Love you guy's posts. Too many good quotes to include in this reply. Sad (for us older-series fans) , but true in a lot of cases. An interesting "generation-gap-oddity", but I've been showing my nephew a couple of the older series over the holidays, "Mission:Impossible", in particular, and he's crazy about that series. My nephew is a "Millinium" kid, born in '80. Sometimes the younger crowd will suprise us "dinosaurs" 
He also likes the original Dick Van Dyke Show.Amen to that one!Joe Lugoff said:
Yep! So true! AND it seems that a big part of humor these days when it isn't centered around bodily functions is nothing but mean-spirited put-downs. That was always an element of humor (Ricky vs. Mrs. MacGillicuddy, Darrin vs. Endora, Buddy Sorrell vs. Mel Cooley, Alan Brady vs. Mel Cooley, etc.), but it wasn't the main thrust of a shows humor before. Everything today is so cynical and nasty. Like you, I am amazed at how much humor (and gentle drama) was milked from so many different facets of life on these classic shows. It's certainly a shame that it appears to be a dead art.Ollie said:
Boy, isn't that the truth Bob! How things have changed (and not for the better, IMHO) on the television landscape in the last 40 years. I too have been struck, as I've watched so many older tv shows on dvd in the last couple of years, at the amount of praying, Bible referencing and church going that characterized so many series in the 50's and 60's.bobraleigh said:One episode that really surprised me was when Hazel got on her knees to pray with the little boy in the series to thank God for letting him keep a dog.
i was so struck that would have played on prime time back then and no one
would have thought anything of it. then this sunday i watched Desperate
Housewives and wow what a difference 40 years makes!
The "old days" are usually referred to as "more innocent." I think of them as "less perverted." I mean, people knew about the darker side of life back then -- they just didn't revel in it as they do now. Entertainment was an escape from negativity -- a lot of it was actually inspirational. Now they focus on the negative and it's terribly UNinspiring.bobraleigh said:
So in your estimation, wholesomeness and goodness with belief in supernatural beings are mutally exclusive and rejection of hocus pocus brainwashing is equated with all that is evil? Or did it never occur to you that these blatant displays of proselytizing might be offensive to those of us who find religious references inappropriate?bobraleigh said:
It depends on who you are and where you lived. Yes, for me, a white Jew living in New York, the 60s were great. And since television spent far more time raising me than my parents did, I was lucky to have Jim Anderson and Ward Cleaver. My father was more like Homer Simpson but not as involved as a parent. The 1950s dads were better role models but I certainly couldn't relate it to anything in the world I lived in. Those same charitable and caring religious people were the same ones enforcing segregation, turning on the fire hoses and bombing black churches. Two sides to every coin. For my money, all religions have one thing in common - the more devout a religion is, the more it subjugates women and enforces how women live and what they do with their bodies. When I was a kid, I remember going to Bar Mitzvahs where the kid's mother was behind a wall with the other women and couldn't even see her son give his reading.
