Childhood TV Nostalgia Poll and Discussion

[rachelmanija]

Poll beneath cut.

Poll #24813 Childhood Nostalgia TV Poll

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 176

View Respondents

When I was a kid, I watched (in re-runs or when originally aired)...

View Answers

The Brady Bunch
74 (42.0%)

Bewitched
90 (51.1%)

The Mahabharata
2 (1.1%)

The Ramayana
0 (0.0%)

Robotech
18 (10.2%)

Cosmos with Carl Sagan
32 (18.2%)

The Waltons
28 (15.9%)

The Twilight Zone
46 (26.1%)

Star Trek: The Original Series
86 (48.9%)

Star Trek: Next Generation
81 (46.0%)

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
42 (23.9%)

Star Trek: Voyager
32 (18.2%)

Max Headroom
27 (15.3%)

M*A*S*H
84 (47.7%)

Doctor Who (which incarnation?)
45 (25.6%)

Dungeons & Dragons
24 (13.6%)

Max Headroom
26 (14.8%)

Land of the Lost
27 (15.3%)

The Animals of Farthing Wood
8 (4.5%)

The Wizard
4 (2.3%)

Probe
10 (5.7%)

Scarecrow & Mrs. King
34 (19.3%)

Murder, She Wrote
64 (36.4%)

He-Man
55 (31.2%)

She-Ra
51 (29.0%)

Dark Shadows
16 (9.1%)

Mystery! (credit sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAmGsM4Dids)
29 (16.5%)

Sesame Street
120 (68.2%)

Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood
98 (55.7%)

Sonny & Cher
26 (14.8%)

Sapphire & Steel
6 (3.4%)

Remington Steele
38 (21.6%)

The X-Files
45 (25.6%)

The Simpsons
49 (27.8%)

Quantum Leap
48 (27.3%)

Beauty and the Beast
35 (19.9%)

The Wonder Years
43 (24.4%)

Mission Impossible
28 (15.9%)

Lassie
24 (13.6%)

My Mother, The Car
4 (2.3%)

Strange Luck
8 (4.5%)

Horrifying public service announcements about drunk driving and so forth
58 (33.0%)

Threads, and I am now scarred for life
3 (1.7%)

Never mind actual shows, let me tell you about the weird commercials of my time!
15 (8.5%)

I didn't watch TV as a child because it didn't exist back then
0 (0.0%)

I didn't watch TV as a child because it was banned or we didn't own a television
11 (6.2%)

Wildly inappropriate late-night movies
22 (12.5%)

Something very popular in my country which you didn't name because you didn't grow up there
21 (11.9%)

Something so weird that maybe I hallucinated it
9 (5.1%)

Something else which I will describe in comments
33 (18.8%)

NOTE: Today (and maybe tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow), I will periodically put up posts that have nothing to do with the election. Come on in and vote in polls, discuss ridiculous books, etc, if and when you need a break. You will be able to find them all by clicking the "election respite" tag.

Comments

[batdina]

A lot of what's listed here I watched as an adult. I are old.

[rachelmanija]

You'd be older if you'd watched them as a kid.

[fox]

Electric Company
3-2-1 Contact!
Charles in Charge
You Can't Do That on Television
Diff'rent Strokes

at different ages, but all count as "kid"

[telophase]

Yes, most of these! (I never got into Charles in Charge.)

[ducened]

Manimal
The Greatest American Hero
The Dukes of Hazzard

[julian]

Beeeeeeeeeeeeelieve it or not, I'm walkin' on air, I never thought I could feel so free-ee-eee...

[cesy]

X-men cartoons

[yhlee]

Those! I loved those.

[rachelmanija]

I watched so much TV when I got the chance that, embedded in my brain forever where I could be storing useful information, I have the complete commercial for a toy truck with claws. From memory:

(sung while truck climbs hills)
The animal...
The animal...
Can anything stop...
The animal?!

(Man's voice, spoken as animal claws jut out from wheels and enable truck to go uphill better)
The animal...
Clawing its way to the top!

And here's the actual commercial, which I looked up after my from-memory account.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afofc_Jt86s

[helen_keeble]

Dear god, I have realised that I remember that too.

