Grandpa’s Saturday Morning Sundown Syndrome

Because I’ve been stop-and-go on two separate posts and I had this fragment sitting around in my journal and I needed to get something up there to let ‘em know I’m still alive and thinking useless thoughts.

I get up on Saturday mornings
the sun blazing through the bathroom window
bathing toilet and sink in glory

and I wonder what cartoon would be on right now
in 1968

The best stuff came on earliest
the old, weird stuff, the dark and violent 
sci-fi shows with puppets from England
getting shot or set on fire
these mysteries shouted to life 
right after the farm report
wrapped at seven

the excitement peaked with the newest 
and most popular stuff
in the nine and ten o’clock hours
then slid slowly downhill around lunch

at one o’clock the trippy Lone Ranger cartoon
came on and at one-thirty it was over
and there was nothing to do 
but go outside

of which I remember next to nothing
sunlight, pinecones, pinestraw
other children

come to think of it Saturday
was like any other day inasmuch as

it was something I endured until dinner

Sometimes I wonder what kids today
do that makes this day off from school special

but don't get me wrong

for all my warm fuzzies 
this old man’s mind can still grasp 
the fact they’re missing
nothing.

Nah, I’m not even including this in my book. No one knows what I’m talking about here anyway and it’s just as well. Still, Copyright © Lawrence Roy Aiken, in case it matters.

The Series Finales of Seem

“Let be be the finale of seem/The only emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream.” It’s okay if you don’t get it. Its an elder English major thing.

Ever notice that series finales of all these once-celebrated TV shows rarely satisfy?

Granted, my first example was by no means celebrated, but it was almost funny—almost—when Star Trek: Enterprise, after its one decent season, got canceled and went out with a Clip Show from the Future episode in which people of the future, namely Riker and Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation, see what happened to the brave pre-Kirk-and-Spock explorers. 

In the course of this dull affair I barely remember 15 years later, one of the more beloved characters was killed, and for no apparent reason than to import gravitas into this clip-show finale. The death was cheap, everything about this episode looked cheap, and you could tell the cast couldn’t wait until this humiliation was over. At least Scott Bakula still found work after this sad ending to the series of spinoffs from Star Trek: Next Generation (itself a spinoff) beginning with Deep Space Nine in 1993. Glasses are raised for the less fortunate.

Then there was that show Lost, the one that made executive producer stars out of J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. For a while in the late ‘00s it had a dedicated cult following. That following did not survive the sloppily written finale. I wonder how many young people under age 18 remember it. I never saw it, so I’m grateful to have been spared the disappointment.

The most famous and recent disaster of a series finale was the one for the once mighty Game of Thrones. Given the opportunity for cosplay (costume + play), the fan base will survive, if only as a niche among sci-fi/fantasy media fandom, which is better than most get. Especially when the Great Big Supernatural Bad and his army is dispatched with one poke of a dagger by some little elfin thing and the much-beloved Mother of Dragons turns evil at the last minute because, as one bystander helpfully offers after all these seasons, it’s what her bloodline tends to do.

When the tweenage girl in Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep cried out, “I feel like I’m Daenerys Targaryen!” during a particularly non-heroic heroic escape from the Bad People she never seemed to be in any real danger from, I knew I was reading my last Stephen King novel. Knowing this Great Platinum Blonde Hope ended up murdering an entire village with one of her pet dragons at least makes it a little funny to think back on. Only a little, though.

Like most television shows I prefer to spend my time reading about them online than watching them. I’ll view the occasional clip, but that’s all. It’s not so much the overt pseudo-moralizing and mean-minded ideological agendas that stink up these things these days, though those are certainly a factor. It’s a matter of committing the time to a structure that involves so much talky/ broody/ gratuitous sexy-time sandwiched between moments of gross and visceral shock. 

The Walking Dead was a great example of this. I’m impressed it’s still around, years after the women on Twitter abandoned the “follow me back pls Norman Reedus” line in their handles. I can imagine the reaction when the series finale to that is announced. I can imagine no one being happy as it finally winds up.

Every now and then I learn of some great, “binge-worthy” series that I’ve never heard of before that is concluding after seven or eight seasons. I’ve heard a credible case for this last decade being something of a Golden Age of Television for all the stuff you can watch. And so much is so cleverly written, too! 

