Mr Jack Webb took some time from his busy schedule to film this brief Public Service Announcement, informing tv viewers about their Medicare benefits.
I was so moved by this PSA that I ran down to my local Social Security office immediately to sign up for my benefits, and told them Mr Webb had sent me, advising that I should go down before my 65th birthday to do all the paperwork.
The woman kindly informed me that there is no need to sign up 25 years before my 65th birthday, and to come back in 24 years, 10 months or so. I vowed to do just that! Then the nice security folks escorted me out of the building!
Volumes 1 and 2 of “Sesame Street: Old School” come with a warning stating the first episodes of the beloved U.S. series may not be appropriate for children.
“These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child,” the statement said.
The long-running series began in 1969.
Asked by The New York Times why the warning was necessary, Carol-Lynn Parente, the show’s executive producer, mentioned one installment that depicted Cookie Monster chewing on, then eating a pipe during the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.”
“That modeled the wrong behavior, so we reshot those scenes without the pipe and then we dropped the parody altogether,” Parente told the Times.
She noted that Oscar the Grouch’s extreme grouchiness in early episodes doesn’t set a great example, either.
“We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” Parente said.
Back in the days when TV was a lot more entertaining, long promos for the series were sent out as part of the syndication packages so that the local tv station could drum up interest for the series. This one for the 1960s incarnation of Dragnet is a classic, and includes part of the famous “What is a cop” speech from season one!
My dad grew up during the Great Depression, and while kids in his generation were generally poor, that’s not to say they didn’t have great imaginations and managed to have fun! Whether it was old time radio, the pulps, or movie serials, escapist fun helped distract kids of all ages from the problems that faced our great nation!
One of the great past times of that era was comic books. Indeed, the period from the late 1930s through the 1940s is affectionately considered the Golden Age of Comics. And in many ways, gold was spun with the adventures of Superman, Batman, The Green Lantern, Captain America, The Human Torch, The Sub Mariner, and more!
To be fair, much of the comic output of this era isn’t very good. While the characters were larger than life, and planted seeds that would grow into full bloom decades later, the stories were simple and the art was often crude. Genuine wit was scarce.
There was one notable exception.
CC Beck’s Captain Marvel is my personal favorite Golden Age comic character. Everything about the character and his different comic titles holds up well even in the 21st Century. The art is crisp, the characters and situations are smart and funny, and the whole approach was memorable.
Television’s house of ideas, Glen A Larson, has created so many great, enduring television shows that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. But one show stands tall even among that tough field. BJ & The Bear
You could count on Mr. Larson to consistently rip off the flavor of the month. For example, when Star Wars became a monster hit in theaters, he followed with Battlestar Galactica on tv. So when audiences responded favorably to the 1977 big screen action/comedy Smokey & The Bandit, Larson took some elements from the film and quickly created his own show.
So in the tv version, we have a rascally truck driver (BJ, rather than ‘Bandit’) and his pet chimp named ‘Bear’ (instead of a pet orangutan as in Smokey) relentlessly pursued by Sheriff Lobo (rather than Sheriff Justice). The basic dynamic from Smokey & The Bandit was intact, though the tv version would have none of the star power of the film - no Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason, nor Sally Field.
A pilot movie was broadcast by NBC in 1978, and it proved popular enough for the network to green light a series. BJ & The Bear lasted three seasons on NBC, for an impressive 48 episodes. It even launched a spinoff based around Claude Akins’s character, Sheriff Lobo.
Each episode usually involved BJ and Bear discovering some criminal or immoral activity, and usually a pretty woman in some sort of distress. BJ would then bend the rules a bit to solve the problem, usually with some action and comedy to please fans of all ages.
In a later season, BJ started his own trucking company out of Los Angeles, and he hired 7 beautiful lady truckers - Samantha, Cindy, Angie, Callie, twins Geri & Teri, and my personal favorite Stacks, as portrayed by the lovely Judy Landers. They would find adventures together. Sometimes Andre the Giant would show up and hang out with them, too.
In other words, this is clearly one of the greatest tv shows of all time.
So sit back and enjoy the opening credits & theme song to one of the great television concepts of all time, BJ & The Bear.
While some folks may be so cynical as to decry the credibility of the basic concept of the show, I have always maintained that the most incredible thing in the show opening is not that an adult male trucker’s best friend is a chimpanzee, but rather that somewhere out on the highways of America there is at least one young, foxy lady truck driver.
The next season introduced seven more young, foxy lady truckers, propelling the show into science fiction.
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