[lemonsharks]

So, so many garbage forensics shows and copaganda

Unsolved Mysteries - original run
America's Most Wanted
The New Detectives
Forensic Files
Cold Case Files
Justice Files
WAY too much Trinity Broadcasting Network (I shared a room with my grandma and that was her choice of show)
Hunter
Matlock
Columbo

Plus:

Muppet Babies

Inspector Gadget

Eureeka's Castle

The Magical World of Richard Scarey

Allegra's Window

Gullah Gullah Island (my FAVE, and, probably responsible for both a lot of little Black children feeling like people and for a lot of little white children seeing their Black peers as people for the first time. also there was a giant frog muppet.)

The Brothers Garcia

Pete & Pete

Salute Your Shorts

Hey, Dude! (The first show I remember actually addressing the oppression of Indigenous people and theft of their land and sacred artifacts, with a real! live! Indigenous! Actor!)

Bizarrely, I also got a good lot of Bananas in Pyjamas despite living in Las Vegas at the time. Along with Power Rangers (boring) and Beetle Borgs (FLAWLESS).

[rosefox]

Inspector Gadget! Yes! Next time, Gadget... next time...!

[yhlee]

I watched tons of Army/American propaganda because AFKN (Armed Forces Korea Network, pretty much the only English-language TV available in S Korea at the time) did not HAVE commercials. They only had propaganda infomercials. I learned at an impressionable age that if I was ever captured by the enemy, I was only to give out my name (yes), rank (hahahahaha), and serial number (?!?!). Also that if you are feeling suicidal, you should go to the chaplain or something for help.

[rachelmanija]

Hahahahaha! At least the suicidal part was useful.

[ambyr]

Shari Lewis was near and dear to my heart (who else was doing Chanukah specials back then?), but I also watched Captain Planet, Today's Special, and Square One.

[lemonsharks]

oh my goodness LAMB CHOP'S PLAY ALONG.

THIS IS THE SONG THAT DOES NOT END YES IT GOES ON AND ON MY FRIEND ...

[sophia_sol]

I didn't watch a lot of tv as a child, so it was mostly Arthur and Magic School Bus.

I also got an education in Canadian political comedy via This Hour Has 22 Minutes and Royal Canadian Air Farce.

Oh, and sometimes I watched Jeopardy!

[rattfan]

I also watched Skippy [The Bush Kangaroo] but you maybe had to be in Australia for that one. As with the book poll, though, I was an adult for a lot of these. I suspect I'm old.

Among American offerings I don't see here: Time Tunnel and Gilligan's Island!

The late night inappropriates were SF and horror films from the '50s to '70s which were the start of me being an sf fan. TV had only just begun to run through the night, yes, I'm old enough to remember the Test pattern when programming ended each evening. So my brother and I would sneak out of bed to watch these things; a rare example of total cooperation, because neither of us wanted our mother to wake up. [Dad not in the picture so we only had to elude one parent].

[stranger]

Oh, yes! Those, and:
Addams Family (I didn't like The Munsters, but millions did.)
I Dream of Jeannie
Mr. Ed
My Favorite Martian
and anything similar that was twisting the '50s nuclear family by way of fantasy tropes.

Also The Man from UNCLE, the lighter side of the Cold War. I missed I Spy, but I wish I hadn't. I caught up with Danger Man and Bond later. UNCLE in particular introduced a generation of pre- and early-teen girls to the Sexy Foreigner, which blossomed into American screaming-audience fascination with The Beatles a year or two later.

I'm too old to have seen Sesame Street not as an adult...

[telophase]

Zoom! The original version, not the reboot. Carrascolendas. And a few other weird 70s kids shows that I don't remember much of anything about, as well as all the educational programming on PBS during the day whenever I was sick at home.

Mom says I learned to read from The Electric Company. I don't remember--I learned when I was 3.

I also had a weird sliver of time when I could watch TV--we were in Africa when I was 4-6, then moved out into the country where we could only get 2 channels when I was 15, so before 6 and after 15 I watched very little. I caught Star Blazers when it was showing here, and had only just started watching Robotech when we moved to the country.

There was an after-school show that would show 2 15-minute cartoons from a revolving bunch of shows, the only one of which I remember was a parody of M*A*S*H starring dogs, which was titled M*U*S*H. (And speaking of M*A*S*H, I watched every episode multiple times--it was in syndication and stations tended to show 2 episodes back to back at 4 or 5pm.)

