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What happened to the sheer excitement of Appointment Television?
Before the cornucopia of streaming and on demand viewing, many of us GenX'rs recall having a constant date with television destiny. As children, we rushed through homework and dinner as the minutes seemed to wane towards that appointed episode, mini-series, or special movie presentation. Many families shuffled their schedules around those very presentations to ensure the entire family could behold the cinema wonder.
In the earlier times of television, quite a few of us dealt with either black and white television sets or the antenna. Some of us had a few more channels to choose from the radio frequency atmosphere while others, such as myself, had 3 to 4 aerial options. Heaven forbid that we'd be interrupted by the Emergency Broadcast System or the U.S. President wanted to inform the adults and, equally both bore and agitate, the children as they interrupted our television date.
While I cannot speak to any early time frame from the 1970s and further, the late 1970's saw the holiday specials and the television shows where the vehicles became part of the cast. Do you remember yearning to see what stunts the vehicle would perform or the holiday special to see if a new cartoon entered into a holiday skit?
Ah! Saturday morning cartoons were the utopia for children and the parents. While the children vied for their turn at the channel knobs and cereal, the parents were equally embracing the fact they could sleep in while the television babysat us. The enchantment and trance of comic strip characters coming to life or seeing puppets chatting amongst themselves or their human co-star seemed epic. Animals interacting with humans, vehicles chatting with other characters, the imagination was so thrust into creativity and adventure. Not to mention the chipper music that somehow was seared into our minds so that we now, forty-some years later, can still sing the tune to those happy days.
The specials that stick out to me were the Christmas specials and the occasional Wonderful World of Disney. Watching Charlie Brown's frail pine tree, Frosty saying "Happy Birthday," a quaint snowman telling the tale of Rudolph; these were a few of the endearing and wintry memories. Watching Disney's Halloween Treat in the mid-1980s:
Even the "must-shows" such as the Wizard of Oz that annually appeared and became a tradition to captivate the family while munching on popcorn or other snacks. The day of appointment television has disappeared yet it lives, fondly, in our memories.
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