Thrill to the high school teacher’s descent into evil as he manufactures and sells methamphetamine to pay his medical bills! (After all these years Breaking Bad is still considered the gold standard for binge-watching a series. General consensus holds that it was consistently good from its bitter beginning to its bitter end.) Nod sadly and knowingly at the cartoon character with the horse’s head on a human body as we examine the effects of alcohol abuse on the people around him. That last one, Bojack Horseman, recently concluded on a blue note, but at least its fanbase seemed satisfied with the conclusion—although some thought it would have been better with the character dying as he did in the penultimate episode. (It turned out to be a dream, or something like that).

Supernatural, the only TV series I’ve been following consistently since Stargate Atlantis wrapped up years back, is concluding after 15 years on the air. I’m heartened to see the writers are doing their best to send Sam and Dean out with good stories; I had feared everything was going to fizzle as with Stargate S.G. 1, which was the longest running genre show at 10 seasons when it went out. The boys are up against God Himself this season. Talk about a Final Boss.

I can only hope the writers, cast, and crew manage to pull it off. When Supernatural is done, that’s it. That will be my series finale of contemporary series. That corner having been turned, like a lot of older people, I’ll go to YouTube and catch episodes of the old classic stuff from the 1960s, most of which were lucky to have lasted three or four seasons back in the day. 

I’m already doing that with the black-and-white first season of The Wild Wild West. It’s nice to have something to sit down and watch with my wife. In the meantime, I raise a most fittingly cooled cup of coffee to the turning of this corner. When there were only so many channels and only so much content, we all had that much more in common. But it’s been 40 years since an entire nation wanted to find out who shot J.R., and over half a century since electric guitar sales spiked because some band from England played them on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show.

It is what it was, and the beat goes on.

The August of Farewells

So many things came to an end in one month, one-half century ago.

It is impossible to overstate how much changed in global popular culture between 9 February 1964 when The Beatles first appeared on U.S. television and 22 August 1969, when that same band, looking like they’d aged ten years instead of five, posed for their last publicity photos. Styles of hair and dress that would have been unthinkable in the U.S. around the time of John F. Kennedy’s assassination had become commonplace, and would get even stranger in the succeeding decades.

I would later learn the band was indeed all together in one room the following month holding contentious meetings, from which John Lennon eventually walked away. The exact last day is unknown, only that it was sometime between 15-19 September. The story is here, but for my purposes, I’ll count The Very Last Day of The Beatles as 22 August.

You see it in their faces. They had just put their final album to bed two days before. Few people realized how utterly final Abbey Road was; Let It Be, the “new phase Beatles album” was the salvaging of an aborted project the winter before. When they had crossed the street for its iconic cover on the 8th, recording engineer Geoff Emerick noted that the chosen shot was of them walking away from EMI Studios. They were done.

The world’s first superstar rock band was finished in time for the leaves to start changing, before the new decade brought its numerous fads and fashions of music and dress, from earnest long-haired singer-songwriters to spangly dressed disco divas to spiky-haired punks. More than a mere “dream” was over. It was the end of a five and one-half year-long era that changed nearly everything.

No one seemed to know it at the time, though, not even The Beatles themselves. It’s poignant to note that no one thought to call it over until April 1970 when Paul answered in the negative to a question in a promotional interview for his solo album regarding whether he would consider working with John Lennon again. To be fair, by 22 August 1969, maybe only Ringo could imagine them all together in the studio again. 

It had been a long, intense ride since their days as teenagers taking the bus to wherever they needed to go in Liverpool. Now they were almost 30. It was ending sometime. It may not have ended well, but half a century down the road it’s apparent it ended when it had to.

The last photo of them all together, ever. I’ve noted this before, but it’s interesting that the two now long-deceased ones are the ones looking away at something else.

I smile to think that, as a teenager in the far more creatively and culturally diverse 1970s (thanks to the 1960s, mind you), my two biggest wishes were for The Beatles to get back together and for new episodes of a revived Star Trek. Thank God neither happened. These core bits of what would eventually become worn-out, chewed-over, flavorless franchises ended when they had to. And their endings marked the end of the beginning of whatever it was that’s led us here.

To mash things up a bit. I don’t know who made this, but my hat’s off and my glass is raised.

