How was life for kids in the early days of Cable?

[Cure DragonEagle 255]

I love hearing the Other Jason talk so much I did this special thread just for him. How was life when CABLE was in its infancy, no Nickelodeon, No Cartoon Network AND MOST CERTAINLY no Disney Channel. How was tv for kids back then?

[The Other Jason]

Hi CureDragonEagle,

How was life when CABLE was in its infancy, no Nickelodeon, No Cartoon Network AND MOST CERTAINLY no Disney Channel. How was tv for kids back then?

I don't remember a whole lot of TV specifics from our first house with cable, as I was still pretty young. It was actually my grandmother's place. She moved, then we took over and inherited her cable subscription. She probably had it from about 1976 or 1977. I don't know that my folks would have gotten it hooked up on their own. As the years went on, I recall having friends over to watch things on our TV. We'd watch programs from other towns that they couldn't get. That was in the days before cable exclusivity shut out other markets, so we got a couple PBS channels and all the stations from the three largest towns in our area. That's how I was able to see Battle from three different sources (although two usually overlapped). I watched other shows from multiple markets like that too.

"What else?" you're probably asking... Well, I especially loved Warner Bros. and Walter Lantz cartoons. I watched Ricochet Rabbit (which always started right before I had to leave for school, so I rarely got to see the whole half hour), and Tennessee Tuxedo. Tom & Jerry for the most part, but I was averse to what I later found out were the Gene Dietch and Chuck Jones-directed ones (except "Dickie Moe," I liked that one for some reason). Plus I kept up with all the other shows I mentioned in the first thread.

I watched Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, The Ernie Kovacs Show, Monty Python's Flying Circus and Benny Hill on PBS (I don't remember if those were all on the same PBS channel though). One of them used to show Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers chapter plays every weekend late at night - those were great! Insert every silly sitcom re-run you can think of too. All the staples. Plus other kid's shows like Captain Kangaroo.

I loved comic books, so I caught all the superhero shows I could. Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Dr. Strange and on and on. I loved them so much, I co-wrote a book about them (WARNING! Plug: Age of TV Heroes). I liked sci-fi, but there wasn't a lot of that on TV when I was young - before Star Wars, anyhow. After that I remember watching Logan's Run and Battlestar Galactica.

I liked game shows too, especially the Tic-Tac-Dough/The Joker's Wild hour in the evenings. I also used to watch Liar's Club after getting home from school. That one, mainly because one of my relatives was frequently on it and it was cool to see him.

We had a box with a connected cable running to our TV that acted as the channel selector. It had a switch on its upper surface to swap from the top row of channels to the bottom. When you pushed the button on the channel you wanted to watch, it popped up the button from the previous selection with a loud "Kachunk!" It was nice since it was pretty much an early remote control. I don't think there was a volume control on it though. I could be wrong. The other thing that was nice, was in bad weather, our TV was usually okay, where other friends' sets lost reception.

I only remember one premium or specialty channel from that time. The same grandmother I mentioned above got cable at her new place and subscribed to HBO. This was probably 1979 or so. I saw early comedy specials and sports events. Plus movies repeated all day long. Really. Their early schedule usually had only two films, which were on back-to-back all day long. One year when I went to visit (after our family moved out of the area), the two films were Alien and American Gigolo. I probably watched Alien four times that day, taking roughly two-hour breaks when the other film was on. I'd read about Alien in Starlog and maybe Fangoria, and was glad to finally see it. She also received a separate little guide from HBO with their schedule each month, and I loved reading through those.

When we got to our second place and subscribed to cable, some of the specialty channels had started to creep in. We had Nickelodeon and I enjoyed watching shows on there like Pinwheel (with a little stop-motion dog named Dougal), You Can't Do That on Television, Mr. Wizard's World and lots of others. All gloriously without commercials. I know you said "no Nickelodeon," but we had it pretty early and it was a favorite of mine. Our cable company didn't carry MTV right away, so I didn't get to see that start up unfortunately.

Heh, this just seems like a list of TV programs and not a lot of memories, but hopefully it's of interest.

What about you? You're in another nation, what was your cable TV experience like?

[Cure DragonEagle 255]

I was a cliche and boring cable kid, Nick, CN the usual. But what does make things interesting is that we South American kids had this unique to Argentina channel that also broadcast in Paraguay: Magic Kids, no G Force but it had most of the anime that put Toonami on the map.

Also massive thank you, your post was exactly what I was looking for its awesome.