cactuswatcher (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cactuswatcher) wrote2005-01-17 12:56 pm
cactuswatcher) wrote2005-01-17 12:56 pm
Childhood TV Meme...
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shadowkat67
Boy, is this an invitation for the old wind bag to sound off?!
I'm old enough to remember when my family got its first TV. I'm old enough to remember listening to Gunsmoke on the radio before it came on TV. I'm just old enough to have seen the very first episode of Captain Kangaroo and to have thought, 'This junk is for babies!"
But, the meme is about shows we obsessed over as children, and why
The Lone Ranger,- It's difficult to imagine how much effect this show had on children in the fifties. It not only presented a good guy veresus bad guy story every week like all the kiddie westerns, it had it's own world of philosophy and morals that children could understand. It taught that some rules were inflexible, and thus were unfair because of that. It taught that personal values were good, even when they got you in trouble. It showed that ultimately honesty and integrity were best even if there were certain people you simply had to fib to. Even if the Lone Ranger's behavior toward Tonto seems patronizing these days, the differenece between how he treated Tonto and how he was treated by the vast majority of the people on the show good or bad was a lesson in race relations most of us kids wouldn't forget. When I got a rocking horse for Christmas one year, you can't imagine my joy that it was white just like the Lone Ranger's horse!
Sergeant Preston of the Yukon - Mounties, dog sleds and the Yukon Wilderness, what more could you ask for? Where the Lone Ranger was the ultimate vigilantee with a good heart, Sgt. Preston was the man of authority alone in the wide world where not only bad guys, but nature itself was a challenge. You knew the man was lonely, but you knew there were more important things to him. If sometimes his dog King was a better judge of people, Preston always gave people the benefit of the doubt till they proved they couldn't be trusted. Like the Lone Ranger, the show was a carry over from radio, but where the Lone Ranger kept riding past the same darn rock, Seargent Preston's world seemed endless on screen (even if it was California and Colorado instead of the Canadian Rockies) . And how great did that Richard Simmons look with a moustache! Like The William Tell Overture, most kids my age could hum the music from Sgt. Preston even if they didn't know it was the Donna Diana Overture by Emil von Reznicek
The original Walt Disney show, Disneyland, was something of a monument for it's time as well. Unlike the repetitious mess of potboilers that came much later under Disney and the unrecognizable and wholely unmemorable stuff put out by Michael Eisner, the original was just the right mix of classic Disney films, both cartoons and nature pictures, and new matierial, like the Davy Crockett stories, which amounted to one of TVs first great miniseries. Imagine these days a scientist of the stature of Werner von Braun coming on a kids' show to explain the elements of how space was going to be explored! Even if it did amount to a huge advertisement for Disney's amusement park the show was still worth watching
The Cisco Kid. Duncan Renaldo was dashing and splendid in black, but when my father learned I was watching the show, he told me to keep my eye on Leo Carrillo, Pancho. I could not believe my ears when I learned that a 70 year old man was doing the trick riding that clearly was not all being done by stunt men. The best part of the show especially, if you were too young to appreciate Cisco's charm with the ladies, was the comedy. There was nothing better than that perpetual inside joke "Oh Ceesco!" "Oh, Panco!"
You Are There. Walter Cronkite's contribution to educational TV in the early days. It was a weekly play about some historical event which was presented as if it were being captured by the newsreel cameras of the early fifties. It tended to be simplistic and politically correct, but it did give hints into what was behind history, real people we could relate to, not distant lifeless statues.
The 20th Century was in fact the follow on series to You Are There, but it was a much more serious and adult presentation of recent history. Using film clips that had mostly never been seen on TV before, Walter Cronkite virtually invented documentary TV. There was a heavy emphasis on the second World War, but that was OK, because it was the major fact of our lives even for those of us who were born after the war. For me it was a good transition from kids' show to adult fare.
shadowkat67Boy, is this an invitation for the old wind bag to sound off?!
I'm old enough to remember when my family got its first TV. I'm old enough to remember listening to Gunsmoke on the radio before it came on TV. I'm just old enough to have seen the very first episode of Captain Kangaroo and to have thought, 'This junk is for babies!"
But, the meme is about shows we obsessed over as children, and why
The Lone Ranger,- It's difficult to imagine how much effect this show had on children in the fifties. It not only presented a good guy veresus bad guy story every week like all the kiddie westerns, it had it's own world of philosophy and morals that children could understand. It taught that some rules were inflexible, and thus were unfair because of that. It taught that personal values were good, even when they got you in trouble. It showed that ultimately honesty and integrity were best even if there were certain people you simply had to fib to. Even if the Lone Ranger's behavior toward Tonto seems patronizing these days, the differenece between how he treated Tonto and how he was treated by the vast majority of the people on the show good or bad was a lesson in race relations most of us kids wouldn't forget. When I got a rocking horse for Christmas one year, you can't imagine my joy that it was white just like the Lone Ranger's horse!
Sergeant Preston of the Yukon - Mounties, dog sleds and the Yukon Wilderness, what more could you ask for? Where the Lone Ranger was the ultimate vigilantee with a good heart, Sgt. Preston was the man of authority alone in the wide world where not only bad guys, but nature itself was a challenge. You knew the man was lonely, but you knew there were more important things to him. If sometimes his dog King was a better judge of people, Preston always gave people the benefit of the doubt till they proved they couldn't be trusted. Like the Lone Ranger, the show was a carry over from radio, but where the Lone Ranger kept riding past the same darn rock, Seargent Preston's world seemed endless on screen (even if it was California and Colorado instead of the Canadian Rockies) . And how great did that Richard Simmons look with a moustache! Like The William Tell Overture, most kids my age could hum the music from Sgt. Preston even if they didn't know it was the Donna Diana Overture by Emil von Reznicek
The original Walt Disney show, Disneyland, was something of a monument for it's time as well. Unlike the repetitious mess of potboilers that came much later under Disney and the unrecognizable and wholely unmemorable stuff put out by Michael Eisner, the original was just the right mix of classic Disney films, both cartoons and nature pictures, and new matierial, like the Davy Crockett stories, which amounted to one of TVs first great miniseries. Imagine these days a scientist of the stature of Werner von Braun coming on a kids' show to explain the elements of how space was going to be explored! Even if it did amount to a huge advertisement for Disney's amusement park the show was still worth watching
The Cisco Kid. Duncan Renaldo was dashing and splendid in black, but when my father learned I was watching the show, he told me to keep my eye on Leo Carrillo, Pancho. I could not believe my ears when I learned that a 70 year old man was doing the trick riding that clearly was not all being done by stunt men. The best part of the show especially, if you were too young to appreciate Cisco's charm with the ladies, was the comedy. There was nothing better than that perpetual inside joke "Oh Ceesco!" "Oh, Panco!"
You Are There. Walter Cronkite's contribution to educational TV in the early days. It was a weekly play about some historical event which was presented as if it were being captured by the newsreel cameras of the early fifties. It tended to be simplistic and politically correct, but it did give hints into what was behind history, real people we could relate to, not distant lifeless statues.
The 20th Century was in fact the follow on series to You Are There, but it was a much more serious and adult presentation of recent history. Using film clips that had mostly never been seen on TV before, Walter Cronkite virtually invented documentary TV. There was a heavy emphasis on the second World War, but that was OK, because it was the major fact of our lives even for those of us who were born after the war. For me it was a good transition from kids' show to adult fare.