Sunday, March 28, 2010

I do kinda remember old-school "SNICK" rather fondly, though...

I fully admit it: I was born in 1981. People always think I'm 16 or maybe 18 and, rarely, I'm assumed to be somewhere between 21 and 23. Then there will be a moment of shock when they either spy my ID, hear me talk about all the things I've done since high school, or listen as I mention things from my childhood.

I saw the Challenger explosion in preschool and I apparently saw Reagan at the town hall when I was a baby/toddler. Hurricane Gloria blew my Fisher-Price playhouse down the road. Games on the playground were about "Rainbow Brite," "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," and "Indiana Jones." I can proudly say I got to see "Return of the Jedi" in the movie theater first run (What a great brother I have! What teenager wants to take his very much a kid sister to "Star Wars"? I am very lucky!) even if I can barely remember the experience. Side Note: For years afterward, I kept remembering people speeding through trees and what I would eventually find out to be Ewoks. It wasn't until I discovered the trilogy in middle school that I realized what I had been seeing all those years.

We had an Atari, a Commodore 64, and (wait for it) the Nintendo Entertainment System WITH ROB THE FREAKING ROBOT! I remember the days you couldn't save your games and had to leave the machine going all night. My father had an Asteroids (or was it Space Invaders? It is somewhat fuzzy now) machine at his barber shop, and we ended up bringing it home and having it in the family room. A nice old table top version, which we did sometimes use as a table. (I admit that bad habit stuck: right now I have a desk lamp on my desktop.) My first TV was black and white and still had a UHF knob. At some point, I got this neat box that had 24 (I think? 18 maybe?) switches I could use to change channels - two per switch. Not all corresponding to channels we actually had but I do remember the switch for Fox was also the switch for Nickelodeon. This allowed me to watch things I wasn't allowed to watch at that age because as soon as I heard someone coming I could switch it easily to "Donna Reed" (on the same time as "In Living Color"). That was maybe one show ("Lassie" was another) that I didn't enjoy watching, but everything else was love. I watched "F Troop" and "Dobie Gillis." "I Love Lucy" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show." "Get Smart" was one of my favorites and I dreamt of the day I could have a shoe phone (essentially a cellphone with a dial... and in a shoe).

Then it all disappeared. The shows I had been watching were on in the 50s and the 60s. Now it was the 60s and the 70s as we moved through the 90s, then... the 80s became classic. Why was my childhood suddenly on Nick at Nite and TV Land? Why could I watch "Full House" or "Roseanne" where I used to watch "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie"? Then the 90s broke through, and you can now watch "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air." I loved that show back in the day, but I can't watch it anymore. It seems too new, until I think back and realize my mother probably felt the same way about those shows I used to watch. They were her childhood and her teenage years. Sure I barely remember watching "Taxi" as a toddler with my mom but I ended up falling in love with it when I was older and watching it on "Nick at Nite." To her, that was her "Fresh Prince." It was her "Roseanne." When is "Friends" going to grace the channel? Will "LOST" ever be on it?

Thankfully the internet is a treasure trove of older shows. For some reason, watching something as "new" as "Newhart" on there isn't as jarring, and I can stil re-watch "Welcome Back, Kotter" and "One Day at a Time." It isn't all nostalgia, because a lot of the things I find myself watching are things I rarely liked as while growing up. Even though I've seen them before, they seem suddenly fresh. Fresh in ways that re-watching shows from the 90s doesn't compare to. Why? Because now that I am almost 30 I am seeing things in these shows that I never saw before. Things you don't understand as a child and can only understand when you've lived a little bit. Will I someday find different wisdom in "Frasier" or "Wings" in ten or twenty years that I didn't get the first time around? Will I see the jokes different? The plot-lines?

Meh, who knows. Just another tangent I guess that I began to ponder. So thank you to Hulu and Netflix for filling the void Nick at Nite can't fill anymore. Now if only I could get my NES working... I could use some old school Legend of Zelda action, and the re-release on the Game Cube just doesn't cut it. (Yeah, I know there are emulators... but it isn't the same!)

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