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Nostalgia for things that were already old when you saw them

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    Nostalgia for things that were already old when you saw them

    The 'horror' channel in the UK is repeating The Invaders. First time I've seen this since I was about 7 (and it's actual level of "horror" can be gauged by the fact that when I watched it it must have been on ITV on Sunday afternoons, probably after The Big Match).

    I think even when I first watched this in the early 80s I was aware that it was a repeat of something made 10 years or so earlier (see also Batman, and the Monkees). So I am being nostalgiac for a programme I last watched in my childhood that wasn't, really, even from my childhood.

    Has anyone else experienced that?

    #2
    Lots of childhood books were ancient when I read them as a child. Narnia was over 40 years old by then and E Nesbit books and Just William even older.

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      #3
      Lots of the school holiday filler on TV was pretty ancient in the 1970s. As well as those mentioned, Laurel and Hardy shorts, Flash Gordon serials, Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films and Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films were staple viewing. Lots of the cartoons were fairly old too. Warner Bros. were generally snappy enough for it not to show too much, Tom and Jerry were variable and occasionally you'd get the booby prize of some faded musical effort about some singing bulrushes or the like.

      Slightly later on, the old monster movies on Channel 4 and Saturday afternoon double and triple bills of old black and white films on BBC2 were big favourites of mine.

      My parents were both from big families so between them my grandparents had pretty much the complete works of Enid Blyton for me to plough through. Some seemed very distant, despite being set in, say, Surrey only thirty years previously.

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        #4
        Probably, for me, the big one would be The Flintstones. When I watched it at lunchtime, from probably 1974 to 1977, I had a vague notion that it was 'old', but I don't think I had any sense of perspective on it. They'd reference Cary Grant, Anne Margaret and Tony Curtis, but I don't think I could place them as 'late '50s / early '60s stars. I figured it out a bit more with gags on The Beatles ("bug music!") and 'she says yeah yeah yeah...he says yeah yeah yeah'.

        Anyway, it was produced from 1960 to '66.

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          #5
          Thanks to being a callow youth during TV-am's somewhat scattergun approach to staying on air during its many various strikes, I'm sure I'm not the only one who sees the 60s Batman and Flipper shows as being contemporaneous with the likes of Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and DuckTales.

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            #6
            "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits". Both were about ten years old when I started to watch them. Still watch them now when they show up.

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              #7
              Star Trek the original series. On BBC2 at 6pm. Turn over from Neighbours. Turn off about 25 minutes in because dad would come home and that would elicit the call of "Tea's ready!"

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                #8
                Originally posted by 3 Colours Red View Post
                Thanks to being a callow youth during TV-am's somewhat scattergun approach to staying on air during its many various strikes, I'm sure I'm not the only one who sees the 60s Batman and Flipper shows as being contemporaneous with the likes of Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and DuckTales.
                I'm with you on 60s Batman, but I was never a fan of Flipper.

                Happy Days was another one as well.

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                  #9
                  Popeye, three days a week when I got home after school. Compared to the Fleischers' earlier work (Betty Boop etc.) it was lukewarm, but still way better than other animated stuff on TV in the early 60s

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                    #10
                    Originally posted by adams house cat View Post
                    "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits". Both were about ten years old when I started to watch them. Still watch them now when they show up.
                    This. The Outer Limits doesn’t seem to be available anywhere I can get it, unfortunately.

                    I recall that it, like The Twilight Zone, has been revived a few times with new stories and redos of old stories. There’s going to be a new TTZ too. Really, there’s no reason for it to ever go off the air. As Black Mirror, as well as online things like Dust and Clarkesworld, have shown, there’s definitely an audience for that kind of thing and there are certainly enough stories that can be told like that.

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                      #11
                      British telly in the 70s was packed with vintage stuff, much of which is already mentioned upthread, It's tragic that that kind of fare has disappeared from UK terrestrial telly. I loved it, from golden age movies through to the mid-60s episodes of The Avengers,

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                        #12
                        Originally posted by Simon G View Post
                        I'm with you on 60s Batman, but I was never a fan of Flipper.

                        Happy Days was another one as well.
                        The thing is I don't associate Happy Days with TV-am. In my head that's Channel 4 in the early 90s at 6:30am, just after Sesame Street and before The Big Breakfast.