On what was either 26 August or the day after Labor, the last re-run of the original Star Trek was broadcast on U.S. network television. I haven’t been able to find precise listings for those specific months, but the last month of summer seems a fitting month to consider that all over. I wonder what famously cringe-inducing third season episode repeated that Tuesday night. The struggling sci-fi TV show that would eventually become a huge franchise over ten years later died with a whimpering of embarrassingly awful scripts and dinner theater budgeting amid a rapidly changing cultural landscape.

I note the passage of Star Trek on network TV primarily because it marked the ignoble end of an era of imaginative television that encompassed The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Wild, Wild West, Irwin Allen’s sci-fi shows, et al. Television might get more “sophisticated” in the 1970s with urban sitcoms and Norman Lear’s reworkings of BBC shows, but it would never have the sense of weird, wacky, good-natured fun one got from most television in the 1960s.

James Bama’s 1966 promotional art, featuring
a “pulp” aesthetic impossible to imagine for anything
in the 1970s, save for that movie that came out
in May 1977. Even that original Star Wars was one of a
kind in that regard, and, like Trek, it never replicated
that original excitement. Yes, “inb4 Empire Strikes Back,”
my favorite movie, but you can’t imagine what it was
like seeing that first one after so many dark and
depressing things between 1970 and 1977.

Star Trek is oft praised for its presumably rare optimism about the future, but it was far from the only television show expressing that. The Robinsons may have been Lost in Space, but they were having a good time. Admiral Nelson’s and Captain Crane’s Seaview dealt decisively with whatever rubber-suit strangeness it came against in their Voyage to the Bottom of Sea. Any darkness and back-stabbing intrigue were the work of foreign agents, but the good guys always triumphed. There was none of the cynicism you saw, say, exactly ten years later in the movie Alien. Captain Kirk may have directly disobeyed Starfleet on occasion, but only on very special occasions, because Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets were honorable organizations.

By August 1969, all that, too, had passed. Passing with it was an make-do/can-do aesthetic of filming television sci-fi that required the viewer to meet the set designers and effects people halfway. For all the remakes and rehashes and re-imaginings to come, this particular flavor of magic would never spark again.

It couldn’t. The very environment which had spawned it had changed. The world of August 1969 was markedly different from the world of August 1968, which in turn was markedly different from August 1966. You get the idea.

As with The Beatles one-half century later, it’s impossible to imagine new episodes of original Star Trek sallying on into 1970. Even as the show’s popularity exploded during the show’s syndication in the following decade, those original 79 episodes were all she wrote. There would be no more because there could be no more.

I’d have preferred the standard flyaway shot into the generic void from the original effects but I must admit this final shot made especially for the “Turnabout Intruder” remaster, in honor of the last original Star Trek episode, is nicer.

Somewhere in the middle of all that a thing called Woodstock happened. It was a music festival that the promoters lost all control over (and quite a bit of money) that marked the high-water mark of the hippie scene. The band lineup was a Who’s Who of those whose stars would rise with the next decade as well as those who would soon pass into memory.

Truth be told, there really isn’t much to say about Woodstock except that it was a music festival that marked the beginning of many music festivals to come, much better managed and far more tightly controlled. When Woodstock happened—and for maybe four or five more years, when disco would put that lie to rest—people believed that Music Can Change the World. Oh, the insane, blank-eyed naivete of it all!

The generation everyone loves to hate when they’re not hating on Millennials. Most of it’s well-earned, I’ll grant that.

Looking back, though, it’s easy to see how people came to feel that way. The new pop music, with its new sounds and arrangements, if it aggravated and terrified the oldsters so much, it had to be doing something right. And speaking as an old duffer who remembers those old duffers of the past—I’m here to tell all you New Traditionalists out there who want to revive the old architecture and mores of days gone by, people threw all that good old stuff to the wayside because no one gave them any reasons to hang onto it other than, “‘Cause I’m yer elder, and I done told you so! Now turn that dang noise off and git back to wuck!”

And then our wise elders sent our jobs overseas. The jobs they couldn’t send overseas, they depressed the wages on by bringing people into the U.S. to work. But they got a handle on controlling—and milking—large crowds for music festivals. So there’s that.

And the music, well, whatever you’re into, it’s something to just get you through your day, however that’s going.

