Thank you for this post! It resonates acutely. I'll also add Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Good Times, and Petticoat Junction. Also we are probably kindred car spirits...we also had a Dodge Aspen station wagon (plaid!l)
For me, the past-era education came from old cartoons, which, in my childhood in the 50s, were on tv every day. Not just the "modern" Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry, but the classic Out Of The Inkwell Max Fleisher Studio black and white treasures or Betty Boop. All the old telephones on the wall, the funny old cars, the Jazz music.
We also watched Little Rascals, for a look at how kids played back in the olden days of the 1920s and 30s.
We must be close to the same age. ha ha, speaking for myself, being one of Josh's old lady subscribers. Before school cartoons & shows for me were Betty Boop, Felix the Cat, Underdog, The Three Stooges and The Little Rascals. Saturday morning was Sky King, Lassie, The Lone Ranger, My Friend Flicka, Fury, Loony Tunes, The Jetsons. After school was Mickey Mouse Club, Howdy Doody, Leave It To Beaver, American Bandstand and week night evening shows were The Andy Griffeth Show, Make Room for Daddy, Father Knows Best, My 3 Sons, The Munsters, Mary Tyler Moore, M.A.S.H, and Sunday was The Wonderful World of Disney, the Ed Sullivan Show and Lawrence Welk. Too many more to name. T.V., books and records were the main source of leisure entertainment, but they all took a backseat to playing outside with friends, wondering far and wide, stretching our horizons as far as daylight and hungry bellies would take us. I really do wish youngsters today, and even going back to the 80's had what we had: carefree innocence unsullied by blatant sex, pornography, drugs or fear, which were practically unheard of when I was a kid, and through my son's childhood. Were a lot of those shows silly and unrealistic? Yes. But they depicted a culture that aimed for higher levels of moral behavior, something hard to find in our culture today. I'm glad Daily Wire and Prager U have stepped up to fill that gap.
Do you know how much I love my "old lady subscribers"? Tons. Me and old ladies have always gotten along like a house on fire. I don't know what it is, but you all seem to be want to be my grandma, and I'm just fine with that.
ha ha, be careful now or you'll be deluged with gifts of crocheted or knitted afghans, boxes of cookies and treats, and drenched in oodles of granny-love. But seriously, you bring out the bestest in us OLSes🥰
"Young people today have no such cultural stepping stones to connect them to a world that existed even 10 years ago."
I think about this often. I'm fairly young (31), but my mother exposed me to many old films from the 50's, 60's, and 70's while growing up, so I appreciate them. When I try to show my friends movies older than 10-20 years, they can't bear to watch them for more than 10 minutes, and society has trained them to actively attack anything and everything depicted in such films. "Oh my god, she's a housewife!? Of course!"
Thanks for your perspective and experience. I think the tide may be shifting a little bit with the youngest generation...Alpha. My oldest is a young 'zoomer' but my other kids are alpha. All of them are into old shows from the 80s and 90s network television...even some from the 1970s like Little House on the Prairie. They don't care about not having an iPhone and aren't on social media. Some of their friends are like this too. Maybe it's my own experience but maybe, slowly, we can bring a few things back that were worth keeping...
My two youngest daughters were born in '96 and '98. We had no television reception in the house (by choice) but I made sure that the first, and for a while the only, videos I would show them were betty boop cartoons. I wanted them to have a very well ingrained appreciation for the "old fashioned" brilliant cartoon graphics, music, pacing etc.
Thank you for the education about the process of technicolor. I learned red, blue, and green are primary light colors when taking a stage lighting course in college. Learning about this process of incorporating those colors makes sense. I was born two decades before you, and I grew up with all those nostalgic shows in black and white until I was in 6th grade, or so we bought one. I remember Disney and one of the shows we were allowed to watch was always in Technicolor. That term sounded so magical and out of this world at the time.
During the CA covid shutdown (which lasted a year and a half),my tween daughter and I watched Little House on the Prairie reruns. (Albert's angelic & heartbreaking face is unmatched to this day.) It was magical and just what she needed. I credit her sterling character, in part, to its influence. Memory Lane Forever!
We had the same television, but with a dial. "Tune in at 8:00!" meant you had to actually tune the television like a radio.
The set weighed about five tons. Wherever you put it, that's where it stayed.
