Haha! I read Lilek's Monday piece before any of you did! Nananana!

Okay, probably just most of you. The Instapundit liked it as well. I resisted the urge to flip into nostalgia mode, but then my friend Harry sent me this bit by Amy Kropp. And I got to thinking...

Yes, there were just three TV channels then. Actually five in Milwaukee where I grew up. There was PBS, which mostly showed old Nasa footage, kids shows (Mr. Rogers, Zoom, Electric Company), and Julia Childs. Oh, and "The Wives of Henry the Eight" when the "Masterpiece Theater" theme music was much cooler and Alistair Cooke was still the host -- and there was a UHF station on channel 18 which showed lots of old movies (Tarzan, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The King & I) and syndicated reruns (example: Gilligan's Island was on when we got home from school, and later, the immaculate "Twilight Zone" on Saturday afternoons). So yeah, we did have a movie channel -- even though most those old movies were pretty bad.

But you know what? I was only a little guy back then -- the age I was, many people have no memories from -- but I seem to recall that though there were only three major networks, they were pretty darned watchable.

I mean, yeah, there were probably all those films like "Towering Inferno" and "Airport 70-something", But there was also "The Wonderful World of Disney" on each Sunday night, which was generally pretty good. And the family never missed "Emergency" -- I think it was Saturdays. And before that was "Dragnet", which I remember my Dad watching. And there was the "Sunday Night Mystery" which had this really, really great theme music and showed a guy walking with a flashlight for about two minutes while the credits rolled... but the feature was always something like "Ironsides" or "Columbo" or "Perry Mason" -- total classics today.

And even the random primetime fodder was stuff like "The Odd Couple", "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", "The Rockford Files", "Happy Days"... all really watchable stuff (still pulling good numbers on TVLand) which also, incidentally, had totally awesome theme music. (Do you get the impression I like good TV theme music? As a kid I would sneak out of my room so I could stand in the hallway and hear the theme music to shows I could never watch because they were on past my bedtime. To this day I remember hearing Simon & Garfunkel's theme music from "The Graduate" back then.)

And even the schlocky stuff like "Laugh-In" (which I barely remember), "Flip Wilson", and the latter "Sunny and Cher" and "Captian and Tenille" (the worst of the lot) were pretty reasonable. The only stuff I really hated were the cynical comedies like "Maude" (shudder) and "All In the Family" which came a bit later -- they didn't seem funny to me, just insulting.

So, yeah, we didn't have many channels to watch, but sometimes I suspect that the average TV moment had better quality. Heck, I know that advertising has increased from 8 minutes per hour in the late 80s to something like 20 today, so it had to be better at least in that regard. Though the commercials, I'm pretty sure, were much worse. (I could do just fine without ever hearing middle-aged men obsessed with squeezing Charmin again, or how un-nice it was to fool mother nature with butter substitutes.) But at least you didn't hear about feminine hygene products in detail over dinner. (They had these ads showing cartoon women whose bodies would contort into odd cloud-shapes as they passed over a calendar. I never understood, and mom never fully explained.)

And McDonalds? The fries were much better tasting than today. And I remember that A&W had some awesome food back then and their root beer was -- well, very good root beer. Not a mass-produced synthetically-simulated concoction like they sell today. I can tell the difference, and its not small. The A&W root beer I remember is forever gone, and I have to content myself with Stewart's.

Mind you, I'm not saying it was all great, but there were many things which were pretty darned good, at least in the world I was privileged to inhabit.

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