Why Men Can't Cry Out Loud!

Remember Gilligan’s Island? What a great show! That show was an intrinsic part of my childhood. I even first heard about the death of Elvis when they scrolled the news across the bottom of the screen during an episode. I watched it every day after school. My favorite episodes were;
1. The one where they did a musical version of Hamlet for the Hollywood producer, Harold H. Hecuba.
2. The one where the hunter comes to the island to hunt Gilligan.
3. The one with the rock group the Mosquitoes
4. The one with the Russian Cosmonauts
5. The one where Thurston and Lovey find out they’re broke (it wasn’t true; it was really Thurston Powell who was broke!)
As a kid, I never wondered why they couldn’t get off the island. I never wondered why the professor could make anything except a raft. Or how their clothes always looked clean and fresh, (Gilligan had a white hat, for crying out loud!). Or in a related point, how Thurston and Lovey and Ginger had plenty of extra clothes for a 3 hour tour. Or how Mary Ann was making all of those perfect pie crusts for Gilligan. When you think about it, the castaways make people on shows like Survivor look like chumps. They can’t even make fire, and the castaways had an entire village of really nice huts with hammocks and doors and everything!
After school we had; Gilligan’s Island, The Jefferson’s, Welcome Back Kotter, the Munster’s, Andy Griffith, Gomer Pyle, Leave It To Beaver, Good Times & the Brady Bunch (and on Sunday morning, we had The Three Stooges before church!). I can remember getting home from school at 3:00 and turning on the TV (which by the way was the size of a microwave!) No remote! 4 channels! 2, 4, 5 & 8. 8 was the PBS channel so if that was on you were watching Sesame Street, the Electric Company and Zoom. No VCR’s or DVD players, no cable, no movie channels. With no remote, you pretty much left it on one channel and watched everything including the commercials (that’s how you found out about the Evel Knievel stunt bike action figure!). These days I don’t think I watch anything without my finger on the DVR’s fast-forward button! I just did a quick search and found that I can watch episodes of pretty much any show I want right now! My wife and I laugh about how you had to wait all year as a kid to see A Charlie Brown Christmas. Now my daughter can watch it in July if she wants to.
That was the good old days! I wonder what shows my daughter will remember, probably Hannah Montana. Oh well. At least she’s hip to Andy Griffith!