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The Golden Girls were pretty progressive, but the pilot with the gay housekeeper was really awkward. I was going through a box of old VHS tapes a year ago, stuff that had been taped off TV in the 1980s. There was an episode of Danny Thomas' last attempt at a hurrah, a show called One Big Family. There isn't much information about the show (to the point that I have no idea what episode I watched), but the gist was that Thomas was Jake, a semi-retired comedian who had moved in with his grandkids. The parents of the grandkids were dead, but the oldest child was old enough to have a spouse and was taking care of the younger siblings. Grandpa Jake was there to help out. In the episode, a teenage granddaughter had gotten a job working for one of Jake's buddies, who ran a restaurant and nightclub. The buddy turned out to be a total prick, sexist and verbally abusive, to the point he was chasing around the young hostesses. The hostesses got fed up and went on strike. It just so happened to be the night that the buddy had invited Jake to do a stand-up routine. He sees his granddaughter striking in front of the building and she fills him on what's going on. She begs him not to perform. The solution? Jake talks to his friend. Turns out that the guy didn't really mean it and agreed to think about the hostesses' demands of basic humanity. Jake performs and the granddaughter went back to work.
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Jul 31, 2017 03:18
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Did Married With Children have any opinions that are really awful in retrospect? While in college, Bud was arguably raped by a woman that was played for laughs, but I'm struggling to remember much of anything else that was really terrible. Al insulted overweight women (and everyone else) but the writers always made the women to be awful individuals. Seemingly every one of his targets was written to deserve it. Considering the attitudes of the era and the show being edgy for the time, I'm assuming there has to be something.
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Aug 5, 2017 05:28
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Calaveron posted:Duckman too because it's an ugly, ugly world but that wasn't a nickelodeon show I hope Duckman was on USA. I picked up the first couple of seasons in a cheap boxset not long ago. I have yet to get far into a rewatch, but from what I've seen so far, Duckman's held up OK.
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Aug 6, 2017 02:56
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In October 1990, The Adventures of Super Mario Brothers 3 aired "Kootie Pie Rocks," which featured Milli Vanilli. Two weeks, Milli Vanilli's career took a bit of a turn. A Wiki says the songs were digitally altered to something else afterwards, so I must have seen it when it originally aired.
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Aug 9, 2017 07:03
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It was a huge deal, being network TV and all, when Chicago Hope and ER said "poo poo" during an episode.
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Aug 9, 2017 18:30
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Detective No. 27 posted:Lucy and Ricky weren't even allowed to be shown sleeping in the same bed. The first on-screen couple to do so were Fred and Wilma Flintstone. That's supposedly Mary Kay and Johnny, which aired from 1947-50.
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Aug 11, 2017 05:13
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stone cold posted:Has anybody mentioned the "classic" gone with the wind bit on the Carol Burnett show? I don't see how it's aged exceptionally poorly. It's quite 1970s, but still has some pretty decent bits. Even Vicki Lawrence playing Hattie McDaniel isn't anywhere near as bad as it could be. If you want aged poorly, though: Mama's Family. It was never a classic, but did have some decent stuff in its first run, when Carol Burnett, Betty White, Harvey Korman and Rue McClanahan were regulars. It was canceled, then popped up again with only McClanahan making an appearance to transition to the new cast members. In the old episodes, Thelma was more hateful and occasionally wrong. Thelma was a curmudgeon in the newer episodes, but always right. (Speaking of The Carol Burnett Show, if you've never heard Tim Conway's elephant story, you should.)
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Aug 16, 2017 03:48
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WebDog posted:Keep in mind this was the early 90s so the AIDS stigma was still massive and the episode reflects that and a few other culture points at the time. Though ostracism was everywhere, that last bit seems to be at least partially inspired by a family's home being burned down in Florida because some of the kids had AIDS through blood transfusions. RC and Moon Pie has a new favorite as of 06:05 on Aug 23, 2017 |
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Aug 23, 2017 06:03
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Davros1 posted:Also shows that haven't age well, what about Hogan's Heroes? A comedy set in a Nazi POW camp? Robert Clary - Corporal LeBeau on Hogan's Heroes - is a concentration camp survivor.
