Jan 31, 2010
I've heard it takes a big man to admit he was wrong. I'm not necessarily that big man. Nor have I been so wrong that it would require a public demonstration of repent. However, I recently found out that Flounder and Newman are not one in the same. Now, for you to say "so what's your point?" would be a little too cliché. The point will follow.
It wasn't all that hard growing up with basically three channels on the television because it was just the way it was. The kids at school may have talked about watching shows I had never actually heard of, but for some reason instantly intrigued me nonetheless. But that "I want what I don't yet have" part of my human nature wasn't developing as quickly as armpit hair and zits.
We had ABC, NBC and Educational TV. I say "basically three" because there were others. At least some times there were others. If the weather was just right and if the wind was blowing our direction, the signals might just come in strong enough to warrant giving it a try via the old manual outside antenna. But even so, CBS was, for the most part, impossible. I wish I knew how many shows I watched sitting way up close to the TV screen and squinting my eyes ever so hard just to see between the staticy lines. Using my imagination to visualize an image that was only partially there made it all seem worth while. We won't even talk about the audio issues.
This sophomoric effort absolutely gave me the edge when friends would invite "the guys" over to watch satellite. This would always quickly become the upper "not actually porn" channels of satellite, Skin-a-max, we called them, that would come through after most parents had gone to bed. This is the same satellite that still sits in their back yards to this day. The one that's so big I used to think it could catch every foul ball in Yankee Stadium, not to mention the local venue, The Deeter Dome. I still adhere to the notion that trying to watch Skin-a-max with the screen constantly rolling through all that static was far more likely to cause the blindness than we what we were actually told would cause it by our parents. Still no hairy palms. I hate to refer to my mom and dad as liars, but I guess they did what they needed to do in those situations.
We lived in a small rural town, on the outskirts of a larger small rural town, that was a little lower than centrally located within the state. Whew! Did you get all that? Mississippi was always the green state on all the maps in school. It was sort of a taffy green, not a tree green. It was even a sherbety shade of lime in the front of the dictionary I used to look up my spelling words on Tuesday nights. Now, imagine that our green state stands four hands high, then Purvis is right at the top edge of your bottom hand. So we were half way in between the bottom half of the state.
In those days the cable company didn't find it necessary to run their lines down every street. (I recently found out that they still don't to this day.) They said it just didn't seem economically feasible. So for all of the 70s and the majority of the 80s (up through present day, I guess), those of us in the outskirts of Purvis had 3 channels. NBC had a local affiliate in Hattiesburg, about 20 minutes away. ABC was down on the coast, about an hour away. And there was ETV out of Jackson, which was about 2 ½ hours away, dead center between the palms of your 2nd and 3rd hands. (In case you hadn't noticed, distance is measured using time.)
The coast had a lot more people per capita than Hattiesburg. So naturally, ABC was a much stronger signal to those of us with rabbit ears. NBC was usually pretty clear. And ETV was pretty much perfect. The only problem with ETV was that once you'd graduated from The Electric Company, there really wasn't much point in watching it. There was Matinee at the Bijou on Sundays at noon, but even that got old.
It would be about 5 years before I'd ever hear Bruce Springsteen bellow out 57 Channels (and Nothin' On), but the thought had crossed my mind with the 3 we had.
We're talking pre-VCR era too here. You couldn't record anything to watch later or to watch again if you missed anything. If you didn't get it the first go round the odds were slim you'd ever see it again. Same at the movie theater. If you didn't go see it when it played that first time, you had to wait until it was edited for television. That could take years. And it always sucked because inevitably Charles Bronson would be about to blow some street thug's lights out in vigilante style and he'd say something like, "You're a friggin' meanie", but his lips would still be moving to the tune of expletives I'd not yet learned. (Which only proves my theory that any sports caster that can read the coaches lips with great accuracy must always have been Death Wish fans.)
It was basically impossible to see these movies again in their truest form. Reruns were sometimes possible with sitcoms, but there was no YouTube or Apple Store to check it out again later. So with theoretically only 2 useable channels, my childhood consisted mostly of family oriented, middle class entertainment. 70s and early 80s TV was great. Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli showed us what being cool was really like. It was very similar to the way Vincent Barbarino had done on Welcome Back Kotter. But with most episodes airing only once, and no internets, it was highly unlikely for us to ever know that the Sweathog's teacher was also an acclaimed poker player in real life. But we watched anyway.