I taught myself how to hook the Nintendo to it (with a few pops and sizzles) and played Tetris on it all day. The picture kept getting smaller and smaller until one day it was a blip in the middle of the screen. I wore it out.
My parents bought a little replacement TV and put it on top. Like I said, where you put it was forever.
Wow, you hit the bullseye with that one. I was born twenty years before you, but your experience mirrors what it was like when I was a kid, too. The black-and-white, wood-furniture tv, the reruns, the texture of life before the twenty-first century. My favorite daily afternoon reruns were of "Father Knows Best", "The Jack Benny Show", "Sea Hunt", and "The Rifleman". There were also 1930s and 1940s movies on all morning, afternoon, and late-night. And the cartoons! All the old theatrical cartoons, from Bugs and Daffy, to Tom and Jerry, to Popeye and Betty Boop. The other great loss to today's children is the freedom to go outdoors and roam the neighborhood, fields, and parks without continuous adult surveillance. There's not much good about turning seventy, but I will be forever grateful that I was a kid in the mid twentieth century instead of now.
Right?! My parents won a color tv from Sears when I was in third grade. It was amazing. I watched Bozo the Clown, Romper Room, Sheriff John, Captain Kangaroo and The Mickey Mouse Club. I well remember waiting each year for the Wizard of Oz to come on-I think it was sometime around Thanksgiving. I loved that movie. Would I have loved it as much if it was on demand any time I wanted to watch it? Who knows? Yes
When I was a kid the only place I'd seen color films was at movie theaters. We got our first color tv when my grandfather died and we inherited his set, a 19-inch screen in a huge wooden cabinet. The first thing I ever saw on color tv was an episode of "I Spy", in January of 1966.
I love your preliminary stipulations. Sure, Dodge City in 1885 wasn't really like "Gunsmoke", but I don't care. I find the Dodge City of "Gunsmoke" far more entertaining. Print the legend!
The thing is that certain shows sent signals to those “in the know.” Green Acres was one such show. Some of the male characters never had a spouse or gf. One was a woman thought of and called by a man’s name. It made fun of simple minded people. But in general up to the Norman Lear shows tv sold a fantasy that many never lived.
I doubt most people watching those shows ever drilled past the surface entertainment they depicted. I sure didn't. Many of them were shallow, yes, and by today's sensibilities terribly un-PC. But that was then, and hardly the foreshadowing of what our culture has become. Many of them were fantasies, but at least they were fantasies of a better, kinder culture than what we've had for several generations.
Being 63, we had a small black and white TV in the very early days. My parents bought their house in 1955 and I look at old photos of the living room in the 1960s and it is pretty sparse. The neighbors next door were much older and one time they invited our family over to watch "The Wizard of Oz", probably in the early1960s. Wow, to see everything go from black and white to color! My parents got a color TV a few years later (I'm thinking by 1966) and wow, all the cool shows in color like Batman, Get Smart, etc. About 1999 it was "The Wizard of Oz" 60th anniversary and it was re-released in theaters. I had never seen it in a theater! I took my 2 year old nephew to a theater close to home and he sat on my lap and we both watched the movie in amazement. He didn't get scared and he watched the whole thing. When we got back to his house he proceeded to tell his Mom (my sister) and Dad the whole plot of the movie. He memorized it. That was a very special moment.
I saw Wizard of Oz for the first time in a theater at about the same time. It was a revelation.
Magical artwork that transcends generations. If movies still exist a thousand years from now, I bet people will still be watching Wizard of Oz, just like we still read the Iliad.
I am older than you, but I acquired my first color TV before you -- for $25 when I was 14, in 1977. It was large, heavy, and hummed loudly and ominously. I suspect I still glow from the radiation....
You are correct that those old reruns (and films) connected us with generations past, and that this lost generation has been deprived of that mooring. However, today's young will likely soon relive the Great Depression, which was exponentially more destructive, so they will soon get to understand their great-grandparents' worldview and life experiences first-hand. It will make them better people. They likely won't survive, but for the first time, perhaps, they will understand what leaving the lessons of history behind can do to one's future.
My grandmother had a tv just like the one pictured above! I grew up watching The Cosby Show, Family Ties, and Alf (my personal favorite, the prior two went over my head, but they were my parents' favorites). I really enjoyed watching reruns of I Dream of Jeanie, Beverly Hillbillies, Lassie, Mr Ed, etc
Watching The Sound of Music on tv was a highlight at Christmastime, until I think I got the VHS tapes (yes, there were two) as a 3rd grade birthday gift.