Hendrix was one of those you wondered how he would have turned out had he lived. Jim Morrison and The Doors were clearly finished after L.A. Woman, but Hendrix might have made a career clear through the 1970s for his tremendous talent and willingness to explore.

This isn’t so much an exercise in nostalgia as it is noting that, for one narrow window of time within one numerical decade that happened to coincide with The Beatles’ U.S. television debut in 1964 and their dissolution in 1969, a lot came and went. Much was changed forever. Network television went from broadcasting in black-and-white to color, for one. For a fun exercise, consider all the popular television shows that came and went. Some of the best remembered ones, e.g., The Munsters, The Addams Family, Batman, barely lasted two seasons. There was the spy craze, the “camp” fad, all those sci-fi shows. The movies from that time frame are another thread altogether.

Few people seem to remember what a big deal it was for a man to wear his hair any longer than a buzzcut. “Izzat a man or a woman, I cain’t tell! Hyuck!” By 1970, a few brave souls were sporting locks over their ears. I still remember seeing grown men losing their composure at the sound of the most anodyne pop songs on the radio up until 1978.  But everyone else knew at the time these old men were just ridiculous. They were on their way out, thank God, and not a minute too soon.

There was actually a time when the music one listened to and how you wore your hair was a political statement, much like the U.S. flag decals in the curve of the lower left rear windshield that said at once, “I support the war in Vietnam because @#$% communists and you stupid longhair hippies, too.” The sides were squaring off, between the Establishment-worshiping squares and everyone else who was sick of being yelled at by blustering, authoritarian old fools with more skeletons in their closets than clothes.

I’m old enough to remember when wearing an American flag on the butt-pocket of your jeans was an invitation to fight you some PATE-tree-otic Amurricans who didn’t cotton to no disrespect to the ol’ Red, White, and Blue, no sir! Up until about 1974, but that’s just me. And, yes, these same people would be scandalized by the above image. Pornography! On one hand, I could see where they were coming from. On the other, what a sadly skewed sense of priorities. That’s why that attitude died out.

August 1969, as The Beatles wound up their last full-band recording sessions and posed for one last set of publicity shots, as the last of the Star Trek third season reruns broadcast on NBC, as The Who played the entirety of Tommy for their largest audience so far and Jimi Hendrix redefined the “Star Spangled Banner” for a generation defined by electric guitar... fifty years ago was the end of the beginning. 

If people keep coming back to all this, it’s because there hasn’t been a whole hell of a lot else as gobsmackingly original since. Most of your all-time greats of anything are one-offs, and these just happened to one-off all at once. 

It’s nobody’s fault, really. Just the way things happened. It is what it was.

The Never-Ending Twilight of the Living Dead Simpsons

The many men, so beautiful! 
And they all dead did lie: 
And a thousand thousand slimy things 
Lived on; and so did I.

—S. T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part IV, Stanza 3

I knew I’d written about this ambulatory rotting corpse of a show sometime ago, so I looked it up and discovered I’d made a post in October 2013. Here we are again, already another half-decade later, with an meme more apt than ever:

Homer’s expression is so apropos. From the Unprofessional Madman Facebook page.

Thirty-one, 32 seasons. Thirty-one, 32 years. Three decades and change. 

Five U.S. presidential administrations, starting early in the term of recently deceased George H.W. Bush.

Baby Maggie would be in her early 30s now. Bart and Lisa would be securely middle-aged. Homer would be dead, either of occupational cancer or obesity-driven heart failure.

Why, oh why? How can this possibly go on? Like NBC’s The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, it’s as if someone forgot to pull the plug on these vegetables long after the EEG flatlined into brain death.

It gets worse. Consider that one generation ago (generations generally measured in 30 year increments), this show began as an act of brazen defiance and mockery of the phony Cosby Show pieties of the 1980s. One generation later, the character who ran the Quik-E Mart is being phased out in craven deference to the even phonier pieties of the current age — despite the fact that the character, funny accent aside, has always been a man of laudable integrity. With their knees bent and heads bowed to the screeching purple-haired Creeps of the New Church, soul and spine were exhausted from this show decades ago already. 

The irony is just a little too ironic here. 

Still The Simpsons persists, a shambling, living-dead parody of the living satiric glory it once was. In the end, all anyone will remember this once ground-breaking show for is as that sometimes-funny cartoon that went on forever and ever and no one knows why.