CHiPs raised our respect for the law. Starsky and Hutch raised our respect for fast cars. And Good Times raised our respect for living a good life through tough times in the inner city. This was a topic I somehow thought I related to. Being a white kid in southern Mississippi and thinking Penny was cute wasn't exactly the most popular thing to advertise in 1979. It would take years before the locals looked at Janet Jackson the way I had as a child. I think I can actually say, with some degree of accuracy, that I've seen more episodes of That's My Mama than Lost. This is a fact that I am quite proud of.
In those days, you might watch a series for years and never realize a complete story arc had ever even happened. Here's a prime example: Did you know that Richie Cunningham had an older brother named Chuck? I didn't either until years later when there were stations devoted solely to all the episodes I had missed as a kid, before the age of the DVR. That was back when the channel was called Nickelodeon. Even when it went to Nick at Nite, it was still cool. Now it's more "Nick of the Nineties". But, hey, you can't have too much of The Nanny, now can you? I'm a firm believer that her outfits must have been made especially for her on the day of taping. My wife says that Fran Drescher's voice is annoying. Personally, I've never actually needed to hear it. No audio is necessary for me to enjoy that show. I don't look forward to the day The Suite Life of Zack and Cody will be on the retro channels.
Sometime in the mid to late 80s a whole new world of possibilities opened up. For years I'd seen commercials for the Laser Disc and the Beta Max, but apparently they were quite large and very expensive. $600-$1000 during the time period that Taxi and Hill Street Blues were still on the air was a month's pay for a lot of families. Needless to say, we didn't all have those monstrosities sitting atop our televison sets. But something happened in 1985 that changed all that. The Video Home System was introduced and more and more people were able to afford their own VHS. With VHS came video rental stores. From the video rental stores came the ability for all us non-cableized, small town folks to watch movies (without static or rolling pictures) from the comfort of our own Lay-Z-Boy. This was the beginning of a completely new trend for people like me. Interested, yet lazy.
I had been to the theater several times. Besides the normal kiddy Disney cartoon and live actions, I had seen Smokey and the Bandit in the theater. I watched Luke Skywalker inside Cloud City look Darth Vader right in the mask and cry "You are not my father" on the big screen before the movie world had ever even heard of an Ewok. And the people that wrote the tag lines were right, I "would believe that a man could fly" after watching Christopher Reeve don the cape, in full color, that I'd grown up seeing George Reeves (no relation) do the same with, in B&W.
Another thing is for sure. It didn't take much more than watching Top Gun close to 100 times on that giant (for its time) 19 inch, plastic, faux wood grain encased box that my parents had, to make me think I could fly an F16 fighter plane in a dogfight, wearing Ray Bans and listening to Otis Redding albums with the lovely and talented Kellie McGillis during her closet days.
And who wouldn't want to quit school and tour the finer establishments of your average bad neighborhoods after seeing Fast Eddie Felson show Vincent exactly how it was done 80 or 90 times? (Note to self: Download the soundtrack to The Color of Money for Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London by and Eric Clapton's It's In the Way That You Use It.)
Of course, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and WarGames made me immediately want to go out and buy a personal computer. If they were actually available at the time.
And… Animal House. Oh, yes, Animal House. That's the one movie that actually made me want to go to college. Albeit, for all the wrong reasons. (Later I'd find out that what I really wanted was a gray tshirt that simply said "COLLEGE.") I probably wore out the tape at exactly that scene where John Blutarsky (John Belushi to any bottom feeders that don't already know) is on the ladder and falls backward from the girls' dorm window. What a scene for a tweener! My imagination was working harder that it ever had squinting through the static. And, "Over? Did you say 'over'? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!" That is comedic genius. "Forget it, he's rolling." Intellectual humor. What a concept. <Deep voice> "Duh you mine… if we dance… wif yo dates?!!" and when Blutarsky said "A zit! Get it?" I almost peed my pants. Not so much because it was that funny per se, but because I only wished I could do that in real life. That was the edge of intellectual humor in those days, but I don't think most people "got it." I'm a firm believer that even the most ardent viewer missed things in that movie that went virtually unnoticed until at least the twentieth viewing. Then one day they say to their wife "Honey? How'd I miss that before? I've seen this thing a million times." It's just how it is. Now, let's all sing "I gave my love a cherry / That had no stone / I gave my love a chicken / That had no bones / I gave my love a story / That had no end / I gave my...", well before you smash my guitar into the staircase, I'll get on with it.