When I was in first grade, a neighbor lady looked after kids after school at her house. Her daughter, a year or two younger than me, got home from preschool or kindergarten earlier than the rest of us got to her house, so she ruled the roost TV, and therefore we all had to watch what she wanted, which was The Brady Bunch, Laverne and Shirley, Happy Days and something else. To this day I hate the Brady Bunch. And in later years, the Brady Bunch/L&S/Happy Days block had Sha Na Na added to it, so my after-school life was steeped in the 50s.

[isis]

When I went to grad school and lived in Somerville I could not give my zip code (or any regional zip code that started 021) without singing it Zoom-style.

[heavenscalyx]

The Banana Splits, Marine Boy, Ultraman, Speed Racer, and OMG Star Blazers.
Benson! Battlestar Galactica. Buck Rogers. Way too much Magnum PI and Matt Houston and Rockford Files (thanks Mom).

Star Trek TNG didn’t come out till I was in college.

[heavenscalyx]

Oh oh, Donny & Marie. Lawrence Welk.

[sovay]

As an actual kid, I watched almost no television outside the Children's Television Workshop unless I was at the houses of friends, where it was anthropologically fascinating: so I have checked off a couple of shows which were watched in my house and which I occasionally interacted with, but in term of personal watching, 3-2-1 Contact and Square One TV were the major players not mentioned here. [edit: I had also some exposure to The Electric Company.] I saw one episode of The Mysterious Cities of Gold at a friend's house, lost track of the title, but some points of the episode and the theme song vividly enough that something like twenty years later I was able to figure out I had been watching that one steampunk Scott O'Dell anime, which I now really want to see again.

[rmc28]

I love the Mysterious Cities of Gold so much that for a while we had a French language version because that was the only thing we could get on DVD. No, I don't actually speak or understand French beyond "can order a coffee and buy a ticket".

(I do now have it in English too; and there is a reboot/sequel on one of the streaming services that I should get around to watching)

[larryhammer]

The something else being Gilligan's Island. I got kinda obsessed with it.

Oh, and the next shows on the PBS ladder after Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street were Electric Company and ZOOM.

[cupcake_goth]

The Addams Family and The Munsters!

[silveradept]

Oh, yes, I remember both of those in their differing ways. The Munsters was more obvious comedy than the Addams Family, but it feels like the Addams Family has aged a lot better?

[topaz_eyes]

(Here from Network...)

I also remember watching (mid-70s/early 80s):
The Muppet Show
Emergency!
The Partridge Family
Lil Rascals
Battle of the Planets
Battlestar Galactica
Facts of Life
Wait 'Til Your Father Gets Home
Scooby Doo
Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour, Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes, etc
Hercules
America's Top 10
Solid Gold

[musesfool]

Yes, to all of these (except Wait Til Your Father Gets Home).

[snickfic]

In the early 90s it was a lot of Disney afternoon reruns: Duck Tales, Tail Spin, Gummi Bears, the classic My Little Pony (a fond favorite!), and of course Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers.

Bewitched, I Love Lucy, and I Dream of Jeannie were my Nick at Nite trifecta in the mid-90s, and then just a tidge later on there was a LOT of Happy Days. So much Happy Days. And Gilligan's Island!

[julian]

Basically, if it was on in reruns from about 1976-1983, I watched it. Benson, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Space:1999 (though I liked it less than BSG and Buck Rogers), Star Trek: TOS (and the Animated series, when I visited my grandmother in PA, but it was never on in the Boston area, it felt like), Tom Baker and Peter Davison Dr. Who (though it had different pacing and expectations than US shows, so I didn't like it as much), the PBS slate, Family Ties & Growing Pains, the various things springing from Happy Days, Voyagers!, on and on.

And my brother and I loved Starblazers and Battle of the Planets, to the extent he made us capes.

I didn't watch much TV after 6 p.m., though we sometimes made an exception for Jeopardy. I do remember the Dallas themesong, though, even though I never watched an episode.

I miss the PSA about cheese. ("I hanker for a hunka, a something something something, I hanker for a hunk've cheese.")

[loligo]

CHEESE! Thank you for reminding me about that one! The "something something" line is "a slab or slice or chunka".

[musesfool]

Also, SPACE: 1999.

Afternoons were for reruns of I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched (my fave!), I Love Lucy (or the Lucy show), the Dick Van Dyke show, Partridge Family and Brady Bunch, and slightly later, Mary Tyler Moore (while the show was also still airing in first run). And then the 4:30 movie on channel 7 (ABC in NYC), where they often did theme weeks (Planet of the Apes week was The Best, also Godzilla week).

