… and happy to share.
I saw King Kong (1933) as a young child – on TV
Thanks to a couple of comments on the last post, I’ve been thinking about some of the truly bizarre television shows that knock around in my memory. This is no attempt to be comprehensive. It’s just some links to oddities I watched at one time or other.
In transitioning from a big town to a small town, I’ve been thinking back on the rich history of television comedies about this topic. Comedy emerges from contrasts and conflicts. You can have stories where the main characters bring rural values to the city, like in The Beverly Hillbillies or Gomer Pyle, USMC, but it’s usually funnier the other way around. Better comedy comes from having city folks move to the country. The big-towners think they have life figured out, and they endure misadventures while being forced to readjust. Viewers can delight as the artificial assuredness of the new residents is upset, their pomposity is punctured, their snobbishness skewered.
The first show of this kind that I liked was Green Acres. In that show, which ran from 1965 to 1971, a couple from NYC buy a rundown farm in Hooterville. Jay Sommers, the main writer, re-tooled it from an earlier radio show he did called Granby’s Green Acres. At first it’s the husband’s idea to give up city life, and his wife doesn’t want to. Once they arrive in the country, she decides she will do whatever she can to bring grace and culture to their new surroundings. Eva Gabor played the wife as a glamorous ditz, sort of an upper-class, Hungarian version of Gracie Allen. Eddie Albert farms in three-piece suits and makes patriotic speeches that cause “Yankee Doodle” to be played as underscore. Other characters hear the music, but he can’t.
The show shared some aspects and characters from the world of Petticoat Junction, also set in the same fictional rural locales, but it was more absurd. The main joke around which variants were created is that the residents of the Hooterville Valley live lives that follow no logical rules, yet they are happily, comfortably bound by the bizarre traditions they’ve decided to follow. This irritates the lawyer from New York endlessly. He’s the only character who can’t live without logic or gamely accept this off-kilter alternate world. His daffy wife goes right along with it.
I grew up loving stories about Robin Hood. Were these tales based on the exploits of a real outlaw? There might have been a number of Robin Hoods in the original region, including some women. It’s an open question if he really lived or not, but what an inspiring symbol. Each of us knows someone, or about someone who’s been dealt an injustice and had to go into some sort of hiding. Many of us become outlaws ourselves, as children or as adolescents.
From the safety of the dense woods, Robin and his band lived simply in Sherwood Forest, shared everything and redressed the crimes visited upon local peasants by an unjust elite who support an illegitimate ruler. That “rob from the rich, give to the poor” catchphrase isn’t entirely accurate. The rich in these stories got rich through unfair laws and taxes they alone benefit from. The serfs and villagers do all the work farming, maintaining the estates and manufacturing goods, and they are starved and thrown in jail if they object to the injustice. It’s a situation begging for revolt, and always relevant, especially in our age of Capitalism, Corporatism and heartless avarice.
LB’s good bud and one of our favorite bloggers (InvisibleMikey) has a spot-on recommendation for our TV viewing:
Ah, politics. The fakeness, lies and weasel-words. The facade of assumed importance. The grand parade of lifeless commodities. During the weeks the political conventions are broadcast I feel as if quality TV, normally one of my maintenance drugs, is only available from secret labs run by chemistry students.
Just in case you also want to avoid the convention broadcasts, here’s a hidey-hole I discovered. There’s an award-winning series from Danish TV about a female Prime Minister and politicians who have to choose between family life and serving a nation. It’s called Borgen, and it’s one of the best political drama series ever made. Superbly written and performed, it’s a less preachy, more plot-heavy, European version of The West Wing.