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Sep 8, 2017 04:57
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The Bloop posted:
It's a bit more complex. Griffith certainly didn't do all he could have done. There were African-American extras on the Andy Griffith Show. There was one black actor with a speaking part: Rockne Tarkington, who played Opie's football coach in a later, color episode. Opie thinks he has to choose between football and piano and Tarkington shows him he can do both. Griffith was questioned at the time. He said that prominent black citizens simply wouldn't exist in the Andy Taylor world. To an extent, that would have been true. Griffith said that if Mayberry had a black doctor, no white citizen would have used him. And they wouldn't. That said, realism stopped with the Andy Griffith Show with the jail key left on the hook between the cells and the kookiness of the town in the color episodes. Of course, there could have easily been more interaction with black citizens in Mayberry on the show. The Andy Griffith Show was a mix of 1930s nostalgia in a 1960s setting. The show only once mentioned Vietnam, too, and that was in passing. There was a reference to marijuana. The black and white episodes were almost entirely devoid of pop culture and the color ones didn't get specific about pop culture, except for a ridiculous computer dating episode. CBS' rural shows had no intention of changing the world and that's ultimately what killed all of them. CBS saw where the wind was blowing and canceled a heap of them..
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Sep 27, 2017 23:55
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TenCentFang posted:It's weird he basically admitted all the fun wacky characters on the show were horrible racists. A mix of racism and social pressure. My grandparents, who lived in the very deep south, would have been considered pretty progressive folks for that era. They didn't mind at all when the local schools were integrated (in 1966!) but they weren't about to lead the charge for integration. To even make pro-integration views known publicly was suicide for southern businessfolks.
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Sep 28, 2017 02:51
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The Bloop posted:I appreciate the effort in your post. And Andy Griffith debuted in 1960, not 1970. Civil rights were starting to heat up; Rosa Parks was in 1955, Little Rock's school integration was in 1957. One-third of America's population was still rural and few schools had integrated in the south. The Twilight Zone had a social conscience (and also aired on CBS), but the rural shows were what paid the bills. Gomer Pyle, USMC didn't mention Vietnam despite airing from 1964-69. CBS clearly didn't want to touch social issues. Nor did really anyone else. Dick Van Dyke was considered very progressive for its time. ABC accidentally hit upon real America when it cut into an airing of Judgment at Nuremberg with footage of violence from the Selma march. Just look at how lovely the lineup was for 1965, one year after the Civil Rights Act. Almost all the television of that era was bubblegum, popcorn, whatever you want to call it. None of them advanced society, but none of them had any designs to do so. Especially since with the near total lack of rerun opportunities, few even had a second chance to see an episode of a show.
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Sep 28, 2017 06:29
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sexpig by night posted:Like, you could write pages about how the whole 'gay vs normal guy' thing is absurd and still regressive and how today 'kick the gay guys out' wouldn't be something the protagonists would ever rally behind at all, but it was a really good time capsule of the seeds of gay acceptance forming and they're genuinely interesting episodes to see from that perspective. It was clearly meant a s a pro-acceptance thing but it was still so heavily framed in the language of 'real men' and all just due to the time period. That kinda stuff can be fun to watch the edges of progressive views bucking the norms and all. Wikipedia has a list of 1970s American shows that dealt with gay topics. Some of them are really cringey. The first All in the Family Episode mentioned, Judging Books by Covers, is a landmark in how it handled gay characters. Here is a good summary of the episode.
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Oct 3, 2017 02:12
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I've never watched much I Love Lucy. I can appreciate what Lucille Ball meant to comedy and to TV, but I've never been able to love Lucy. But I'm in a lobby the other morning and the end of an episode is playing on a TV. Lucy is confused by a note in Ricky's handwriting that is a long list of women's names and I think one or two men's. Being Lucy, she overreacts and grabs a gun and heads off to Ricky's stage show. She points the gun at him while he's in the middle of an act and he explains that the names belong to the dogs doing the conga on stage. Lucy's embarrassed and surprise, surprise, Ricky is exasperated by her meddling. He points the gun at the her and fires it. It's a prop gun and there's just one of the "bang" flags that come out of it. I only saw the last seven or so minutes. I don't know if it was established in act one that the gun existed and was a prop. Or if Ricky and Lucy were both aware that it was. Of course, you know full well that Lucy isn't going to actually shoot Ricky or vice-versa. But it's awkward as hell. As I said, I haven't watched enough Lucy to know if she does have her moments of genius or if 95% of the time she portrayed as flighty as all the clip shows show her. The latter approach never appealed to me at all - even as an ardent lover of the Three Stooges, the clips I saw of Lucy were too silly and no matter how accomplished Ball was that didn't age well.
