Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Pieces of my childhood, chronicled in Wikipedia

In what may be a record for links in one post...

PBS stations introduced me to Doctor Who, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Omega Factor. (It also brought Americans Monty Python's Flying Circus, which I was a bit young for, and Benny Hill, which I was way too young for). But the fledgling network Nickelodeon brought us The Tomorrow People. It hits some nostalgic happy place inside me to know that 1) many of these are being released on DVD and 2) the Internet's best encyclopaedia has entries lovingly crafted by those for whom these shows mattered.

Come to think of it, these shows also probably helped ignite my Anglophilia, and even my somewhat pretentious spellings--I remember first reading the word 'programme' and realising that there were regional differences. And well, you see the results. :) (Although I'm really just a throwback pre-Dewey and Bernard Shaw. I like the old spellings. So sometimes I just stick with antiquated spellings for no other reason than, like HP Lovecraft, I just like them.

I remember looking forward to the Tomorrow People after school. I'd always been fascinated by psychic and paranormal phenomena (my favourite childhood show was In Search Of...; I liked Project Blue Book; I even had a Bermuda Triangle board game)--long before the X-Files made that stuff cool.

I did, however, miss two American classics along the way--Kolchak, the Night Stalker and Dark Shadows. I was born in 1967, so I should have been old enough to watch the first, but I somehow missed them both. Fortunately I've been exposed to them by friends who did see them, along with the series Ultraman, which started this whole trip down memory lane. :)

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