I guess, even though I'd risked life and limb adjusting the manual antenna outside the house in the rain while dad yelled from inside "just a little bit more, oh no, wait, go back some, ok, right there", the fascination of watching on the little screen probably hadn't fully developed until the latter part of the 80s.
It was about this time that I'd seen Jerry Seinfeld appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Soon he'd have his own show. It would be a show about nothing. A show that proves you can have a life centered around cereal and comic books. Did you ever realize that Superman appears or is referred to, sometimes very indirectly, in (rumor has it) all 180 episodes? (It's become a nerd-sport to guys like me to try and spot them all.) Then, yada, yada, yada, the show was a hit. Kramer slid in through the door. George's pretzels were making him thirsty. Elaine shouted "Get OUT!" And then there was… Newman.
"Hello… Newwwmannn." (grit teeth and turn, trying not to smile)
"Hello… Jerrrrry." (ditto)
It never crossed my mind that I didn't already know this guy. In my mind it was Flounder from day one. But it wasn't. I can remember thinking to myself that Kramer may make the show, but Flounder needed more stage time. Just sayin'. All the seriousness that he brought with the badge of the mailman made every scene a masterpiece.
I guess in the pre-interweb era where imdb.com is just a dream with no name, it could probably happen. Not nowadays. I knew that Kevin Bacon had made an early, if not his first, appearance in Animal House. He was noticeable in that role. But the fat guy that always gets screwed is such a believable part for a guy like me. I also remembered that a Donald Sutherland showed his ass, literally. And I probably knew that Flounder's real name was Stephen Furst. But apparently it didn't really matter in the annals of worthless knowledge that I chose to retain.
Today, seeing Stephen Furst and Wayne Knight I'm not real sure how I missed this for so long. But one thing I can tell you is that there were only 12 years between Animal House at the theater and Seinfeld taking over the air waves. Seinfeld reined supreme for almost 9 years. Fast forward just a little while and you'll realize Seinfeld's been out of syndication for 12 years, the same distance between Animal House and the first Seinfeld Chronicles (true fans know this). Where did all the time go? Maybe it flew by so quickly because there has not been a single day in almost 20 years that an episode of Seinfeld has not been on the air. It will definitely seem strange, if the day ever comes, that I start flipping channels at bedtime and Seinfeld is not taking up two slots back to back. If they'd had cable TV back in the 70s, they'd probably have said the same thing about I Love Lucy.
Think about this, aside from Lucille Ball basically giving birth to Little Ricky on live television in 1953, the Beatles invasion of 1964 and the "at the time" unrated swagger of a guy named Elvis in 1956, both on the Ed Sullivan Show, were the only times that would even come close to how many people, both viewers and households, that actually watched the last episode of Seinfeld air. That night at The Bombay Bicycle Club we knew we were, although indirectly, and even more so, inconsequentially, living a vital part of small screen history.
I still watch the old reruns. Seeing Seinfeld on television is far better for me than watching it on DVD. There's a certain "timing" that gets lost when there's no actual commercial break. Similar is true I'm sure of Animal House in the actual theater. I did not see Animal House in the theater, but I can tell you from experience that the fanboys of today that rent the Indiana Jones Trilogy and take advantage of a $3.00 2-liter Coke and a "free" pack of microwave popcorn at the counter because Netflix is taking a day longer than expected, will never know what it feels like to actually feel that big ass boulder rolling toward Harrison Ford in the movie theater. But if they think they can, maybe they should go home and watch X-Games on ESPN. Or even worse, X-Games on ESPN Classic.
Are they secretly promoting deadbeat suicide with this stuff. I wonder just how many poor bastards lie at home on the couch, staring at this crap because A) they have no sense of creativity from the watering down of modern television, and B) they're too lazy to get up and find the remote control for crying out loud. So he ends it. The note he leaves, if he leaves one at all, might refer to his Facebook account getting hacked or eHarmony not working out, but it doesn't really matter. I mean really, unless your little sister, or your brother-in-law, is the one actually skiing down the slope on the bright pink boogy-board from 1994, then who in the hell really cares? Is this what entertainment has become? Reruns of sports shows that nobody even really watched when they were on the first time? Give me some Newhart. It was pretty boring too and nothing ever really happened, but at least we could laugh at Larry, his brother Darryl and his other brother Darryl.
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