Season
*Favorites At-The-Time: Emergency!, The Wonderful World of Disney
*Eventual Favorite: M*A*S*H (tho' it was YEARS before I was allowed to watch it!)
The following season would bring in two shows that would engage my fandom and set a lot of my psychological tendencies for life: Happy Days and The Six Million Dollar Man.
People who weren't alive back in the early Seventies don't realize what a cultural phenomenon Happy Days was and how much something like it was needed at the time. It was like a national reset button, a reminder of what America is and is supposed to be, and the American character. Yes, it was silly, and much too aware of its impact on pop culture for its own good. Heck, that's why the show HAD to Jump The Shark.
What little kid in the Seventies did NOT want to be The Six Million Dollar Man? While Happy Days looked to the past for its optimism, this show built it into an action hero's anatomy...piece by piece. We had a lot of problems, but maybe technology could solve them. What if everybody had telescopic vision and parabolic hearing? What if we had power-boosted limbs and super speed? What if we all had COMPUTERS? Was this the future we wanted?
1973-'74 Season
*Favorites At-The-Time: Emergency!, Happy Days, The Wonderful World of Disney
*Eventual Favorites: M*A*S*H, The Six Million Dollar Man
MORE TO COME.
This blog, and likely the ones after it, will only be personal by degrees. I'm still dealing with the aftereffects of the death of my mother back in April; life with Dad is kind of strange. It's hard to tell when Brave ends and Numb begins. Neither of us is self-medicating, but aside from brief bursts of humor we are neither happy nor super-depressed.
I'm trying to remember how I coped long ago when my grandparents died. But that was decades ago. I don't know how different I am today.
* * *
I'd had this grand idea to poke through Wikipedia at the history of television and about my own relationships and fandoms with the shows. I realized that making it a regular series, year by year, would take quite a piece and a lot of text. So I'm going to take something of a middling approach.
I'm starting with the season BEFORE the first one I was old enough to watch primetime programming: 1972-'73. Lots of shows that were in primetime that year became staples in syndication, of course. Also, there was a mechanism between primetime and syndication that the networks had well into the Eighties but dropped when syndication companies got big enough to produce so much of their own content. They re-ran primetime show episodes in daytime (or late-night) slots, often only the following year from initial broadcast. This was how I saw things like Sanford & Son, The Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch and some others before my parents would let me stay up past 8PM. In fact, my elementary school used to let us students watch some shows between classes, while the teachers and their aides graded papers.
1972-'73 Season
*Favorites At-The-Time: Emergency!, The Wonderful World of Disney
*Eventual Favorite: M*A*S*H (tho' it was YEARS before I was allowed to watch it!)
The following season would bring in two shows that would engage my fandom and set a lot of my psychological tendencies for life: Happy Days and The Six Million Dollar Man.
People who weren't alive back in the early Seventies don't realize what a cultural phenomenon Happy Days was and how much something like it was needed at the time. It was like a national reset button, a reminder of what America is and is supposed to be, and the American character. Yes, it was silly, and much too aware of its impact on pop culture for its own good. Heck, that's why the show HAD to Jump The Shark.
What little kid in the Seventies did NOT want to be The Six Million Dollar Man? While Happy Days looked to the past for its optimism, this show built it into an action hero's anatomy...piece by piece. We had a lot of problems, but maybe technology could solve them. What if everybody had telescopic vision and parabolic hearing? What if we had power-boosted limbs and super speed? What if we all had COMPUTERS? Was this the future we wanted?
1973-'74 Season
*Favorites At-The-Time: Emergency!, Happy Days, The Wonderful World of Disney
*Eventual Favorites: M*A*S*H, The Six Million Dollar Man
MORE TO COME.
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