Autopilot

The big screen has been consumed with comic book series and remakes of older movies – somtimes (Batman, Spiderman) movies that aren’t even all that terribly old.

And now – the small screen?

Roseanne, Will and Grace and Curb Your Enthusiasm are coming back.

Wheeeeee.

Never really cared for any of ’em.  I mean, sure, Curb was funny, but in the same way the UK version of The Office was funny; the long slow buildup of hatred for Larry David was hilarious, but wore thin, fast…

No word on  Firefly or Freaks and Geeks. Both of which I finally binge-watched in the past eighteen months or so, and can finally see what all the fuss was about.  Although one minor beef with Freaks and Geeks, which was set in more or less my senior year of high school, making it all the more cringe-worthy; while the final episode was at least in concept believable (I’m tiptoeing around spoiling things, here), did Judd Apatow really thing the Grateful Dead were relevant to high school seniors in 1980?

10 thoughts on “Autopilot

  1. did Judd Apatow really thing the Grateful Dead were relevant to high school seniors in 1980?

    Granted, I went to a snooty private school and not public school, but there were a sizeable crowd of kids in my class (1988) who were Deadheads (and fans other alt/progressive rock groups). 1 of them took a semester off from college to follow the hippie pack that trailed the tour, and another waited for a full year before he started college to follow the tour. A lot of my classmates preferred Cities 97 to KQRS/KDWB/WLOL, and those who remained in the cities were probably extremely disappointed when ClearChannel assimilated that station.

  2. did Judd Apatow really thing the Grateful Dead were relevant to high school seniors in 1980?

    Oh come on, you mean you weren’t playing “Alabama Getaway” every day back then? Can’t speak for everyone, but I’m Class of ’81. At my high school, the kids who weren’t paying attention to music got a steady diet of “Funkytown” and the deep thoughts of Joey Scarbury. Among the kids who were paying attention, the debates raged between “new wave” (e.g., the Clash, Talking Heads) or prog-rock (IIRC, Rush was having their heyday).

    I also remember ’81 being a pretty crappy year for music, especially after some of the glories of 1980, much of which you’ve documented here. Things got better in ’82.

  3. Oh come on, you mean you weren’t playing “Alabama Getaway” every day back then?

    No, Quelle Surprise.

    Gotta say that the scene with LIndsey Weir (Linda Cardellini) dancing to “Box of Rain” in the final episode of Freaks and Geeks prompted me to give the song a second listen. Whereby I determined that the attraction was entirely Linda Cardellini.

  4. FYI, Both of my brothers, who graduated in 77 and 80 in southern MN, were and are still Deadheads. Their friends were too. The older of the two spent some time chasing them around, as deadheads are wont to do, around 81.

    The ‘Dead never really took for me, although I like Workingman’s Dead quite a bit. But it’s also the most normal of their albums and pretty much 100% bluegrass which I do like sometimes.

  5. Class of ’76, and we were all living on reds, vitamin C and cocaine.

    Well, more like Boone’s Farm and Lynnry Skynnrd down in that part of Missouri, but we’d heard of those other things.

  6. I want to see a reboot of “All in the Family”, with a former-hippie Archie and his millennial kids – the libertarian and the socialist.

    Which also sounds like a reboot of “Family Ties”, come to think of it…

  7. I want to see a reboot of “All in the Family”, with a former-hippie Archie and his millennial kids – the libertarian and the socialist.

    Do you mean the Neo-Nazi and the Antifa blackshirt, the children of the former hippie?

  8. Nah, Swiftee, a remake of The Prisoner today wouldn’t be any fun. He’d be captured instantly with RFID monitoring, unable to anything against facial recognition monitors, etc. Besides, it’d be little more than a documentary about how it is to work at Google as a conservative.

    I watch so little TV that, while I’ve seen a few episodes of the series that Mitch mentions, none of them excited me then, and the prospect of them coming back doesn’t even warrant a yawn now. Now, a revival of The Twilight Zone with a little budget and some good writers would be interesting, but that’ll never fly. Today’s Hollywood supports the dystopian state and culture we have now, and a series that promoted the individual and questioned the state would never get made.

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