You Are What You Were. Celebrate Retro Pop Culture At Retroland.
Despite the curious mid-word contraction, Diff’rent Strokes certainly made its mark in sitcom history, appealing to a wide audience during its original run in the late 70s-early 80s and during syndication later on. Thanks to a cherubic young star, and aided by an incredibly catchy theme song, the series was immensely popular and still resonates in pop culture today.
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With the enormous success of MTV in the early 80s, it was only a matter of time before Saturday morning programming took advantage of the power of music video and worked it into a live action/animation hybrid. They called their creation Kidd Video.
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Oh, boy. Nobody can resist a time-travel story, especially when the sci-fi aspect is toned down in favor of drama. Quantum Leap, which debuted in 1989 on NBC, put a unique twist on time-travel, having the main character, Dr. Sam Beckett, actually inhabit the bodies of various people living in the past. That included women, kids and, in one memorable episode, a chimp. Thanks to compelling plots and a wonderful chemistry between Sam and his sidekick, Al, Quantum Leap won the hearts of many a TV viewer.
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It is often said that two is better than one. And for a young girl named Nicole Bradford, the old adage would be put to the test. With the untimely death of her mother, she learned that mom had been splitting her romantic time between two men, and furthermore, both were awarded custody of the girl. Such was the premise of the 80s television sitcom, My Two Dads.
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The battle between good and evil as it played out on California’s freeways found a good home in the classic 70s NBC series, CHiPs. It was an airy mix of action, police drama and comedy but that was not all; there were also tight uniforms and a groovy theme song.
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You gotta love a show that tells you exactly what it’s about in the first 30 seconds of every episode. The above was narrated every week before the opening credits, followed by the distinctive staccato beat of the theme and, oh yes, machine gun rounds spelling out the ‘A’ in A-Team. One may even say that machine guns were the main instruments utilized in the show’s musical score. The series created by 80s wunderkind Stephen J. Cannell ran very successfully from 1983 to 1987, becoming an international hit and pop culture icon.
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Welcome to The Sunshine Cab Company, where the career aspirations of the taxi-driving employees sit as idle as a yellow cab parked along a deserted curb, just hoping to be noticed. And through their trials and tribulations, their triumphs, and more often, their failures, this collection of cab drivers delivered some of the most memorable and uproarious moments in the history of television sitcoms.
Continue reading...For many Americans who grew up in decades past, Sunday night provided a wonderful family tradition, where the whole clan would gather around to be entertained by the imagination of Walt Disney. Perhaps you knew it as Disneyland in the 50s, or Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in the 60s, or maybe The Wonderful [...]
Continue reading...Back in 1962, a new western premiered on NBC, called The Virginian. While it had plenty of competition in the genre, from show like Bonanza, The Rifleman and Gunsmoke, The Virginian was unique in that it ran for 90 minutes, and was shot in color for its duration (with the exception of the pilot episode [...]
Continue reading...Today is Sunday, and like many people, you may decide to spend the evening curled up in front of the television to cap off the weekend. We thought it might be fun to see what people were watching on Sunday nights, 25 years ago, in February of 1985. If you happened to be loyal to [...]
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