dual personalities

Last night, after scrolling through Amazon Prime in a fruitless attempt to find something to watch, I discovered the early 1960s TV show My Favorite Martian, starring Ray Walston as the titular Martian and Bill Bixby as his terrestrial host.

I watched a couple of episodes and was not disappointed — it was pretty entertaining in a 1963 sort of way, and it had reasonably good special effects. You can read all about the show here. My Favorite Martian got me thinking about what else I watched as a child. Most of my very early TV watching consisted of reruns like Father Knows Best (1954-1960) and the Donna Reed Show (1958-1966) that I watched during the day while my siblings were at school, and Leave it to Beaver reruns (1957-1963) after they got home.

Years later and still watching reruns, my dual personality and I yucked it up over F-Troop (1965-67),

a very silly sitcom that would never get made today. After all, they named the local Indian tribe the Hekawi because, “Tribe travel west, over country and mountains and wild streams, then come big day… tribe fall over cliff, that when Hekawi get name. Medicine man say to my ancestor, “I think we lost. Where the heck are we?” — how culturally insensitive is that?

I also went through a long phase of watching Hogan’s Heroes reruns (1965-71) every afternoon with my best friend. The show was on just before dinner, and it used to drive my DP crazy when I would run home just in time to eat but too late to set the table.

Hogan’s Heroes was charming and funny and we thought Richard Dawson, the wise-cracking British prisoner, was very cool. Back in those days it was okay to make fun of your enemies. In fact, some people probably thought it was wrong to make light of WWII or make the Nazis look like buffoons instead of unmitigated evil. They had a point.

As if to make up for the comic version of WWII, we watched Combat! (1962-67) starring Vic Morrow and Rick Jason. My brother was a big fan of the show, so naturally his two little sisters wanted to watch. We were even recruited to play army with him.

Sal Mineo as special guest victim with Vic Morrow in Combat!

Years and years later, after I graduated from college, when I worked at the library of our flyover university, reruns aired at 10pm every night. I’d get off work, grab a snack, and watch. My DP and her OM would watch at their house, too. Pretty soon we started a betting pool to guess how Vic Morrow would suffer in each episode: a wound to the shoulder, the leg, the head; temporary blindness; madness, or memory loss. We also played spot the ‘special guest victim’ – everyone from Sal Mineo to Telly Savalas appeared on the show (see the full list on Wikipedia).

I’ve left out too many shows to list, but you get the idea. Many of them are available to watch on Amazon or Youtube, and while I am not suggesting that you try to recapture your youth by watching them, it is fun to look back. Imagine that! At the very least you’ll chuckle over hair styles, clothes, and terrible laugh tracks. What TV shows did you enjoy as a child?