It was in my formative years that the commonly grumbled phrase was “generation gap”. Even after all that violence and turbulence of the late 60s and early 1970s gave way to some resigned, inflammatory apathy, too many people beyond the threshold of middle age, respectful of youth or not, claimed some inability to relate to the popular culture of youth today. What was once an irreparable crevice though has undeniably become an ocean.
It’s probably no one’s fault. Parents interested in relating, or more likely forced to relate to the socioculture of their teens will effectively do so. I doubt however that someone unforced, like myself, will ever bear any type of connective lexicon with that of modern youth. While it doesn’t really concern me, I am sometimes led to wonder just what this means for the future of generational connectivity.
Invariably, there I’d be, a boy of ten or eleven, the lone and outstood child at high noon on a Sunday, in an apartment full of kibbutzing, arguing, eating, coffee drinking grownups, me seated hospitably one bedroom away, before the portable Trinitron TV throughout the visit, understandably unable to engage with the towering elders, those who roared with great fervor, argumentation, laughter, over subject matter no less than foreign to me.
TV back then was still, even in itself, a more collective medium. You didn’t watch what you wanted, you watched what was on. Multiple channels, digital services, platforms, or viewing devices did not exist in the spring of 1978. What’s more, that which was on the six-channel smorgasboard was limited to what television stations, independent ones in particular, deemed most cost-effective. If King World’s re-processed, re-packaged, re-edited (and to film purists, abomination of the) Hal Roach Our Gang series, re-dubbed The Little Rascals, proved a winner in key cities, then it was the reigning kid-vid Sunday staple for a good long time. It’s what was for breakfast.
Original syndicated programming on the commercial dial for formidable youth was not quite yet the cottage industry it would soon become. In the late 1970s, “live-action” programs, or shows featuring a host or talent of sorts was no longer a very common format, certainly not to the extent that it was in the prior decades. By this time, with cartoons and animation efforts largely targeted by interest groups over violent themes, the mainstay for the independents flickering on the cathode-ray tube on America’s day off was off-network re-runs and old, old movies.
The so-called staple that something like The Little Rascals became was a very strange kind of intimate belonging in one’s daily or Sunday life. It wasn’t something you tuned into with great anticipation because you haven’t yet seen it, like the next episode of some long-running decade-old digital TV series from some other platform that you haven’t seen all twelve seasons of yet. This was basically wallpaper. It was the equivalent of songs or music videos you know only too well, who does or sings what, and what happens when. The jokes really aren’t funny, but the visuals are more or less iconic. I don’t think any kid my age who’s eyes and TV dial gravitated towards it each Sunday would’ve been capable of explaining why he wanted to watch it, other than a cursory admission of “I always do..” It somehow wasn’t 11:30 on Sunday morning without a TV screen branding a grainy, sound-muffled, black-&-white image of a pom-pom capped Spanky and Pete The Dog, something produced for the big screen by Hal Roach for little folks forty years prior. This stuff composed that piously denounced image of “junk” us children grazed on, preferenced to homework, reading, or going out and getting some exercise. If anything though, for a kid too-intelligent like myself, those familiar, foolish flickers were just a common admonishing over a lack of better initiative. It wasn’t even the kind of offering you could ever rationalize as something you “just want to see the end of….” before getting to the book report. It almost kind of helped to bring closure to the awareness of television as a finite entity, a containable “box” one needn’t allow oneself to indulge in like a sack of sugary, nutritionless, and mostly stale donuts.
And all this is just what would render such as uncomfortable to a kid seated before it in some stranger’s home, where you’d rather not share your more intimate, embarrassing habits, akin to eating in your pajamas, or singing some ubiquitous commercial jingle aloud as a silly parody only you and your mom might get or appreciate.
And in spite of all your awkward alienation, you weren’t alone.
Invariably, I’d be sitting there, politely, that obligatory child in the room, trapped before the monochrome Alfafa, Buckwheat, Farina, Chubby and Jackie Cooper, in a way I would not be ordinarily, soon upon which some transient adult on the way back from the bathroom would look in on the boy in the bedroom with the TV as a brief respite from the dining room circus. Characteristically, the visitor was some tall, overweight gentleman of urban Depression-era descent, some walking revival of W.C. Fields in his own right. But well meant enough..
“Eh….is that Jackie Cooper…?? Ah, we used to see him at the movies all the time…….Ha..! There’s Spanky..! You know about Spanky…?”, the old coot would mutter, fixated suddenly on the screen, breaking into a grin……..”Eh, these people are all old now……..” He’d gaze for another moment before addressing the viewer. “Ya’ like these kids..?? We saw ‘em in the movies….” He’d chuckle wistfully and walk off. What just happened there…?
