It was my wife’s birthday this week, and I gave her a DVD–Season #5, 22 episodes of The Rockford Files.
We don’t have television anymore. My friends who have cable or satellite all say, “We get 150 channels and there’s nothing to watch.” I only see TV, these days, when I have to go to the doctor. Last time I was there, I saw a special on Kim Kardashian and her ridiculous marriage, and part of a soap opera. The guy who called television “a vast wasteland” was being much too kind. It’s much more like what you’d expect to see if they had brothels in Mordor.
Patty and I were Rockford fans way back, when the show was actually on TV. We hadn’t seen it since. So we popped the disc into the DVD player, and…
Wow!
Blow me down! A plot, of all things. A clever and creative story. Characters! Played by professional actors. Crisp, sparkling dialogue, with unexpected twists that made us laugh. Do you mean to say that TV was once like this? And it was free? You just turned it on, and there it was?
Those old Rockford Files episodes, all cranked out for just one season, were better than nine out of 10 first-run movies today. I don’t even know what’s on TV anymore, other than soap operas written by dirty-minded 12-year-olds and performed by Seconal addicts, and reality shows featuring poor schlubs whose only talent is to make the audience feel superior, and sleazy, leering screenplays about teenagers coughing up their virginity. The crimes solved by Jim Rockford seem virtuous by comparison.
I wonder what else was on, 35 years ago, that was a thousand times better than the best we have today.
How did our popular culture go so bad, so fast?
I know it! Have you ever seen the old BBC Chronicles of Narnia? They’re from the 80s, and every single one of the child actors has an innocence in their eyes and a sweetness that is completely lacking in the newer Narnia movies. Actually all the actors have a more care free, less ‘professional’ attitude, and the movies are so much more earthy and gentle and real than the special effects and epic battles. Basically, unless it’s a Christian movie, my family watches mostly older movies, like Jimmy Stewart cowboy movies, Get Smart (the TV show), etc.
Have we ever seen the old BBC “Narnia”? And how! We are lucky enough to have it in our movie collection. In spite of the low-budget special effects and not terribly convincing costumes, Patty and I both feel very strongly that these are much, much better than the new Narnia movies–slick, overproduced, and annoyingly tampered with. (See my reviews on this site.) The BBC productions somehow capture the true spirit of the Narnia stories: and you’re right, the child actors are more natural.
Most of the movies in our collection are old. I don’t think we’ve got anything later than the 1990s. It amazes me, how great were some of the movies made in the 1930s when “talkies” were only a few years old. If you’ve been reading my reviews, etc., you know what I think of most of the new stuff.
The Rockford Files was a favorite. That was towards the end of my television watching days. Just a few years later, broadcast TV began it’s slide into its present state. My TV broke, just about the time Rockford went off the air, and by the time two weeks had passed, I found that I no longer wanted to watch the standard broadcast fare.
These days, if I’m exposed to television, I find it very predictable. You can see the setup to every event and the dialogue is so obvious that a viewer can almost speak the lines before the actors spit them out.
I have several shows on DVD. The Bob Newhart Show, and it’s ‘80s successor, Newhart, are favorites. Newhart’s humor was intelligent. It wasn’t pseudo intellectual, just the product of fertile and creative minds. It never resorted to off-color humor, and the characters were nice people, good people, albeit with interesting quirks.
In the later Newhart series, they had three backwoods characters name Larry, Darryl and Darryl, basically the northwoods equivalent of hillbillies, but Larry, the only one who ever spoke, was polite, considerate and at times bordering on eloquent. These were supposed to be one-time characters but proved to be so popular that they were made regular characters.
Such imagination is totally lacking from most contemporary entertainment. I haven’t seen a movie in a theater in nearly 20 years, and only watch cable/sat’ TV when visiting the homes of others. But I value some classic series which I have in DVD.
I don’t have TV at all. I watch what I want to watch on my computer–mostly older things. Between YouTube and Amazon you have a great deal to choose from. Plus classic movies if that’s what one likes. We gave up TV when they killed analog and have done just fine. Patty
I have a 50” smart TV, but it’s only signal sources are my home WiFi network )which gives me access to Amazon videos and YouTube) or my DVD player.
Similar to my setup. Patty
It’s the way to go, in our day.