In the old days, for a while we had reruns of the Monkees, and Brady Bunch had an episode where Marsha got to meet Davey Jones. My mom was able to relate how big of a deal that was back when it originally aired. When the Monkees had a reunion tour, we went and saw them together. In hindsight, that connecting of generations was beautiful.
Modern TV makes me ill.
My daughters are 16, 12 and 12. The closest thing we have to that intergeneration thing now is music. They love Pump-era Aerosmith and Sweet Child O' Mine. They love the Bangles. It brings a tear to my eye when they can sing along to Santa Monica with me. Nirvana is kind of take-it or leave-it with them, but you can't win them all.
I am really curious about your observation that young people today react with disgust at the older tech. My experience with my kids (age 10 and 13) is that they love many but not all of the classics. Little House series, classic Christmas specials, A Christmas Story, etc. Also, we watched Stranger Things with my older one and she loved everything about the 80s and had many questions, inc about the dial phones and old TVs. Now we are watching X-Files with her and she has remarked how the mobile phones of the 90s look totally different than smart phones. I detect no disgust, while at the same time I know she prefers her smartphone. She has said “classic” stuff is trending with her peer group esp bc of Stranger Things. Not sure what that means so I will inquire more!
It sounds like we may be speaking about different age groups when we both use the same term young people. I believe you that your experience is not the same as mine. I am telling the truth about my experience. I do not have contact with 10 and 13-year-olds, so I am not speaking about that age set when I speak about this.
Sorry I didn’t mean to come across like I didn’t believe you, that would be so dumb. Your post just really intrigued me bc it brings up a very important and concerning issue, and I am observing something different with my kids. But is my experience indicative of anything bigger or reflective of many other kids in their age group? Don’t know. If it is, I wonder what is causing the difference in the somewhat older age range you are observing. Or is it just that I have made the effort to curate their media consumption to include the classics? Again, I just don’t know.
Thank you for this post! It resonates acutely. I'll also add Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Good Times, and Petticoat Junction. Also we are probably kindred car spirits...we also had a Dodge Aspen station wagon (plaid!l)
😭😭😭
Oh wow. The nostalgia....
For me, the past-era education came from old cartoons, which, in my childhood in the 50s, were on tv every day. Not just the "modern" Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry, but the classic Out Of The Inkwell Max Fleisher Studio black and white treasures or Betty Boop. All the old telephones on the wall, the funny old cars, the Jazz music.
We also watched Little Rascals, for a look at how kids played back in the olden days of the 1920s and 30s.
My kids watch the original Little rascals with their grandparents, my mom and dad! They love it!
We must be close to the same age. ha ha, speaking for myself, being one of Josh's old lady subscribers. Before school cartoons & shows for me were Betty Boop, Felix the Cat, Underdog, The Three Stooges and The Little Rascals. Saturday morning was Sky King, Lassie, The Lone Ranger, My Friend Flicka, Fury, Loony Tunes, The Jetsons. After school was Mickey Mouse Club, Howdy Doody, Leave It To Beaver, American Bandstand and week night evening shows were The Andy Griffeth Show, Make Room for Daddy, Father Knows Best, My 3 Sons, The Munsters, Mary Tyler Moore, M.A.S.H, and Sunday was The Wonderful World of Disney, the Ed Sullivan Show and Lawrence Welk. Too many more to name. T.V., books and records were the main source of leisure entertainment, but they all took a backseat to playing outside with friends, wondering far and wide, stretching our horizons as far as daylight and hungry bellies would take us. I really do wish youngsters today, and even going back to the 80's had what we had: carefree innocence unsullied by blatant sex, pornography, drugs or fear, which were practically unheard of when I was a kid, and through my son's childhood. Were a lot of those shows silly and unrealistic? Yes. But they depicted a culture that aimed for higher levels of moral behavior, something hard to find in our culture today. I'm glad Daily Wire and Prager U have stepped up to fill that gap.
Do you know how much I love my "old lady subscribers"? Tons. Me and old ladies have always gotten along like a house on fire. I don't know what it is, but you all seem to be want to be my grandma, and I'm just fine with that.