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Oct 27, 2017 01:57
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Marx Brothers movies, Garfield and Friends, and Looney Tunes do. As long as everyone understands that Friends aka US Acres is what holds up.
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Oct 28, 2017 07:49
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The lyrics transcription of Bobby Goldsboro's Honey doesn't convey just how awful that song is:quote:Was just a twig... Honey is also in its own creepy category of death songs during that era: Tell Laura I Love Her, Last Kiss, Leader of the Pack, etc. There are a bunch of 1950s-60s songs with the obviously adult singer lusting after a teenager. You're Sixteen posted:You walked out of my dreams, and into my car Sixteen Candles posted:You're only sixteen but you're my teenage queen
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Nov 12, 2017 16:34
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Choco1980 posted:There were all kinds of weird porn films to come out of this fad. It didn't last long, but it definitely made an impact. Indeed.
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Nov 16, 2017 06:39
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Volcott posted:If you're in the mood for a rock opera I don't think the subject matter is all that important. Rick Wakeman staged his album The Myths and the Legends of King Arthur as an ice show.
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Dec 1, 2017 03:01
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Mister Kingdom posted:My first exposure to British TV was The Good Life on PBS in the late 70s/early 80s. That show went for four series of seven episodes with two specials. While I wanted to see more, I felt they had told all the possible stories without repeating themselves. Each character got their own episode or two, while both couples got theirs. Same goes for my other favorites like Black Adder, The Young Ones, etc. The fifth season of the original Upstairs, Downstairs was padded to 16 episodes because London Weekend begged for them (the previous four were 13 episodes each). The show had already been plotted out for the final series and it was a struggle to come up with material to fit in. Fawlty Towers had two series, space years apart and even as a VHS tape set, only take up a small part of my shelf. On the other hand, Are You Being Served had 69 episodes in 10 series. That was about eight series too many for that show.
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Dec 27, 2017 03:12
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Calaveron posted:Homer steals cable On a similar note: "Assume Fox viewing positions." https://i.imgur.com/sXNTkyY.mp4
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Jan 5, 2018 06:48
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Tiggum posted:I watch this every time someone posts it, hoping that this time I'll be able to tell what the supposedly incredibly obvious difference is, and I never can. It's more obvious here. This was shot in 1971. Funnily, it was reshoot of a black and white episode because of an ITV color technicians' strike. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj9exQpkGqA
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Jan 7, 2018 02:53
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remusclaw posted:Wrestling was first outed by journalists in the 30's. It seems to be a cyclical thing where each generation has it's super smart, totally mature media tastemakers who are all like, "Hey, don't you idiots know that poo poo's fake?" Arguably in some cases, they were. Jim Cornette's 1980s riot stories from Mid-South are insane. Other fan violence stories are obviously one nutjob, but Mid-South was way beyond that. And Vince McMahon outed himself to the government in the 1980s for tax reasons. Seems that taxes for legitimate sporting organizations were more than what McMahon dubbed sports entertainment. e: efb on Cornette stories.
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Jan 22, 2018 15:37
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hard counter posted:the wrestling kayfabe carrying over to real life talk reminded me that a lot of older sitcoms tried to do something similar with gimmicky bit part characters who were contractually obliged to stay in character during public appearances as a kind of silly marketing stunt One of the more famous examples is Anissa Jones. Being forced to carry a baby doll and wear pigtails as your approach your teenage years can screw you up.
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Jan 24, 2018 03:49
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There was a controversy over The King's Speech getting an R rating. The reason it got the rating was solely the profanity-laden speech the Duke of York delivered to Lionel Logue. Part of the scene was censored so the movie got a PG-13 rating and it, too, aired in some theaters.