Plus, 60s Batman and the George Reeves Superman. Late night was ST:TOS, F Troop, Hogan's Heroes, and The Honeymooners. And the 11 pm M*A*S*H rerun (it was on at 7 pm and 11 pm, and also at 9 pm on Mondays while it was still running and we watched every airing).

(We were technically not allowed to watch TV before dinner, but uh, we did anyway, especially once my mom went back to work, or downstairs in my grandmother's apartment on her black and white tv set while we were supposed to be practicing piano.)

[silveradept]

The Adam West Batman is still the best adaptation of it, even though I realize that it's the one that's commpletely in opposition to the comics. but I have a soft spot for any adaptation that realizes they're in a comic book and behaves accordingly.

[taelle]

I mostly did not watch TV because we did not own it. The things I did watch were Soviet hits everyone watched like the Three Musketeers musical or the Guest From the Future movie where a girl from the future travelled through time and went to an ordinary school for a while. And Leopold the Cat cartoons (a very mild-mannered intelligentsia cat who was pursued by two thuggish mice, but their plans always failed and the cat said "Guys, let's live peacefully")

... and then I got the second childhood, because my sister is ten years younger and during her childhood we did own TV, and more than that, USSR ended and we got everything from Chip and Dale to Duck Tales to Disney TV films to Beverly Hills 90210 to French series Helene et les Garcons. So, the best of both worlds.

[loligo]

Post-Soviet TV broke my brain once: we were visiting my mom's relatives in Latvia in 1991, and there was a Mexican telenovela that everyone was crazy about. Our cousins insisted we all had to watch it. The vocal track was the original Spanish and there were Russian subtitles, and my cousins were translating every line of dialogue into Latvian for my mom. I knew some of each language but wasn't fluent in any of them, but at the time Russian was my best, because I had taken two years in college. I tried just to focus on the subtitles, but it was futile with two other half-understood languages distracting me. I think I lasted maybe 15 minutes before language ceased to have any meaning whatsoever, and I had to leave the room!

[owlectomy]

I didn't have cable until I was twelve and we moved to the States; in southern Quebec, over the antenna, we got CTV and CBC and two or three Vermont broadcast channels.

My strongest memories of kid TV: Today's Special (a Canadian show about a mannequin who lives in a department store! It's so good! In my memories!), Belle and Sebastian, all the early-90s Disney afternoon block stuff (Darkwing Duck, Ducktales, Talespin, Rescue Rangers), Star Trek: The Next Generation. In France I watched Mysterious Cities of Gold, Asterix, Tintin, and a really excellent (in my memories!) Italian-Japanese co-production of The Jungle Book. In my mind, it's the only canonical version of The Jungle Book - the wolves are very pretty, and it doesn't feel AS bad, colonialism-wise, as either the Kipling book or the Disney animated film.

(I have just learned this is available digitally on Amazon, for $15/season, and I am definitely going to buy it.)

[silveradept]

Darkwing Duck is absolutely something that should be more than just a television show in the new Ducktales reboot. There's so much of the less good stuff that's gotten a reboot, why not get to the good bits? (Even though we know that Animaniacs is getting a reboot.)

[nocowardsoul]

Rugrats
Wishbone
I wanted to watch Cardcaptor Sakura but it came on during school
The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
Digimon 01
And Arthur

I didn't watch MASH as a kid but I've been watching it for the last two months.

[edenfalling]

Wishbone!!! Oh wow, I forgot Wishbone entirely. How could I forget Wishbone? Best dog!

[davidgillon]

Is there a non-British equivalent of the dodgily over-dubbed European series that ran during the summer holidays? The only two I can definitely remember are On White Horses and The Flashing Blade.

[thomasyan]

Battle of the Planets. When the villain briefly was unmasked at the end of the season, my brother and I were astounded, and wondered what would happen next.

And it never came back....

... And then in recent years Gatchaman was revived. So I watched the first few episodes in horror. What was this?

This past year I gave the revival another chance with the understanding that it was best to ignore its previous incarnation. I did enjoy it on its own terms, but still don't understand the attempted connection.

[gwyn]

Some of my favorite commercials in the '60s were for the Quisp and Quake cereals, which were done by the animators who did a lot of the best cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle or Underdog (both fave watches of mine, I was devoted to Underdog and it has...not aged well). Those commercials were amazingly effective as my sister and I became obsessed with the cereal but my mom normally didn't let us eat sugar cereals.