Thank you, OLSes!
ha ha, be careful now or you'll be deluged with gifts of crocheted or knitted afghans, boxes of cookies and treats, and drenched in oodles of granny-love. But seriously, you bring out the bestest in us OLSes🥰
"Young people today have no such cultural stepping stones to connect them to a world that existed even 10 years ago."
I think about this often. I'm fairly young (31), but my mother exposed me to many old films from the 50's, 60's, and 70's while growing up, so I appreciate them. When I try to show my friends movies older than 10-20 years, they can't bear to watch them for more than 10 minutes, and society has trained them to actively attack anything and everything depicted in such films. "Oh my god, she's a housewife!? Of course!"
Thanks for your perspective and experience. I think the tide may be shifting a little bit with the youngest generation...Alpha. My oldest is a young 'zoomer' but my other kids are alpha. All of them are into old shows from the 80s and 90s network television...even some from the 1970s like Little House on the Prairie. They don't care about not having an iPhone and aren't on social media. Some of their friends are like this too. Maybe it's my own experience but maybe, slowly, we can bring a few things back that were worth keeping...
My two youngest daughters were born in '96 and '98. We had no television reception in the house (by choice) but I made sure that the first, and for a while the only, videos I would show them were betty boop cartoons. I wanted them to have a very well ingrained appreciation for the "old fashioned" brilliant cartoon graphics, music, pacing etc.
Thank you for the education about the process of technicolor. I learned red, blue, and green are primary light colors when taking a stage lighting course in college. Learning about this process of incorporating those colors makes sense. I was born two decades before you, and I grew up with all those nostalgic shows in black and white until I was in 6th grade, or so we bought one. I remember Disney and one of the shows we were allowed to watch was always in Technicolor. That term sounded so magical and out of this world at the time.
During the CA covid shutdown (which lasted a year and a half),my tween daughter and I watched Little House on the Prairie reruns. (Albert's angelic & heartbreaking face is unmatched to this day.) It was magical and just what she needed. I credit her sterling character, in part, to its influence. Memory Lane Forever!
We had the same television, but with a dial. "Tune in at 8:00!" meant you had to actually tune the television like a radio.
The set weighed about five tons. Wherever you put it, that's where it stayed.
I taught myself how to hook the Nintendo to it (with a few pops and sizzles) and played Tetris on it all day. The picture kept getting smaller and smaller until one day it was a blip in the middle of the screen. I wore it out.
My parents bought a little replacement TV and put it on top. Like I said, where you put it was forever.
Wow, you hit the bullseye with that one. I was born twenty years before you, but your experience mirrors what it was like when I was a kid, too. The black-and-white, wood-furniture tv, the reruns, the texture of life before the twenty-first century. My favorite daily afternoon reruns were of "Father Knows Best", "The Jack Benny Show", "Sea Hunt", and "The Rifleman". There were also 1930s and 1940s movies on all morning, afternoon, and late-night. And the cartoons! All the old theatrical cartoons, from Bugs and Daffy, to Tom and Jerry, to Popeye and Betty Boop. The other great loss to today's children is the freedom to go outdoors and roam the neighborhood, fields, and parks without continuous adult surveillance. There's not much good about turning seventy, but I will be forever grateful that I was a kid in the mid twentieth century instead of now.
Right?! My parents won a color tv from Sears when I was in third grade. It was amazing. I watched Bozo the Clown, Romper Room, Sheriff John, Captain Kangaroo and The Mickey Mouse Club. I well remember waiting each year for the Wizard of Oz to come on-I think it was sometime around Thanksgiving. I loved that movie. Would I have loved it as much if it was on demand any time I wanted to watch it? Who knows? Yes
When I was a kid the only place I'd seen color films was at movie theaters. We got our first color tv when my grandfather died and we inherited his set, a 19-inch screen in a huge wooden cabinet. The first thing I ever saw on color tv was an episode of "I Spy", in January of 1966.
I love your preliminary stipulations. Sure, Dodge City in 1885 wasn't really like "Gunsmoke", but I don't care. I find the Dodge City of "Gunsmoke" far more entertaining. Print the legend!
The thing is that certain shows sent signals to those “in the know.” Green Acres was one such show. Some of the male characters never had a spouse or gf. One was a woman thought of and called by a man’s name. It made fun of simple minded people. But in general up to the Norman Lear shows tv sold a fantasy that many never lived.