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                          #13
                          The Rathbone/Bruce Holmes movies ignited my love for the character. My mum said once that it was one of the few times I’d be totally quiet in front of the telly.

                          The Warner Oland Charlie Chan movies have a similar effect but repeating those nowadays would be... problematic.

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                            #14
                            Champion The Wonder Horse

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                              #15
                              Originally posted by Evariste Euler Gauss View Post
                              British telly in the 70s was packed with vintage stuff, much of which is already mentioned upthread, It's tragic that that kind of fare has disappeared from UK terrestrial telly. I loved it, from golden age movies through to the mid-60s episodes of The Avengers,
                              Agreed and even on satellite/cable it's mostly disappeared.

                              A couple of things to add:

                              The Phil Silvers Show was a late night staple when I was a kid, and for a long time I would have thought it was a chat show or similar hosted by a guy called Phil Silvers, as I never got to see it as it was past my bedtime.

                              My kids have very little concept of Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry etc - they know most of the characters from merchandising etc but don't have much idea what they all did (and my kids are 20 and going on 16) - these were common time-fillers when I was a kid in the late 70s even though some of them were quite old by then and the stuff they referenced (Tom and his mates playing jazz/skiffle, Bugs Bunny singing old music hall songs) seemed ancient history.

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                                #16
                                Originally posted by WOM View Post
                                Probably, for me, the big one would be The Flintstones. When I watched it at lunchtime, from probably 1974 to 1977, I had a vague notion that it was 'old', but I don't think I had any sense of perspective on it. They'd reference Cary Grant, Anne Margaret and Tony Curtis, but I don't think I could place them as 'late '50s / early '60s stars. I figured it out a bit more with gags on The Beatles ("bug music!") and 'she says yeah yeah yeah...he says yeah yeah yeah'.

                                Anyway, it was produced from 1960 to '66.
                                This, absolutely. My sister and I loved The Flintstones - and the parents enjoyed it too - in the late sixties/early seventies, by which time many episodes would've been at least a decade old. One of the novelties of US television for us Britkids was the fact that there were multiple channels broadcasting from early morning (and obviously many running 24 hours) by then*: other than educational programming, this was obviously not the case in the UK. Anyways, Fred and Barney came on WNEW (NY Channel 5) every weekday at 8am or so, so the old man would usually let us cut into the Today show and watch.

                                (*Whether or not this was a good thing is of course highly debatable.)

                                Nods also to The Twilight Zone - classic television that put the bejayzus up the both of us as kids.

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                                  #17
                                  Skippy - must have been older than we realised considering a pre-teen Liza Godard is in one episode. There we were watching it in the Home Counties, and it was made about ten miles up the road from where we live now. We visited the zoo park a couple of times before it closed down, enough time for Mrs. S to be ravished by a horny roo.

                                  Even now the show is on very late now and then on a minor channel. Hasn't lasted well.

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                                    #18
                                    Agreed and even on satellite/cable it's mostly disappeared.
                                    There's a Freeview channel which does nothing but vintage movies. Most of them aren't much good, but there's a few gems in there every week.

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                                      #19
                                      Originally posted by Ginger Yellow View Post
                                      There's a Freeview channel which does nothing but vintage movies. Most of them aren't much good, but there's a few gems in there every week.
                                      Talking Pictures is the recentish (I think) arrival that does lots of old films, particularly British ones. It does some good television series too, recently rerunning The Human Jungle and now some way through Public Eye, as well as Edgar Wallace mysteries, documentary shorts and other stuff. The programming isn't as cosily nostalgic as the channel's branding suggests. I really like it. We are only just getting to the three month barrier after which you really start to notice the level of repeats if the cupboard isn't very well stocked but the turnover seems decent so far compared to, say, ITV3 & 4.

                                      London Live used to show some interesting old films and shorts, possibly through a hook up with the BFI, but the good ones seem to be getting thinner on the ground, amidst reams of '70s soft porn that even Matthew Sweet would struggle to sit through.

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                                        #20
                                        Originally posted by Benjm View Post
                                        Lots of the school holiday filler on TV was pretty ancient in the 1970s. As well as those mentioned, Laurel and Hardy shorts, Flash Gordon serials, Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films and Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films were staple viewing.
                                        The BBC were still showing b/w Tarzan and Flash Gordon well into the 90's as school holiday morning filler, usually late December/early January when they'd run out of all the newer children's programming.

