Fuck this show. I was scared to death as a kid watching this. “Please don’t be here…”
We own many of those shows now as my kids grew up watching them several times a day during whatever holiday it might be, and of course The Wizard of Oz is on all the time now.
I don’t know if there is a modern version of any show that is only played around a certain time and hasn’t become standard home video fair anyway.
I remember watching video from the 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt on the news when I was nine, which has stuck with me for some reason.
Another one, that I managed to identify some years back but have since forgotten what it was called, was a TV-show I watched at my grandparents in the early 90’s. It might have been some years older. Maybe even a movie, or TV-movie. There was this guy (who looked bit like Harry Hamlin or David Hasselhoff) who travelled in time with the help of a techie sidekick, solving problems. I think. He had one or two laser pistols, and a black armor-suit-thing that looked very Darth Vader-ish. I don’t remember specifics about the plot, but I think he at some point had to travel back a day to save his sidekick. Or his dying sidekick sent him back to save him. I have a very clear image of the sidekick bleeding to death in their secret bunker lair.
There is no doubt in my mind that the original can never surpass my memory of it.
Hey any of you dudes remember Automan? Guy who could turn into a car? And what about Misfits of Science, kind of an early X-Men sort of thing, had Monica from Friends as a girl who could move things with her mind, but only if she could see it. I remember she spent a decent chunk of one episode totally flummoxed by a blindfold over her eyes until she realized she could see that, and she just poofed it away and escaped.
I loved that show! Seriously, I was so freaking pumped to see the Lamborghini. Very sad when it went off the air.
And the 3-2-1 Contact theme:
I remember seeing a spiderman sketch while in college, and immediately remembered it from back when I was a little kid, even after not seeing it for ages.
Recently ME-TV aired almost the entire run of the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk show. Every episode had some little exchange I had remembered all these years, though in most cases I couldn’t have said what show it was from. Not dramatic moments, just little snatches of dialogue.
Apparently a lot of you remember theatrical movies from the television of your youth.
Me, I remember being traumatized by this…
My father made me watch the Sound of Music with him, and at the end as the von Trapps walked across the Alps into Switzerland, he said they ended up in Vermont. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how they walked all the way from Austria to Vermont. There’s an ocean in the way!
http://i.imgur.com/ziXZ0xD.jpg
WKRP in Cincinnati.
My dad was a salesman in Cincinnati in the 70’s (though not in radio sales) and was know to wear suits in the vein of Herb Tarlek.
I loved that show. First series cancellation to break my heart, IIRC.
No wait, Voyagers was actually the first.
Misfits of Science was the best thing on TV as far as I was concerned. I’m sure it was more like the best thing on TV in my imagination, but still.
One memory I have of something on TV that really made an impression was when I was a teenager in the 90s and I saw this French sci-fi cartoon from the 1970s on USA’s Night Flight:
I had no idea what I was watching, but I couldn’t stop.
I was 9 and the show was Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. I was a huge Kiss fan. Kiss “Destroyer” was the first album I ever owned. I begged my mom for weeks to let me stay up and watch it. When Kiss uses their superpowers in the fight under the roller coaster, I thought that was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I mean; Star Wars was incredible and all - but this was KISS!
It couldn’t be more perfect that YouTube has the exact scene:
Holy shit that is amazing.
Yeah, Night Flight ruled. It’s been resurrected as a streaming channel now and looks great — I’ll subscribe on my Roku one of these days. I’ve also seen torrents of DVD images with original Night Flight shows.
And I love Fantastic Planet — I have a DVD. There’s a new Blu-Ray, and it’s one of the reasons I’ll get a Blu-Ray player when my beloved Oppo DVD player finally breaks.
I turned on the TV after school one afternoon when the Special Bulletin TV movie was in progress in 1983. It was a docudrama presented as a live TV news broadcast wherein domestic terrorists had hijacked a tugboat w/ a smuggled nuke inside and were threatening to blow it if their demands for disarmamanet weren’t met. To show that a nuclear war was unwinnable. I don’t remember if I came in just before the nuke went off (spoiler for 25 year old TV movie) or when the swat team stormed the boat to take out the terrorists.
It didn’t take me too long to realize it was a docudrama, but as that was a new thing, I was genuinely freaked out for a few minutes, and never forgot the moment. Cold War and the nuclear menace was near its peak at that time, and there was no Google or Twitter to instantly dissuade my concern. Of course, now I instantly recognize a bunch of the TV actors, but in those first few moments watching the broadcast…
I remember the bit where someone asks Herb where he gets his suits, and he concedes they’re hard to find, but “there’s a pro shop in Kentucky.”
The scene that sticks in my mind is one of Loni Anderson’s from S1E12 Tornado. Andy Travis has been clobbered by flying debris and needs to be resuscitated. Jennifer takes charge.
Herb: “You know mouth-to-mouth?”
Jennifer: “I know all sorts of things…”
I still use that on occasion, but the effect just isn’t the same.
Oooh, I remember one where Jennifer takes a modeling job and the photographer takes nude photos of her through a one-way mirror and Johnny Fever and someone else break in to steal the photos.
And one where Johnny Fever is terrified of “the phone cops.”
You know, I loved WKRP as a kid but the episode it seems like everyone talks about, the “as god as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly” one, I somehow never saw.