I doubt most people watching those shows ever drilled past the surface entertainment they depicted. I sure didn't. Many of them were shallow, yes, and by today's sensibilities terribly un-PC. But that was then, and hardly the foreshadowing of what our culture has become. Many of them were fantasies, but at least they were fantasies of a better, kinder culture than what we've had for several generations.
My husband and I still watch the Honeymooners, Hogan's Heroes, Andy Griffith, Bob Newhart. The humor was witty yet respectful for family watching.
Being 63, we had a small black and white TV in the very early days. My parents bought their house in 1955 and I look at old photos of the living room in the 1960s and it is pretty sparse. The neighbors next door were much older and one time they invited our family over to watch "The Wizard of Oz", probably in the early1960s. Wow, to see everything go from black and white to color! My parents got a color TV a few years later (I'm thinking by 1966) and wow, all the cool shows in color like Batman, Get Smart, etc. About 1999 it was "The Wizard of Oz" 60th anniversary and it was re-released in theaters. I had never seen it in a theater! I took my 2 year old nephew to a theater close to home and he sat on my lap and we both watched the movie in amazement. He didn't get scared and he watched the whole thing. When we got back to his house he proceeded to tell his Mom (my sister) and Dad the whole plot of the movie. He memorized it. That was a very special moment.
I saw Wizard of Oz for the first time in a theater at about the same time. It was a revelation.
Magical artwork that transcends generations. If movies still exist a thousand years from now, I bet people will still be watching Wizard of Oz, just like we still read the Iliad.
I am older than you, but I acquired my first color TV before you -- for $25 when I was 14, in 1977. It was large, heavy, and hummed loudly and ominously. I suspect I still glow from the radiation....
You are correct that those old reruns (and films) connected us with generations past, and that this lost generation has been deprived of that mooring. However, today's young will likely soon relive the Great Depression, which was exponentially more destructive, so they will soon get to understand their great-grandparents' worldview and life experiences first-hand. It will make them better people. They likely won't survive, but for the first time, perhaps, they will understand what leaving the lessons of history behind can do to one's future.
My grandmother had a tv just like the one pictured above! I grew up watching The Cosby Show, Family Ties, and Alf (my personal favorite, the prior two went over my head, but they were my parents' favorites). I really enjoyed watching reruns of I Dream of Jeanie, Beverly Hillbillies, Lassie, Mr Ed, etc
Watching The Sound of Music on tv was a highlight at Christmastime, until I think I got the VHS tapes (yes, there were two) as a 3rd grade birthday gift.
Incredible post.
In the old days, for a while we had reruns of the Monkees, and Brady Bunch had an episode where Marsha got to meet Davey Jones. My mom was able to relate how big of a deal that was back when it originally aired. When the Monkees had a reunion tour, we went and saw them together. In hindsight, that connecting of generations was beautiful.
Modern TV makes me ill.
My daughters are 16, 12 and 12. The closest thing we have to that intergeneration thing now is music. They love Pump-era Aerosmith and Sweet Child O' Mine. They love the Bangles. It brings a tear to my eye when they can sing along to Santa Monica with me. Nirvana is kind of take-it or leave-it with them, but you can't win them all.
Also, anything "sponsored by Dolly Madison" was a winner.
I am really curious about your observation that young people today react with disgust at the older tech. My experience with my kids (age 10 and 13) is that they love many but not all of the classics. Little House series, classic Christmas specials, A Christmas Story, etc. Also, we watched Stranger Things with my older one and she loved everything about the 80s and had many questions, inc about the dial phones and old TVs. Now we are watching X-Files with her and she has remarked how the mobile phones of the 90s look totally different than smart phones. I detect no disgust, while at the same time I know she prefers her smartphone. She has said “classic” stuff is trending with her peer group esp bc of Stranger Things. Not sure what that means so I will inquire more!
It sounds like we may be speaking about different age groups when we both use the same term young people. I believe you that your experience is not the same as mine. I am telling the truth about my experience. I do not have contact with 10 and 13-year-olds, so I am not speaking about that age set when I speak about this.
Sorry I didn’t mean to come across like I didn’t believe you, that would be so dumb. Your post just really intrigued me bc it brings up a very important and concerning issue, and I am observing something different with my kids. But is my experience indicative of anything bigger or reflective of many other kids in their age group? Don’t know. If it is, I wonder what is causing the difference in the somewhat older age range you are observing. Or is it just that I have made the effort to curate their media consumption to include the classics? Again, I just don’t know.