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Jan 26, 2018 03:33
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On Seinfeld, Kramer's first name wasn't revealed until the sixth season. The episode does about as good a job with it as possible. It just randomly comes out when George meets Kramer's estranged mom. Not much, if any, was made of Kramer's lack of a first name in the seasons prior, but I can remember the preview ads for this episode (The Switch) making a huge deal out of it. Vera Peterson was unseen on Cheers, but there was never a situation where it was made a big deal out of. Sarah was unseen and unheard on the Andy Griffith Show, but the joke was that as the telephone operator, she knew everybody's secrets.
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Feb 9, 2018 17:06
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Werong Bustope posted:I saw Patrick Stewart in Anthony and Cleopatra once and for some reason they'd put him in a toupee. It was very distracting. 
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Feb 16, 2018 02:52
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Mister Kingdom posted:Caught an episode of Married with Children this morning where Peggy had to get a job because Al wouldn't buy her a VCR (that's dated by itself) Because there isn't a solid wi-fi connection, I'm using an old mp3 player when I have to work outside. Offspring's Americana album came up in the mix and there were two particular things that stood out for their dated-ness. Walla Walla: The big item noted to have been stolen was a VCR. Pretty Fly (for a White Guy): "At least you'll know you can always go on Ricki Lake"
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Feb 16, 2018 17:19
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Measuring the amount of credits for some actors isn't the most accurate thing if it's pre-1990s. Soap operas are especially under-represented on IMDB. There are fans who have episodes tracked pretty well, but soaps are also hit with that so few survive. Wiping was a massive practice before the mid-1970s and a lot of info was lost with it. Don Knotts played a character on Search for Tomorrow for about a year. One episode is known to exist and I don't think anyone knows exactly when it aired. Non-American shows are also not represented too well, unless it's a series that had a reasonable amount of popularity. I know of many UK made-for-TV movies from the 1960s that aren't credited. And in both the UK and USA, live TV was still a thing in the 1950s. Very little chances of getting information out of that. Even into the 1980s it's a problem for non-popular shows. On an old tape, I discovered an episode of Danny Thomas' last attempt at a sitcom, One Big Family. It aired in the late 1980s. There is so little information about it out there that I have no idea which episode this even is.
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Feb 22, 2018 15:55
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Mister Kingdom posted:I was caught off guard to this response on Match Game '74: King Crimson similarly finds it very awkward to explain a lyric from The Great Deceiver on Starless and Bible Black. "Robert Fripp's Diary posted:A recent [Fripp wrote this in 1998] book on gay references in rock songs referred to the line "health food human being" from The Great Deceiver. At the DGM Playback for "The Night Watch" (London 1997) I asked Richard Palmer-James, the lyricist for that and several other Crimson songs of the 1972-74 period, what he had meant. Richard had no gay reference in mind: his notion of "human being" was the health food version of a meatball. The insulting gay connotation only occurred to him later. A 2016 article on the same site about the making of the album doesn't even mention the line's contents at all, just "The Great Deceiver, newly emerged from the sessions at Air, contained a Fripp lyric about the clash of commercialism and religion, as well as Richard Palmer-James reference to falafel-making rather than any homophobic inference which some listeners mistook it to be."
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Mar 16, 2018 04:51
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SEX BURRITO posted:Ah the golden days of everyone getting a Saturday morning cartoon. Even MC Hammer got to fight bad guys. Just before everything fell apart, Milli Vanilli was on Captain N and the Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ses06u43g_I
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Apr 8, 2018 04:50
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winterwerefox posted:No Andy Griffith Show? Which was a spinoff of The Danny Thomas Show. Which was renamed from Make Room For Daddy (and better known as that now). If being Andy Taylor wasn't enough, there was another Andy Griffith Show, conveniently named The New Andy Griffith Show. This time he was Andy Sawyer. And because Griffith's previous attempt at a show, Headmaster, failed, Andy Sawyer was virtually identical to Andy Taylor. To the point a handful of old characters from Andy Griffith Show and Mayberry RFD appeared, making for an odd universe where Goober knew Andy Taylor and Andy Sawyer, but the Andys weren't the same person. RFD was still airing at the time.
