DON'T kill your TV!

(alternately titled: The Good Old Days.... of TV!~!)

I am the first to admit I love TV... good, bad and otherwise... If the internet wasn't so damn interesting I'd spend much more time in front of it. When I was single I used to have it on in the morning while getting ready for work, and as background noise while home at night. Oh.. long time companion, TeeVee....

Earlier this week I was remincing about public TV kids shows that me & my brother would watch during the summer. We would fight over the 2 PBS stations 9 and 54 because they both had great summer programming, and different shows on at different times... We would look at the schedule, that we had sent our SASE along for, (and I still can't remember what they called that 'programming block' during the summer... like "PBS summer splash" or something catchy like that), and decide whether to watch Newton's apple and Vegetable soup or watch 321 Contact and then the Secret City or Cover to cover... so great. such good old days. TV is just not the same.

The local stations had so many unique shows, and PSA's were a BIG thing in the 70's apparently... Then Evany's dog sitee inspired her to ask if anyone remembered "the bulldog in the leather S&M newsie cap and his...donkey?...sidekick, a puppet duo who made their fame doing commercial breaks during early afternoon television in the Bay Area in the 80s?" Which of course made me google it up since I was already skipping merrily down the nostalgia path... Charlie and Humphrey!

Which got me thinking about all the great local TV we used to have (like Home Turf) - and great franchised TV too (like People are Talking - did you know that Ann and Ross were specific to the bay area? But that different markets around the nation had different hosts?! Romper Room too!).

Needless to say this makes me want to 'go home sick' and watch Leave it to Beaver, and then wait impatiently - maybe kill time with some Electric company until Scooby Doo comes on, and then hope that Dad comes home late so we can watch Dance Party USA or maybe Growing Pains re-runs before TeeVee is corrupted by the evening news....

I'm not a parent and sorta a hater when it comes to baby blogs, but there is a category, in the SFGate parent validation of coolness blog thePoop, called gone but not forgotten, which is great for such trips down memory lane. Go to it - remember Frontier Village, buster & me, evening magazine, time for timer, etc. it's practically a time machine right there in your computer!