In spite of all my staunch, pre-adolescent iconoclasm, in a world where grownups just wouldn't understand kids, this unlikely figure of a time, an era and a sociology long prior, joined me in some abridged moment of common understanding. Perhaps no other circumstance could have furnished that.
It’s a bridge more impressive in that time than likely any chronological one constructible today. The common lexicon is somehow just less likely or less readily established. Those rotating dozen or so little crackly two-reelers were unmistakably just those, the originals. Not re-makes, re-boots, re-casted, or re-done. They were not one of a massive series of offshoots or spinoffs, with endless plot or premise changes. The little films each bore their own iconic immortality, like the runaway jalopy, or the kid tossing the cake out the window, landing on the blustery policeman’s head.
Making that connection with one’s elders over, say, feature films would already be a more involved and mature effort. Indeed, I spent plenty of afternoon TV matinee moments with some unknown WB classic flashing onto the screen mid-feature, my uncle muttering….”Jimmy Cagney…….Paul Muni..”, recognizing them aloud while channel surfing. For a ten-year old though, too boring.
So the next question is, in a world where families of young and old continue to gather on occasion, the impressionable youth left to their own devices whilst the adult folk gather to ostensibly convene as the grownups, is that very connective moment, opportunity, or the existence of it even sociologically possible..?
To put it in TV terms, first you’d need some kind of common ground. Are the kids watching anything “old” on TV anymore..? Anything you, the reader, a contemporary of mine perhaps would recall thriving on videologically at their age..?
Very possibly not. Again, it’s no one’s fault. Movements in the entertainment and personal-electronic “platform” industry have mandated the need for more constantly changing forms and styles of entertainment. There is no available time for some television series to “trend” nowadays, by way of exposure. No one cooks anymore. The smash hits of the 1970s and 80s became so as a result of failed launches, and the determination of network programmers to give the show a good, hard try. Now, it’s not about the show, its content or quality. It’s all about the pre-trending efforts and external on-line and social media hype. And in more ways than one, the hype takes precedence over the show.
Some years ago, my cousin’s teenage daughter, whom I got to spend a few moments in a room with after dinner at a family occasion was busy texting her friend some image of TV’s Gomez Addams, the great John Astin in some unmissable black-&-white frame from the The Addams Family. I thought that encouraging, at first. The photo though had Gomez with some superimposed red hat of some sort on his head. I had no idea what it was about, but it was obviously some short-lived on-line gag. Unaffected by that addendum, I offered “Hey, you remember The Addams Family..?? That was a great show….I used to watch it….”
“What….?”, the girl looked up, quite obviously puzzled by my reference, no clue as to who the fellow in the trending photo was….
“He’s an old actor…..”, I dismissed.
The common absence of such immediate lexicon from one generation to the next may not seem relevant or important in a world too absorbed with greater strife. But the question begged here remains, is there indeed the threat of a generation gap even greater than the one lamented more than fifty years ago, one that deems threat in different ways, one even more alienating and divisive between populations each more intelligent than ever before...? It seems that before even more serious points of history can be understood in relation to today’s or future worlds, the first hand understandings of those having lived those events need in some way to convey that understanding to those of today’s generation, never having known the past in it’s very context. It’s about the dangers, the violence, the misanthropy of today’s world. And it’s not about an absence of Spanky, Buckwheat and Alfafa.
Come to think of it, just as powerfully memorable to the likes of myself from the time of my irreverent-humored youth is the once trend-heavy explosion of comic Eddie Murphy, and the hilarity he so brilliantly mined from that ancient, anything-but-politically-acceptable 1930’s image of little Buckwheat. Murphy was clearly firing a comic bazooka at the outrageous creation of such figure. It was an irreverent, well-defined attitude and attack we all, of every race, appreciated and seemed to share. And that effort seemed by contrast to outscore the fearful, witch-hunting instincts of today’s so-called, thought-eschewing “cancel culture”, one in which clearly no expressed thought as such would be permissible by anyone’s admission. Except on social media, the most vocal platform possible, where the ugliest mental synapses rage without apology. Or in probably any case, not even a shred of humor.
And is that in fact the frustrated connective ground to which our modern-day culture is reduced..? The war on alienation can only be fought and better resolved with a connectivity, a communication, and in some ways perhaps a level of self-admission that needs to be taught, and learned. And shared. Enough of a little more of that, and dare I say there’s every chance that that’s one less automatic weapon picked up and handled by a civilian hand younger than twenty-five.
Noah F.
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