Favorite TV Show as a Kid

[Dangler]

The Fugitive, Car 54 Where Are You?, The Lone Ranger, Sea Hunt, Mighty Mouse, The Three Stooges, Gunsmoke, Bonanza and The Adventures of Superman.

[marty59]

Quote: "Soupy Sales out of Detroit. 1959 or so". Yes, but into the sixties too!

Watching Our Gang, Three Stooges, living for Saturday morning cartoons. Mission Impossible always came on late Sunday nights and as a kid that meant bedtime for school so it was a real treat during the summer!

Sundays in general were always a good day for TV and relatives being over and having color tv in the sixties. Good memories!

It's hard to say just one favorite show when programming was really good then. Nowadays, not so much...

[DaveWM]

star trek,I dream of jenie,bewiched,get smart,outer limits,TZ,columbo,mannix,dr kildare,pettycoat juntion,rawhide,science fiction theater,mickey mouse show,WW of disney,batman,geez there was SO much good stuff, now I get over a thousand channels and pure garbage on network tv, Metv RTV etc.. is good but I notice they chop out parts for more commercial

oh ever notice how commercial are totally out of bounds, besides way too many and way too much, there is way too much info (no standards being applied). I think I would prefer the cigarette commecials over the stuff that comes on now.

You really have a hard time sitting down with your kids and watching a decent show these days (young ones anyway).

[radiotvnut]

MacGyver was my favorite show as a kid and I recorded most every episode on VHS tape. Over the years, I watched the tapes to the point where they were worn out and I eventually bought the show on DVD.

I also liked Dukes of Hazzard, Incredible Hulk, Knight Rider, A-Team, Jake and the Fatman, Magnum PI, etc. I also liked reruns of the older shows such as Kojak, Emergency, Marcus Welby, Rockford Files, etc. The last "current run" shows that I watched were the Commish and In the Heat of the Night. When those two shows went off in the mid '90's, I pretty much lost interest in anything "current" and my main TV watching since then has pretty much consisted of watching the news and reruns of older shows on tape or DVD.

[ChrisW6ATV]

The first favorite show of mine was the Road Runner Show, cartoons on Saturday morning. Also, Garfield Goose, a local show on WGN-Channel 9 on weekday afternoons in Chicago.

Originally Posted by bgadow

One of my earliest TV memories is a scene from Holmes & Yoyo (!) where Yoyo jumpstarts an elevator. Not sure why that ended up in my memory bank, but there it is!

Wow... So, there are two of us who remember that show! I liked it, but it wasn't on for very long. The ads described it as "Holmes, not at all like Sherlock, and Yoyo, not at all like anyone!" (The bunco squad... The bunco squad... The bunco squad... whack!) I am just old enough to have recorded episodes of that on my first VCR, but I know I didn't.

I did record The Dukes Of Hazzard while I watched The Rockford Files (or the other way around), both on at 8 PM on Fridays if I remember right.

[David Roper]

So many that I could name have been listed above already, so I'll just stick with shows I (and perhaps I alone...) doted on that haven't been mentioned.

Ghost and Mrs. Muir--which I recall best from its brief run in syndication on a local UHF station in the early 70s, although I'm utterly certain I had watched it on the network in 1970 when it followed Brady Bunch.

Mr. Ed--I mean come on, did somebody already bring this up and I just missed it? Classic Filmways stuff.

Arnie--Herschel Bernardi in a sort of fish-out-of-water tale as a blue collar guy who gets kicked up to management. Sandwiched between My Three Sons and Mary Tyler Moore on Saturday night--whereby the Nielsen tracking had the outline of an elderly horse

New Dick Van Dyke Show--as close as any "New" show ever came to being a hit on network prime time.

When Things Were Rotten--Mel Brooks gets smart with the Robin Hood legend.

Salvage-1--Andy Griffith is a junkman who builds a rocket out of junk to salvage the junk NASA left behind on the moon. Since all that happened in the pilot, well....

Turnabout--might not have thought to mention this one if nobody had brought up Holmes & Yoyo. John Schuck again, this time as Sharon Gless' wife--and she as John's husband--after a little statue they bought from Mother Nature places a spell on them.

Eischied--Should have lasted much longer, but was stuck following Rockford Files (when it was on its last legs) and pitted against Dallas (when it was just taking off).

Barnaby Jones--because again, apparently nobody else mentioned it.

That's a brief list, there are others I'm too embarrassed to mention. Besides which it chronologically takes us up to when I was 16 and so no longer really 'a kid'.

[Dude111]

Originally Posted by egrand

Mine was Emergency. I loved watching it every week parked in front of our big Motorola Quasar set.

Yes that is a good show!

I also like Land of the lost! (Original series)


Thats just 1 I like,there are many!!

[sampson159]

phil silvers,twilight zone,alfred hitchcock,gunsmoke,cheyenne were favorites.then along came the 60s and brought route 66,naked city,east side west side and my all time best show-the fugitive

[Jon A.]

Garfield and Friends, TaleSpin. I haven't learned much more about planes now than what I learned from the latter, so I won't be a bush pilot anytime soon. The Air Pirates' planes were called CT-37s; sounds like an old RCA set.

[baursam]

Hogan's Heroes, Sanford and Son and The Beverley Hillbillies all come to mind. :-)

[Username1]

Barnaby Jones was cool..... Always polite, and near the end - one hip shot with his itty bitty 6 shooter always got the bad guy in the shoulder.....

Did he ever fire more than one shot per show..... ??

