Isn’t it an awful thing, to have the scales fall from your rose-colored glasses? Especially when those glasses were pointed directly at your own childhood.
During a lull in an otherwise eventful trip to Williamsburg a few weeks ago, I had two consecutive unpleasant awakenings courtesy of cable TV. Now, to set the record straight, I do not have cable TV. There is no earthly reason for me to spend thirty dollars per month in order to receive seventy channels of utter garbage, particularly since they make you pay extra for the never-very-exciting pornography. When in Rome, however, I firmly believe in doing as the Romans, or in this case, the other tipsy William and Mary alumni. Resting up in my motel room (delightfully “retro” only because the place hasn’t redecorated since 1957), I flipped on the TV.
Wow! A Scooby Doo marathon! Life just doesn’t get better. Poised in faded letter sweater and jeans, beer in hand, I prepared for a trip (with training wheels) down Memory Lane.
Memory Lane is evidently one of those roads that shows on the map looking something like the Skyline Drive, but is in reality more like the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Scooby Doo is patently awful. Obviously, my five-year old brain hadn’t been able to recognize that, but somehow you’d think that if it had really been that awful, I’d have figured it out somewhere along the line. Nope. It stinks. Mind you, it’s light years better than the computer-generated schlock you see any given Saturday in 2002, but it still stinks. It’s not particularly sophisticated from an artistic standpoint; it’s far too dated linguistically and the jokes fall flatter than a soufflé in a tornado. Here I’ve been using this program as a point of reference for years, the shining example of how good Saturday morning cartoons used to be, and it’s… well, bad. I tried to convince myself that the constant ending — the tag line of every episode — was meant to be a joke, but I’ve resigned myself to the likelihood that it was an easy cop-out that kids wouldn’t notice. And they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling thirtysomethings.
My television apocalypse was not yet complete. Giving up on the banality of Hanna-Barbera’s charms, I flipped over to a station that was showing a collection of Halloween skits from several years’ worth of Saturday Night Live. Good, I thought. They’re bound to have some of the Old Ones, from the Time When SNL Didn’t Suck.
Wrong again, old boy. What is it about these shows? With Scooby, of course, it’s the fact that we were five when we watched it. It was good then, and our minds never processed the fact that it wasn’t that great, because by the time we were old enough to realize it the program was long gone. Poor Saturday Night Live, though… long past its prime, it stumbles on blindly, and badly. What was its prime, though, really? Sitting through those Halloween skits, I began to wonder if the Scooby paradigm didn’t apply to SNL as well. Did I just think SNL was hilarious when I was sixteen, because it seemed so sophisticated at the time? Was it, in fact, always a string of sophomoric jokes that I only remember as witty?
The old saw that you can never go home is true. I know this, because I tried returning to my hometown only to find a city that I didn’t really want to call home anymore. (I stayed, though.) Some memories, even those as trivial as television shows, are perhaps best left memories. Let the mind’s eye alone see the roses and you’ll never have to discover that they’re paper.
Happy Fun Ball is still bloody hilarious, though.
During a lull in an otherwise eventful trip to Williamsburg a few weeks ago, I had two consecutive unpleasant awakenings courtesy of cable TV. Now, to set the record straight, I do not have cable TV. There is no earthly reason for me to spend thirty dollars per month in order to receive seventy channels of utter garbage, particularly since they make you pay extra for the never-very-exciting pornography. When in Rome, however, I firmly believe in doing as the Romans, or in this case, the other tipsy William and Mary alumni. Resting up in my motel room (delightfully “retro” only because the place hasn’t redecorated since 1957), I flipped on the TV.
Wow! A Scooby Doo marathon! Life just doesn’t get better. Poised in faded letter sweater and jeans, beer in hand, I prepared for a trip (with training wheels) down Memory Lane.
Memory Lane is evidently one of those roads that shows on the map looking something like the Skyline Drive, but is in reality more like the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Scooby Doo is patently awful. Obviously, my five-year old brain hadn’t been able to recognize that, but somehow you’d think that if it had really been that awful, I’d have figured it out somewhere along the line. Nope. It stinks. Mind you, it’s light years better than the computer-generated schlock you see any given Saturday in 2002, but it still stinks. It’s not particularly sophisticated from an artistic standpoint; it’s far too dated linguistically and the jokes fall flatter than a soufflé in a tornado. Here I’ve been using this program as a point of reference for years, the shining example of how good Saturday morning cartoons used to be, and it’s… well, bad. I tried to convince myself that the constant ending — the tag line of every episode — was meant to be a joke, but I’ve resigned myself to the likelihood that it was an easy cop-out that kids wouldn’t notice. And they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling thirtysomethings.
My television apocalypse was not yet complete. Giving up on the banality of Hanna-Barbera’s charms, I flipped over to a station that was showing a collection of Halloween skits from several years’ worth of Saturday Night Live. Good, I thought. They’re bound to have some of the Old Ones, from the Time When SNL Didn’t Suck.
Wrong again, old boy. What is it about these shows? With Scooby, of course, it’s the fact that we were five when we watched it. It was good then, and our minds never processed the fact that it wasn’t that great, because by the time we were old enough to realize it the program was long gone. Poor Saturday Night Live, though… long past its prime, it stumbles on blindly, and badly. What was its prime, though, really? Sitting through those Halloween skits, I began to wonder if the Scooby paradigm didn’t apply to SNL as well. Did I just think SNL was hilarious when I was sixteen, because it seemed so sophisticated at the time? Was it, in fact, always a string of sophomoric jokes that I only remember as witty?
The old saw that you can never go home is true. I know this, because I tried returning to my hometown only to find a city that I didn’t really want to call home anymore. (I stayed, though.) Some memories, even those as trivial as television shows, are perhaps best left memories. Let the mind’s eye alone see the roses and you’ll never have to discover that they’re paper.
Happy Fun Ball is still bloody hilarious, though.
posted by Daniel | 4:22 PM
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