Would 60's & 70's Kids TV & Movies be popular today? - Page 2

My wife and I have several children, and if you asked them which shows we watch in our home, it would be cartoons and television shows from the 1960s and early 1970s. If we watch shows from more recent decades, these are most often viewed only by my wife and I, and (in some cases) our older children. We also allow our children to watch a couple of shows on Disney and Nickelodeon.

For the most part, as a family we watch The Herculoids, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, and Jonny Quest just about every week, and usually follow these up with an hour or two of adventure, science fiction, and/or spy shows from the 1960s. One would say that we are caught in a time-warp with regard to our television viewing. I am quite pleased that we are.

Here is a sampling of what we watch (additional to the cartoons listed above) on a fairly regular basis:

The Avengers
The Brady Bunch
Dark Shadows (1966-1971 series)
The Fugitive
The Invaders
I Spy
Mission: Impossible
The Mod Squad
The Monkees
The Outer Limits (1963-1965 series)
The Paul Lynde Show
The Partridge Family
The Three Stooges
Star Trek (all six series and films)
The Waltons

Exceptions:

All In the Family
Charmed
Hawaii Five-O (new series)
Lost
Roswell
7th Heaven
Walker, Texas Ranger

When I was a kid, there were cartoons on after school during the 4pm to 5pm hour. (Before 4pm, it was usually soap operas).

I remember watching cartoons like the Pink Panther, Looney Tunes, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, Rocky & Bullwinkle, etc ...


During the 5pm to 6pm hour, it was frequently "stripped" reruns of some live action shows.

Depending on the particular year, I remember watching reruns of shows like Get Smart, Starsky & Hutch, Wonder Woman, Charlie's Angels, etc ... in the 5pm to 6pm slot.



Even when I was growing up, they were gradually replacing some of the cartoons with reruns of live action shows like Gilligan's Island, in the 4pm to 5pm slot.

The same thing can be probably said about previous generations of kids.

When I was growing up during the late-1970's and 1980's, my parents did not have cable tv. So we essentially only had around three tv channels, which were clear and viewable at any one time on the air. (By the time my parents got cable tv, I was ready to move out for college anyways).


In the case of many pre-1980's tv shows, I never got the opportunity to watch many of them at all when I was growing up, if they were not shown in off-network reruns.

The only pre-1980's shows which I ever had nostalgia for, were for shows which I watched in reruns when I was a kid and pre-teen. This was shows like: The Pink Panther, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Wonder Woman, Charlie's Angels, Hawaii Five-0, The Six Million Dollar Man, Gilligan's Island, Get Smart, CHiPs, Starsky & Hutch, Happy Days, The Bionic Woman, etc ... (I did not really watch these shows in their original first runs, other maybe some random episodes in the late 1970's).


More recently I watched other pre-1980's shows, largely from "impulse buys" of dvd sets from bargain bins. Over the last year or so, I picked up Baretta, Kojak, Columbo, McCloud, Dragnet, The Outer Limits, Police Woman, The Rookies, SWAT, etc ... Though I found that I have zero nostalgia for these shows, regardless of how good they were from a storytelling and production perspective. These shows just simply don't have the same nostalgia gravitas for me, or the emotional connection is completely absent for me. As far as I'm concerned, they're not much different than watching episodes of CSI, Law & Order, NCIS, etc ...

In a more general context, somehow I have a lot of nostalgia and emotional connection to tv shows I use to watch frequently when I was a kid and teenager (both first run shows and reruns). For stuff I did not watch at all, I have no nostalgia for and no emotional connection to.