Thank God for Re-runs

mental bric-a-brac

If you’re of a certain age, you grew up on re-runs of old television shows. As a young kid under 10, re-runs were shown daily on most channels (there were only 3 to 9 channels, depending on the year in question). They filled out space between current programs in the era when no one had heard of the “24-hour news cycle” that Cable News Network introduced to us in the 80s.

Stipulate the following please, so that we can move past these and discuss without stopping to caveat:

1. Television shows glamourized life and presented an ideal
2. Many people’s lives were not as depicted in television shows
3. TV shows were a vehicle to sell dish soap, not a documentary record.

Have you so stipulated? Good. We’re moving on.

Re-runs were cultural education for my generation, even though that wasn’t their purpose. Watching sitcoms and dramas depicting life 20 or 30 years before I was born showed me a world familiar to my parents and grandparents. The 1950s and 1960s looked dated to me, yes, but that did not metastasize into the modern Millennial/Gen Z disgust reaction so common among young people forced to be aware of a world in which you had to get up from your seat to physically change the channel.

On a dial. A dirty, awful, analogue. . .shudder. . . physical dial that gave gross tactile feedback and made noise! Kah-chunk.

I grew up on the cusp of the black-and-white-color world of television. Sure, color broadcasting came out in the 60s, and I was born in 1974. But television sets (compare: the wireless set) were expensive, near-lifetime purchases. We could not afford a color television. The first time I saw color TV in my own home was in 1985 when Aunt Vivian gave us her cast-off set. It looked like this:

That year was the first time I saw the Land of Oz in color. Every year children and families waited with anticipation for CBS to air The Wizard of Oz, which they did every fall. This is how you saw movies in those days if you missed them at the theater; they came on television (until video rental stores took off).

When Dorothy steps out of the door in Munchkin Land, everyone knows that she went from sepia-toned black and white into rich Technicolor. Forgive and indulge me for a moment: I mean real Technicolor. The word is a trademark for a real process; it is not just a “description of bright colors.” Technicolor was an impossibly laborious process that required shooting three strips of black and white motion picture film at the same time, with each lens carrying a red, green, or blue filter. The three strips were then combined in optical registration and used to lay down a record of the complementary-to-the-filter color, in actual dyed gelatin on a blank strip of film. The actors suffered under brutally intense studio lights that caused excess heat, and sometimes eye damage.

And the result was the most beautiful color reproduction humans have ever created.

But until 1985, I had never seen the Land of Oz the way it was meant to be seen. I’ll never forget that night.

“Go warm up the TV set,” was a nightly refrain. And at the end of the night (which concluded this broadcast day), when Channel 3 stopped broadcasting and showed an image of a test pattern, you turned off the set and watched a tiny little glowing dot slowly fade in the center while an impossibly high-pitched tone faded with the glow.

Sometimes while watching Lassie, or Twilight Zone, or Dennis the Menace, my mother would get a little choked up. “What’s making you sad, Mom?” I would ask. “Well, that’s what the world looked like when I was your age. We had those aluminum tumblers. It’s just something you’ll understand when you’re older.”

I am older and I understand. Catching a music video by The Bangles can bring out the tears as I see those young people who looked like me and my friends, getting into cars that we took our driver’s license tests on, full of confidence, Aqua-Net, and Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum. At some point in the past 20 years, what looked “normal” to me now looks to me the way watching a 1950s family on the Donna Reed show looked when I was 10. My 1980s have become the 1950s.

Here is a list of television shows I knew just as well as I knew The Facts of Life, Family Ties, and Knight Rider.

Bewitched
I Dream of Jeannie
The Donna Reed Show
Little House on the Prairie
The Twilight Zone
The Honeymooners
I Love Lucy
The Brady Bunch
Leave it to Beaver
Dennis The Menace
The Munsters
The Addams Family
Lassie
The Carol Burnett Show
The Lawrence Welk Show

Some of those were closer to my era, and a few were still airing when I was a kid.

Say what you will about the (negative?) value of television and sitcom family life, but those shows provided a connection between me, my mother’s generation, and my grandmother’s generation. Styles changed, furniture changed, slang changed, but it changed naturally, not overnight.

You could trace the thread from the black rotary-dial desk set telephone on the stand in June and Ward Cleaver’s foyer to the banana-yellow kitchen phone (now with touch-tone dialing for only $1 more per month to Bell). The impossibly odd early 60s Chrysler cars designed by Virgil Exner softened into the staid and respectable 1969 Dodge Dart, and then the 1979 Dodge Aspen wagon that we grew up with. And the same sewing-machine-perfectly-ticking Slant Six engine was under the hood of the whole lineage.

Young people today have no such cultural stepping stones to connect them to a world that existed even 10 years ago. How can they remember that world when there have been six iterations of smartphones between 2012 and 2024? Short-term memory is shorter than ever.

It’s not clear what’s chicken, what’s egg, what’s cause, what’s effect, or what merely travels together. But along with the disappearance of re-runs comes the disappearance of gradual connectedness from father to son, to grandson.

If familiarity breeds contempt, then in this modern era, so does its lack. You’ve seen it, I know. The sense of near-disgust and humiliation that young people display when they stumble on a depiction of an actual telephone, a television that requires touching the appliance to reset it, a manual-shift transmission.

Something is badly wrong with us today. We need our version of re-runs, but I don’t think we’re going to get it.