Hey there I'm Robert MacEwan the author of Ideal Absolutes. If you're new to macewan.org, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.
As my family moves on toward the “It’s December, hence the workday lethargy increases” season, it pains me to realize television will not serve as a panacea for my entertainment ills. We all know it. The re-run parade of questionable original episode champions began with failed labor negotiations. All the holiday-type tripe movies were shown last week. From Elf to Miracle on 32nd St..
Val and I were talking last night about there’s no television anticipation anymore. While the networks and cable channels use their teasers: Original Series! Starts Tonight! The Most Loved New Show on TV! We at home feel no sense of urgency. Not really… with 24/7 programming and more channels than names in the Little Rock phone book, what goes around will certainly come around. Again and again and again.
It’s kind of a shame, isn’t it? Val remembers when The Wizard of Oz was on just one Sunday night a year… it was the premiere entertainment event for kids. “It made us pay attention to every piece of dialog. The next day at school would be spent re-enacting the movie, even teacher’s would go along with it. I had one teacher who could do a perfect Glenda the Good Witch… we baby-boomers are the film strip generation.”
I was born along with Woodstock. That makes me the first VCR generation, I suppose. Ollie and Emmett (the grandballoons) are the first DVR generation. At 90 yoa, my m-i-l Ruth is the Talkie Generation. Her sister Helen played the piano / pump organ in a Cincinnati movie theater back in the 1920s. From Rudolph Valentino to a Red-Nosed Reindeer.
This blog is going to begin to include more cultural conversations. I’ve got almost a century of human experience years bombarding me all day long.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I didn’t quite get your comment on livecrunch today , was your wote on mixx?
I was telling my boys that the other night, that when I was a kid, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was only on ONCE A YEAR, and then we had to wait a whole YEAR to see it again! It’s like telling them that we had to chisel our own TVs out of rocks, they just have no concept of having to wait.
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