Hillbillies Revisited...
I kept looking at the picture of Buddy Ebsen as Uncle Jed posted yesterday and I thought....wow what a great show, I wish we had something like that now. Younger readers will think, "yeah, right Dude, people back in the early 60's must have been real rubes to have watched that hick show"! Simple people in simple times who would lap up anything and call it entertainment.
Not so! During the first years that TBH's was on the air we had some of the most difficult events to handle that the 20th century offered. We had a President assasinated and we thought anarchy might reign, the democratic system could collapse. We were within a cat's whisker of a real nuclear war with the Russkies over Cuba, we know only now just how close. When TBH's had been on a few years, we started losing hundreds of young men every month in Vietnam, escalating to 1000's. These were serious and tough times.
And this is the reason that The Beverly Hillbillies was so immensely popular across a wide spectum. Why? Because it was funny and it was really stupid. And.....we laughed and we knew it was really stupid. It was supposed to be stupid and we needed and appreciated stupid. Compare this to the immensely popular show genres of today, the "reality shows". The Discovery Channel has probably five shows based on the "Trading Places" premise: turn a perfectly good room into something belonging in a cheap trailer park. The major networks each seem to have several shows based on "The Bachelor" premise: get people without a real life themselves to believe that two people can actually meet in a staged competition, get married and live happily ever after.
Like The Beverly Hillbillies these shows provide some form of entertainment and are really stupid, but the difference now is that a large sgement of the population doesn't seem to know that they're stupid. So as I set down by the cement pond with a mess of hog jowls and use my 5th grade education to do some 'cypherin', I conclude that I miss shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and that 20 years from now young people will look at Trading Places reruns and think, "What a bunch of pathetic losers people were in 2003.....didn't they have lives of their own, the rubes".
I kept looking at the picture of Buddy Ebsen as Uncle Jed posted yesterday and I thought....wow what a great show, I wish we had something like that now. Younger readers will think, "yeah, right Dude, people back in the early 60's must have been real rubes to have watched that hick show"! Simple people in simple times who would lap up anything and call it entertainment.
Not so! During the first years that TBH's was on the air we had some of the most difficult events to handle that the 20th century offered. We had a President assasinated and we thought anarchy might reign, the democratic system could collapse. We were within a cat's whisker of a real nuclear war with the Russkies over Cuba, we know only now just how close. When TBH's had been on a few years, we started losing hundreds of young men every month in Vietnam, escalating to 1000's. These were serious and tough times.
And this is the reason that The Beverly Hillbillies was so immensely popular across a wide spectum. Why? Because it was funny and it was really stupid. And.....we laughed and we knew it was really stupid. It was supposed to be stupid and we needed and appreciated stupid. Compare this to the immensely popular show genres of today, the "reality shows". The Discovery Channel has probably five shows based on the "Trading Places" premise: turn a perfectly good room into something belonging in a cheap trailer park. The major networks each seem to have several shows based on "The Bachelor" premise: get people without a real life themselves to believe that two people can actually meet in a staged competition, get married and live happily ever after.
Like The Beverly Hillbillies these shows provide some form of entertainment and are really stupid, but the difference now is that a large sgement of the population doesn't seem to know that they're stupid. So as I set down by the cement pond with a mess of hog jowls and use my 5th grade education to do some 'cypherin', I conclude that I miss shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and that 20 years from now young people will look at Trading Places reruns and think, "What a bunch of pathetic losers people were in 2003.....didn't they have lives of their own, the rubes".
