MickeyTime Goes By
I was weeding out some of my old videocassettes yesterday (after a few decades they just don't play very clearly), mildly surprised by some of the things I had once thought important enough to merit saving for posterity. Home VCRs came out back when having any sci fi show on TV was a novelty, and I had recorded quite a few shows that, in retrospect, didn't even merit the one viewing. Wait for the next time SciFi shows a block of Manimal and you'll see what I mean.
It was different as a child, of course- no VCR or time-shifting. I rolled out of bed early Saturday mornings to catch the Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner cartoons (and I know I wasn't alone in that; much if not most of the Hollywood creative community apparently learned physics from watching cartoons), and then once my older brothers got up the schedule shifted to the superhero cartoons. My first exposure to Superman was the cartoons, and it wasn't until I got older that I started reading the comics.
As I got older, the cartoons aged, too, and not in a good way. Politicians freebasing typewriter white-out decided that cartoons were bad for us, and they started sanitizing them, cutting out the last few frames of Wile E. Coyote's fall so we didn't see the puff of dust as he hit the bottom, that kind of silliness. I started turning off the Saturday morning cartoons for swimming, playing ith the cats, comic books, real books, etc.
Between three older siblings and two parents I didn't have any control over the TV until the 70's. So I watched a lot of silly sitcoms, wondering why people on TV were such incredible morons, and a few good sitcoms (though it took a while before I realized why my brothers enjoyed watching Barbara Eden in her little harem outfit so much). We also got some quality shows, Star Trek and Lost in Space and Outer Limits and Twilight Zone... good times.
My brothers started going out at nights (my parents were cool with that- within reason; back by 10:00 on school nights, NO drugs, keep your grades up) and I started picking out shows that appealed to me. I was a sci fi whore, watching some truly craptacular shows just for that slight spark of imagination, no matter how badly it was presented or how inanely it was written. There were some gems along the way, like Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The Evil Touch, but back then I felt lucky to have one fantastic-type show on at any given time, and I watched them all.
Same deal for movies; by the time I was in my early teens most Friday afternoons I'd cook up a large cup of strong instant coffee (loaded with milk and sugar- best college prep I ever had!) and freeze it into a caffeine slushy, which I would enjoy while watching the 1:00am showings of movies that ranged from Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still to Night of the Lepus and The Green Slime.
Fortunately Star Wars proved to Hollywood that they can make money on sci fi (It helps a hell of a lot if it's good sci fi, but one lesson at a time...) and almost every season we would usually have at least one sci fi or fantasy show. As my own tastes matured, I could see that some shows were clearly better than others... but I watched anyway. Even bad sci fi is much better than almost any generic, predictable sitcom.
When Star Trek: The Next Generation showed that sci fi could be popular on TV, we soon had a sci fi show on virtually every night... and it reached the point where I simply didn't have time to watch them all. Picking out the best shows helped to refine my tastes even further, and I began to critically examine the shows, noting their strengths and weaknesses, where they missed a great opportunity and where they had surprised or even amazed me.
It is of course an inexact science; I skipped Buffy until about the fourth season since I had seen the movie and didn't learn until later that the series was infinitely better. I still watch more sci fi than any other genre, though I am more discriminating than I was as a child (even I had to tune out of Andromeda during their final insipid season). While I skip the boring stuff, I still retain a certain taste for the sincerely, epically bad sci fi (Starship Troopers, or the last two Star Trek spin-offs).
And that, boys and girls, is the story of how a cracker from Florida grew up to be a TV reviewer.
It was different as a child, of course- no VCR or time-shifting. I rolled out of bed early Saturday mornings to catch the Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner cartoons (and I know I wasn't alone in that; much if not most of the Hollywood creative community apparently learned physics from watching cartoons), and then once my older brothers got up the schedule shifted to the superhero cartoons. My first exposure to Superman was the cartoons, and it wasn't until I got older that I started reading the comics.
As I got older, the cartoons aged, too, and not in a good way. Politicians freebasing typewriter white-out decided that cartoons were bad for us, and they started sanitizing them, cutting out the last few frames of Wile E. Coyote's fall so we didn't see the puff of dust as he hit the bottom, that kind of silliness. I started turning off the Saturday morning cartoons for swimming, playing ith the cats, comic books, real books, etc.
Between three older siblings and two parents I didn't have any control over the TV until the 70's. So I watched a lot of silly sitcoms, wondering why people on TV were such incredible morons, and a few good sitcoms (though it took a while before I realized why my brothers enjoyed watching Barbara Eden in her little harem outfit so much). We also got some quality shows, Star Trek and Lost in Space and Outer Limits and Twilight Zone... good times.
My brothers started going out at nights (my parents were cool with that- within reason; back by 10:00 on school nights, NO drugs, keep your grades up) and I started picking out shows that appealed to me. I was a sci fi whore, watching some truly craptacular shows just for that slight spark of imagination, no matter how badly it was presented or how inanely it was written. There were some gems along the way, like Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The Evil Touch, but back then I felt lucky to have one fantastic-type show on at any given time, and I watched them all.
Same deal for movies; by the time I was in my early teens most Friday afternoons I'd cook up a large cup of strong instant coffee (loaded with milk and sugar- best college prep I ever had!) and freeze it into a caffeine slushy, which I would enjoy while watching the 1:00am showings of movies that ranged from Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still to Night of the Lepus and The Green Slime.
Fortunately Star Wars proved to Hollywood that they can make money on sci fi (It helps a hell of a lot if it's good sci fi, but one lesson at a time...) and almost every season we would usually have at least one sci fi or fantasy show. As my own tastes matured, I could see that some shows were clearly better than others... but I watched anyway. Even bad sci fi is much better than almost any generic, predictable sitcom.
When Star Trek: The Next Generation showed that sci fi could be popular on TV, we soon had a sci fi show on virtually every night... and it reached the point where I simply didn't have time to watch them all. Picking out the best shows helped to refine my tastes even further, and I began to critically examine the shows, noting their strengths and weaknesses, where they missed a great opportunity and where they had surprised or even amazed me.
It is of course an inexact science; I skipped Buffy until about the fourth season since I had seen the movie and didn't learn until later that the series was infinitely better. I still watch more sci fi than any other genre, though I am more discriminating than I was as a child (even I had to tune out of Andromeda during their final insipid season). While I skip the boring stuff, I still retain a certain taste for the sincerely, epically bad sci fi (Starship Troopers, or the last two Star Trek spin-offs).
And that, boys and girls, is the story of how a cracker from Florida grew up to be a TV reviewer.