I liked Colombo too.... Best was the murder with the automatic record player and the umbrella up the chimney.... No cop today would ever solve that one....

Did he even have a gun....?

I watched Arnie too..... Short lived as it was...

[Jeffhs]

I developed a liking for detective shows when I was a teenager in the 1970s. Watched almost every detective show that came out on the networks--Columbo, Banacek, McMillan and Wife, et al., including Quincy, M. E. (I have the first season of the first four shows I mentioned on DVD--that's how much I enjoyed them.) I still watch those shows in reruns on MeTV. They were so well made I don't mind seeing them over and over again. I don't get Quincy on MeTV (yet), but I do have six seasons of the show on DVD, and am waiting for the last two to be released; who knows, one of these days it just might show up on MeTV or even AntennaTV. When and if it does, I'll be here to watch it.

I also liked the comedy series of the '70s, such as The Odd Couple. I have all five seasons of the series on DVD, and again, like the old detective shows, The Odd Couple was so well made I could (and do) watch those shows over and over and never get tired of them.

They don't make TV like that anymore. This afternoon, however, I was thinking about the remakes that have been made of shows like Kojak, Ironside, et al. Ironside's remake is just about done on NBC (the network will show the last episode this week some time, if they haven't shown it already); the Kojak remake ran for just one season on one of the networks, can't think which one at the moment. The reason these remakes don't do well on network TV, IMHO, lasting only one season if they are lucky, is that the shows they are based upon were one of a kind, and were not meant to be remade for the 21st century and its new TV technology. Note that there have not been any attempts (yet, anyway) to remake other '70s detective series such as Mannix, Quincy and the like. I say just wait--these shows may well have remakes eventually, but like Ironside and Kojak, if Mannix and Quincy (to name but two) are ever remade for this century, they may very well suffer the same fate; that is, the shows may run on one of the networks for a season or two, then they will be canceled and will never be seen again.

BTW: It's probably not fair to compare news broadcasts and documentaries to comedy series, but I saw Rock Center, a newsmagazine program on NBC, disappear after only one season--or was it two? Maybe NBC, after seeing "Rock Center"'s ratings (which couldn't have been very good if the show was canceled after only one season), decided that its one remaining magazine, "Dateline", was enough. (Rock Center's downfall was probably the manner in which it tried to emulate CBS's "60 Minutes".)

NBC has been #4 in the ratings for some time behind Fox, and I can see why. If they want to be #1 again (as they were in the '70s-'80s), they had better get on the stick and start showing programming that will last more than a season or two (or even less), and will beat the other three networks at their own game. NBC was (and still is) my favorite TV network for news, but I will not watch their prime-time entertainment offerings until or unless they improve their programming--drastically. I may be asking far too much, since I am 57 years old and most TV programming these days is geared to 25-54-year-old viewers. However, this is why I have a collection of DVDs and VHS tapes of shows I enjoyed in the '70s and '80s.

I read just recently here on this forum (in another thread) that broadcast television's days are probably numbered, to be eventually replaced by video on demand and other non-broadcast formats. If and when broadcast TV fades into oblivion, I won't miss it, as I will still have my DVDs and tapes of programs which, by that time, may well have been long forgotten. One of the reasons the TV networks' ratings are slipping is because of the popularity of VOD, satellite, cable, et al., and the networks cannot keep up with these changes. These new technologies may not be eating the networks alive (yet), but they certainly aren't doing much (if any) good for ratings. Those things called DVRs are not doing the networks any favors, either, since they allow viewers to record a show and watch it at a later time (time shifting)--I'm sure this all but drives the programming executives at all four networks bonkers.

This is not new, however, as it's been going on since the days of VCRs; however, in the beginning of the VCR era, there were few shows on prerecorded tapes; until 1975, there was a controversy over the legality of recording television programs off the air (remember that warning the TV stations used to show at sign on and sign off, "The programs broadcast by this station may not be used for any purpose except ehibition at the time of broadcast.....", which was supposed to prevent showing of [and charging for] TV programs shown on standard television receivers in public establishments). This controversy ended when the courts found in favor of Sony, the motion-picture producer that was so dead-set against the possibility (now a reality) of TV viewers taping shows and watching them at any hour they chose, and to archive such programs if they chose to keep them.

[DavGoodlin]

Hogans Heroes - Operating a radio antenna by extending a flagpole LOL

The Munsters - granpa Lewis' basement was just the beginning of my interest in electricity.

The Addams Family - uncle fester and the light bubs

The sheer outragesness of Lost in Space prepared me for the serious consideration od Star Trek later.

And that's just on the 1962 Motorola, as far as the 70's, I liked most of what you guys mentioned here though we only had 4 good channels, in color on the '71
Zenith, but that changed in '74 when my dad finally admitted that the JFD all-in-one VHF-UHF-FM antenna was a dud for UHF and we were missing out.

Once we could get the UHF independents from Philly, every funny cartoon or sitcom made since the early 60s was on one of those "new" channels at one time or SO, plus great horror and science fiction movies every weekend!

[bgadow]

I would hardly ever watch a drama as a kid, aside from Quincy and maybe Trapper John, MD...now, thanks to MEtv I'm catching some of what I missed. I like Columbo and, in recent weeks, I've started watching Kojak. My wife has been teasing me about that-man, Theo was a cool dude!

[tvtimeisfun]

Hey my favorite programs as a kid sanford and son, make room for daddy , leave it to beaver ozzie and harriet, gomer pyle,