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                                          #21
                                          We are only just getting to the three month barrier after which you really start to notice the level of repeats if the cupboard isn't very well stocked but the turnover seems decent so far compared to, say, ITV3 & 4.
                                          It sits just below the Sony Movie Channel and London Live on my EPG, so the repeats look pretty good in comparison.

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                                            #22
                                            Originally posted by Jah Womble View Post
                                            Nods also to The Twilight Zone - classic television that put the bejayzus up the both of us as kids.
                                            Back in the dirty '80s, when you only got a half-dozen channels after 11 at night, I'd watch The Twilight Zone on Buffalo 29 or Toronto 79 .... whist I babysat...alone in a house. God, was that stupid. Gave myself the shits, I did. But found it irresistible all the same.

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                                              #23
                                              'Only' half a dozen late-night channels? 'You were lucky, etc.'

                                              When I used to babysit as a fifteen-year-old it was pretty much only ITV of the three channels available to us in the UK that still had proper shows running past 11pm. That said, I can remember watching old reruns of Boney - ie, the Australian cop series that featured a blacked-up lead character (I kid you not) - which seemed to be the only programme they could be arsed repeating at the time. (The job was worth it though, because the kids' mom used to leave me beers in the fridge...)

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                                                #24
                                                I can remember Boney running in an afternoon slot; there was a ritual scarification scene that stuck in my mind but little else.

                                                Supposedly Frank Farian named Boney M after the series but that sounds dubious to me, mainly because it's the sort of thing that I might have made up if someone hadn't got there first.

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                                                  #25
                                                  The Flinstones are a good example. We watched that in the 70s and 80s. But the Saturday Morning cartoons I watched as a kid that I’m really *nostalgic* for are the Looney Tunes. Most of those were made decades before I saw them and they still stand up.

                                                  I was/am really into Peanuts. A lot of the strips I liked as a kid were decades old when I read them.

                                                  Most Holiday specials for kids - especially the Peanuts ones and the Rankin-Bass stop-motion ones - were already old when I watched them as a kid and they actually used to be *special*, because they were only on once a year and if you missed it you were out of luck. I can still remember how incredibly excited we got when we saw this intro thing (https://youtu.be/7Hhx8CaaMik) and I recall how sad I was when the block of kids stuff was over and the local news came on, which meant it was time for bed and a return to the real boring world.

                                                  Perhaps this is antinostalgia, but Gary Gulman, the comic, has a line - not even a joke, just something he’s relayed in interviews - about how the tick-tick-tick of an analog stopwatch makes him sad because it reminds him of the start of 60 Minutes. When 60 Minutes came on, that meant that the football game was over, the weekend was over, and we had to start mentally preparing to go back to fucking school. He is so right. I’ve had jobs I absolutely *hated* that I dreaded less on Sunday night than going to school in the 80s and, relative to most kids, I *loved* school. It was just such a relentless grind.

                                                  A lot of the comics I read in the late 80s were from the 70s - especially the Denny O’Neill/Marshall Rogers/Neal Adams Batman stuff, which really established the template for all the Batman stuff that came after - including Frank Miller’s - and inspired the fantastic animated shows and the Christopher Nolan films.

                                                  I got into Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons and what not in the 80s. At the time, I felt like it was really from the Third Age. Of course, Tolkien started creating it over his whole life from WWI through the 60s - but mainly in the 40’s and 50’s. Much of it reflects his experiences with both wars, but the bits that resonate with me now are the sentiments about nature and longing for a peaceful agrarian life that probably never really existed. Those feel very much like 60s/70s ideas.

                                                  As i’ve mentioned before, in the late 80s when contemporary pop and rock on commercial radio was 95% garbage, I, along with most of my peers, retreated into music from the 60s and early 70s. So the Beatles makes me think of the 80s and 90s.



                                                  I didn’t get into Monty Python until the mid 80s and didn’t see the original Flying Circus episodes until the late 80s. It wasn’t that old then, but I wasn’t watching anything else from the early 70s/late 60s at that time so I guess that qualifies for this category.

                                                  (Soon the original series will be 50 years old. And much of it still holds up and is attracting fans.)
                                                  Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 21-11-2018, 19:58.

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