I’m the child at 45. Between this board and a horror board I post at, I’ve come to the conclusion I’m now the only person of my generation into this stuff. Most old enough to be my Dad, and the ones who aren’t I’m old enough to be their Dad.
Well, for my generation, we were force-fed this stuff in the years before cable became a "thing." In fact, my neighborhood in Brooklyn didn't get cable until 1987!!! People were in an uproar for years -- must have been some sort of political thing.
We had CBS, NBC, ABC, (plus each had the local affiliates outside of prime-time), 3 independent channels, and PBS. There were lots of UHF channels, but rarely did any have decent reception, and they were usually a few steps below VHF in content. (But Channel 47 from Newark, NJ, used to air Laurel and Hardy, followed by The Stooges, dubbed into Spanish! El Gordo y el Flaco, and Los Tres Chiflados, respectively. They did this for a year or 2. I watched these when both teams were off-the-air in English on my local stations.)
So you watched what was on! Except for prime-time on the 3 networks, everything else was pretty much news, old TV shows, and very old movies. The not-so-old movies usually had a network run for many years until they were syndicated.
The networks ran first-run kid's shows on Saturday mornings, but they even sneaked in old former prime-time shows like THE FLINTSTONES and the JETSONS. The networks ran first-run soap-operas in the afternoon. (Yuck!!!!)
The old TV shows and movies appealed to us young kids. In the afternoon, would you watch a soap opera or the Stooges, or the Rascals? Then WABC-TV had the 4:30 movie -- older but not too old movies. The time-slot was only 90 minutes, so a lot was usually cut out, unless it was an unusally lengthy movie, where they would air it in parts throughout the week. I think it took them the whole week, or close to it, to show CLEOPATRA with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.
So we got hooked on the classics for the simple fact that the choices were few. Had they not run them ad infinitum, I might not be typing this on this forum right now. In fact, they probably
became classics due to their TV exposure and growing popularity because of it. In the Stooges case, their career was revived due to TV exposure.
I can also see a scenario where the Stooges left theatrical shorts in the early 50s and moved to a TV show instead, a la THE ABBOTT AND COSTELLO SHOW. The content could have been almost identical to the shorts of the 50s we now have. The downside is that the series might not have lasted very long, since few TV series do -- especially back in the 50s.
