Déjà vu

The first Baby Boomer nostalgia boom occurred in the Eighties when, if you had cable, you could find The Addams Family, The Munsters, Donna Reed and My Three Sons, among many others, during primetime – not at hours when only shut-ins and truancy cases might be watching. I ran our VCR ragged taping The Outer Limits and weird shit like Camp Runamuck and Lancelot Link.

The second boom is happening now. We have several new channels dedicated to old shows, a virtual senior center airing mostly programs I don’t care about: hours and hours of black and white Westerns, and seemingly every dopey fantasy sitcom from the sixties. But if you watch the schedules closely, the occasional gem – more weird shit – surfaces.

Like Mack and Myer For Hire, a bargain-basement Abbott and Costello. Pistols and Petticoats, a cross between The Munsters, F Troop, The Wild Bunch and an NRA promotional film. The Lucy Show, where the only male the man-hungry widows Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance ever seem to encounter is the fussy Gale Gordon.

Also on view are shows dating to the Paleolithic Age of television that offer subtexts I didn’t get when I was a kid. Like My Little Margie, with daughter Margie left to protect her 49-year old widowed father from preying women. “After all, he still looks good in his tennis shorts,” muses Margie, as the show takes a weird turn. Or Topper, where the ghostly couple George and Marion Kirby are not only dead and childless, but dedicated lushes.

GET-TV has been running old variety shows, those singing, dancing and comedy shows that hit the wall hard at some point in the seventies and never got up. Reruns of the Judy Garland Show are a reminder that at one time an army of energetic young men made a living leaping about in these shows, mimicking (and mincing) to song lyrics and always smiling. The heyday of male variety show dancers is long gone.

I’m also reminded of how the older Judy Garland scared me. Big head, spindly body, like Dorothy Gale in a funhouse mirror. Her shaky singing, like she was going to burst into tears at any minute. Plus, I knew, because I read The Daily News and WNEW-AM was always on in the kitchen, that she kept overdosing or trying to cut her wrists. Scary adult stuff.

Then there was a rerun of The Merv Griffin Show, with Xavier Cugat and Charo. The unctuous Griffin leans in close to Cugat (whom he calls “Coogie”), who explains there’s nothing wrong with a 66-year old (like Coogie) marrying a 21-year old (like Charo). This was another weird adult thing. I was 12, had some idea about sex and couldn’t get my head around the idea of Coogie and Charo in bed. Same with Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra, and Hayley Mills and that old British fart she married. My parents were born 12 years apart and I could accept that, but the rest confused me to no end.

Thank God Arthur Treacher, the ancient, chain-smoking Sphinx sitting at the end of Merv’s couch, didn’t marry some 20 year old.