my dearest,
the burden of age rests heavily upon me, and i grow weary of this world and its trappings. much as time came even for the fearsome spinosaurus and carcharodontosaurus to make way for new masters of this world, i fear it has come for me. please tell radiohead and nirvana that i love them
Somehow when we were kids we could figure out who Peter Lorre or W.C. Fields were after they popped up in a Bugs Bunny cartoon and we didn’t have clickbait articles walking us through it.
it's true and it's tempting to go after 'the kids' for stuff like this but then i think about all the viewing choices they have that we didn't and i kinda get why we were better educated about what came before us
I remember as a show business obsessed pre-teen knowing the full primetime line up by heart and studying the TV Guide Fall Preview like a new playbook dropped. Now I discover a show only if it manages to float to the top of the stew.
oh my god I did that too!! I thought I was the only kid who did that 😂 I highlighted the shows that sounded interesting from the descriptions and planned my viewing week. was gutted when two interesting things were on at the same time. the youths will never know this pain.
The best TV times were when the network would randomly throw together a primetime special previewing the new shows coming that fall, full of awkward interactions with casts of various and disparate shows.
I never missed the ones for the new Saturday morning cartoon lineup. Vanished beauty.
I saw someone point out that young people today are largely watching content made by their peers or even younger kids. There are no references to culture of the past whatsoever within large amounts of their media.
for sure, and again, not something we could do! they can watch new stuff literally 24/7/365, we had a handful of tv networks and they played the national anthem and then shut down every night! and even post-cable our choices were pretty limited for a long time
I’m 62, and this was the case for me until the early 1980’s ( we didn’t have cable). Things could get pretty stressful around 3 a.m when you haven’t fully come down from that night’s acid trip and there’s literally nothing to watch but the ceiling.
Old man voice: I was an avid weekly viewer of Taxi and Soap before I was 10 years old because there was no "kids' tv" except on saturday morning.
Oh wait, that's just my voice voice.
Vivid memories of being up late as a tween watching Wild On! on E! because nothing else was really on at three in the morning. Every commercial was for Girls Gone Wild. Simpler times