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Apr 29, 2018 02:12
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Think about Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Everybody likes Carl. Even though if he was a real person and lived next to you you'd hate every minute of it when you put him in a fictional show he becomes everybody's favorite. I think it has to do with taking refuge in absurdity; if you make a character that's just impossibly awful people tend to like them. Carl is not the worst individual on ATHF. He's constantly dumped on by everyone. He wants to be a badass, but the only time he really got to live out that dream was Larry Miller Hair System. Everyone else just clown him (once literally). Shake or Frylock are the worst. Shake has no redeeming qualities, but is an idiot. Frylock is on the surface is good, but is also the one who became a murdering stalker who wore the decaying body of the man he killed.
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May 24, 2018 02:51
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Speaking of TV series that don't show up anywhere, I recently sought out an Evening Shade set for a birthday gift. My parents ate that show up. I haven't seen it since it originally aired in the early 1990s, but remember a ton of good character moments. Burt Reynolds starred, but had the sense to play the straight man to the slightly wacky townspeople. Anyway, only season one is on DVD out of four and that season came out a few years ago. As for the ultimate DVD set, all uncut episodes of The Carol Burnett Show. Only bits and pieces are out there with about 100 of the 278 episodes being released on various compilations. Rights are apparently a nightmare.
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Jun 12, 2018 02:41
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LIVE AMMO ROLEPLAY posted:When did shows start doing gimmick episodes like musicals and such? I Love Lucy had a story arc where the Ricardos went to Hollywood and hung out with movie stars, so pretty much from the start.
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Jun 17, 2018 02:20
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Solice Kirsk posted:I mean, a lot of the jokes were just adult versions of Warner Brothers cartoon jokes. Candygram for Mongo!
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Jul 15, 2018 02:24
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business hammocks posted:Wasn’t the whole point of the joke that wrestling is fake? Did 70s people not know that wrestling is fake? Most, yes. But the ones who didn't could be a bit rowdy. NSFW warning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKSAf_aMl-E These stories are mid-1980s. RC and Moon Pie has a new favorite as of 15:15 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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Jul 22, 2018 15:12
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Don Gato posted:I liked it when he did that, but also was so coked up he doesn't even remember what he wrote in that state. I don't know if The Stand was written during that era but it would explain a lot. Cujo was the coked to oblivion novel. The Stand, written a few years earlier, was mostly booze. It also suffered from him kicking around the the unfinished manuscript for years, writing himself into a corner and having to come up with a deux ex machina to get out of it.
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Jul 25, 2018 02:59
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Rirse posted:Meanwhile TBS these days seems to air nothing but Big Bang Theory. How in the world that show gets four hours a day of airing on that channel. TBS aired a lot of documentaries in the 1980s. In addition to the Atlanta Braves baseball and pro wrestling.
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Jul 26, 2018 13:41
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BrigadierSensible posted:Forgive me for stating the obvious: But that was also part of the satire. In your "Leave It To Beaver" worlds, everything is peachy gosh darn keen, but when you meet people who look like that in real life, they are always harbouring deep dark resentments and animosities towards each other. Which it winked at when bringing Jerry Mathers for an episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFSUAJlVVLo hard counter posted:i think president hw bush even joined in on the fuss by saying something vaguely like 'i want good strong families in our america that are a lot more like the waltons and a lot less like the simpsons' while campaigning whereas barbara bush publicly called the simpsons the dumbest thing she'd ever seen on tv And Dan Quayle poked his nose into Murphy Brown.
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Aug 21, 2018 14:40
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CannonFodder posted:Hey now, the Braves finally managed a World Series win in 1995 There's a fun little book called "We Could've Finished Last Without You," by a guy named Bob Hope (not that Bob Hope) who did promotional stuff for the Braves and Hawks during the bad years. It has a bunch of stories about how crazy Turner was. Though if he heckled anyone shirtless from the stands, it was the Hawks. He tried to tank them so he could move them to Charlotte.
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Sep 5, 2018 03:52
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