I have way too many childhood memories connected with the shows and movies I watched as a kid. Way too many of them have remained obsessions into adulthood. Way too many.
Still, there seem to be others like me around, who had the tube as a babysitter. There's worse things. I wasn't beaten, neglected, or unloved. I just watched (and remember) too much TV. More than anything else. Maybe because I was an unathletic, somewhat solitary (not friendless - I just tended to prefer my own company) kid, those flickering images are my strong memories, instead of - I dunno, playing down at the ol' swimming hole or whatnot.
(Actually I grew up in the suburbs, and we had no ol' swimming hole, nor vacant lot baseball - sorry)
O Best Beloved, television was a different beast then. We had no cable (there was cable TV to speak of until the late 70's). No VCR's - much less DVR's.
No, instead you had a dial with channel numbers on it (many of the channels might not even have existed), an antenna connected from the roof to your TV via a wire, and pair of moveable antennas that could be extended from the back of the TV. We called them "rabbit ears", and sometimes you'd have to position them in bizarre ways to get your station.
TV worked like the radio. You could tune in signals from stations that broadcast in your area. And those signals could be interrupted or interfered with by weather and other conditions. In a storm, you might not be able to get some stations in at all!
And if you wanted to watch your favorite show or movie - you just had to wait till they broadcast it.
I know ... how did we ever survive?
There were two frequencies then - VHF, and UHF. VHF was where the networks were - ABC, CBS, and NBC (no Fox, CW, etc. There had once been a fourth network called DuMont, but they vanished in the late 50's). The networks broadcast there programming through local affiliate stations, who filled the hours outside of Prime Time (roughly 7 - 10 PM) with their own media. It was also home to PBS.
UHF was the wild west. All local stations with no network affiliation. They filled their hours completely with their own stuff.
I should clarify here - ALL stations were local. You had as many stations available to you as there were stations in your area whose signal you could pick up. We were lucky where I grew up. We had ten stations (a few more we could get a fuzzy signal on, sometimes, or just snow). In Bakersfield they had three!!
Now, I mention that outside of network programming, the stations had "their own media, their own stuff." By which I mean they filled their hours with locally-produced special interest shows, syndicated programs that were sold to stations independent of the networks, re-runs of older shows, and movies. Lots and lots of the latter two.
Which meant my whole generation grew up watching old shows and old movies as much as new ones.
And we didn't mind black & white. We were used to it.
Hell, some of us had black & white TV's!
Yes - it's true - TV's that didn't have color! They were cheaper.
We had one till I was 11.
It's true.
Heck, we had to do something besides painting on the walls of the cave!
So this is where my TV watching begins, sometime around 1970, 1971. Anything before that is lost to the mists of time.
The station that looms most profoundly in my memories is Channel 20, known as KEMO. KEMO was a new and apparently very small station. But I seem to have watched that above all others. And many of my most strongly-remembered favorite shows I can trace back to KEMO.
Saturday morning listings aren't available for KEMO, but I have distinct memories of watching Samson and Goliath (a teen who could turn himself into a musclebound superhero - and his pet dog into a lion!) and Fireball XL-5 (an animated sci-fi action show from the UK with lots of rockets and spaceships - done with marionettes no less!) - in addition to network showings of Scooby Doo (spooky - I liked it! My penchant for scary stuff was already kinking in), Lancelot Link Secret Chimp (chimps in costumed with dubbed voices, acting out secret agent scenarios - honest I'm not making this up!), Pufnstuf (in repeats but still showing on NBC), Doctor Doolittle (a pin-off from the Rex Harrison film which I recall as a particular favorite) the incredibly strange Bugaloos (another Sid and Marty Krofft creation), the long-running Bugs Bunny and Pink Panther shows, and The Monkees (also in re-runs). Looking over the Saturday morning network listings c. Fall 1970, nothing else sticks out in my memory - either I wasn't watching or none of it made an impression.
That was Saturday morning c. 1970-1971 for me. It was on the weekday afternoons that the richest fare would show most of the programs I loved best. Aside from Bozo the Clown, which I watched but never actually liked...
Top of the heap: Spider-Man. Yes, the Grantray-Lawrence Spider-Man with its crude animation, irresistible theme song (still the second-most definitive superhero theme song). Spider-Man introduced me not only to Spidey in all his wise-cracking glory, but to the rogues gallery of Spidey villains - Doc Ock, The Vulture, The Green Goblin (far less scary in his televised incarnation) and best of all, the impossibly weird Mysterio...
Yeah, Spider-Man rocked.
Not only that, but KEMO also managed to corner the market on the other big superhero show - Batman. Yes, Adam West's Batman, with its camp and the MOST definitive superhero theme song. As a kid, I didn't see the camp, and moments such as The Penguin lowering Bruce Wayne into an incinerator, or a confused Catwoman leaping to her "death" were the stuff of rich excitement to me.
Coming in behind those was the bizarre Tobor: The 8th Man. Tobor was actually an android or robot who masqueraded as a human - until trouble showed up. It was, in fact, a Japanese import, as were several cool shows I watched growing up. Seen today, 8th Man looks pretty crude (though no worse than Spider-Man). But there was a certain depth to the plots, and a real sense of darkness and danger at times that made it especially compelling to a kid.
Also from Japan was the very famous Speed Racer, which I was never as crazy about as some other toons, but still watched religiously. Speed, like the other Japanese shows, was genuinely exciting and often scary in a way no American shows were (Trixie's nightmare of Speed as a green-faced monster [Ep. 11 "The Most Dangerous Race"], the garden full of iron plants [Ep. 41 "The Car Destroyer", the talking robot in "Race for Revenge" [Ep. 12], the weird giant car that looks like a sawfish [Ep. 47 "Car With A Brain"]).
Another fave was a Japanese-American co-produced cartoon featuring King Kong, which depicted the great ape as a gentle giant who tussled with dinosaurs while protecting his human friends. The theme songs stays with me to this day. I had friend who used to crack me up by changing the lyric to "you know the shame of King Kong!"
Ah. but I'm saving the best for last. Because KEMO was also showing Ultra-Man - Eji Tsuburaya's now-famous judo-chopping giant from space, who knocked off giant beasties in episode after episode. Seen today, Ultra-Man is beyond repetitive (there were a handful of exceptions) - beastie shows up and makes some noise - science patrol (the intrepid team whose job it is apparently to fly/drive around confronting giant monsters) shows up and ineffectually confronts beastie - Hayata, the team's resident square-jaw, ducks around a corner, whips out the beta capsule, and turns into Ultra-Man, giant wet-suited martial artist from space. He opens a can of whoop-ass on the beastie, finishing it off just before his five-minute battery gives out, and off he goes.
As a kid, formulaic isn't a negative. I loved Ultra-Man. It was full of action and monsters, and Ultra-Man just plain looked cool. UM, too, had a memorable theme song, and the evocative opening - rattling percussion and swirls of, I assume, paint, unfurling, was a major mindfuck to a 5 year old. Ultra-Man was The Bomb.
Then, a very shocking thing happened.
In the spring of 1971, KEMO went off the air.
All of a sudden it was just - gone. No more Ultra-Man. No more Spider-Man. No more Batman, 8th Man or King Kong. No more Samson or Fireball XL-5. I couldn't wrap my toddler brain around it, but Channel 20 and all its treasures were gone forever....
(to be continued)
