The Toronto Star TV Guide recommendation for Sept. 1, 1989 read: "For every season, there is a Charlie Brown special. From 1969, It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown has Charlie moaning about how the boys never won a game against the girls at summer camp. A great way to prepare the kids for that dreaded first day at school."As soon as I read it, I felt a surge of nostalgia for those halcyon 1969 times when I took some time from my carefree days of evading the 106 neighborhood bullies in River Heights to watch the show's original broadcast. Peanuts was hot stuff then, being the world's most popular comic strip, and every Charlie Brown TV special was an event.
After I thought about it for a while, though, I realized was that the show's return for the nth time was probably more to prepare we adults for that dreaded day the kids go back to school---Charlie Brown is, after all, our symbol, not our kids'. Snoopy works for Metropolitan Life, now.
A scene drifted into my head: the family has all gathered around the television to watch It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown. Dad tells the kids that he watched exactly the same show when it originally came out in 1969. The program begins, and as the images flash by, the parents positively glow with emotion, secure in the certainty that the kids at this very moment probably feel exactly as they themselves did 20 years ago.
This is now expected to be a point of real contact between generations; a meaningful family moment, rather like taking Dad to see Field of Dreams, and then going home with him to get good and drunk and listen to all of his Benny Goodman records and a scratchy old copy of Tommy by The Who. It made me dewy-eyed just to think about it.
But then, there is also something vaguely sick about the whole idea of a group of otherwise intelligent adults re-experiencing their video childhood in front of the family, and then thinking that this somehow better connects them to their kids. Points of real communion between generations used to revolve around the concrete common experiences of growing up or growing older: A first day of school, or a last day of summer vacation. Childhood humiliations. Falling in love. First hot-wired car. Childhood victories. These are experiences our parents had, we had, and our children have. They are common episodes which jump generational boundaries to connect us.
But, witnessing all of the above second-hand in a Charlie Brown TV special as a point of family communion? Something funny is going on here: The way-back machine has crashed in flames, or at least does something radically different than it used to. Maybe the idea now is just to get in touch with your own childhood, and the guise of communing with the kids is just so much sentimental malarkey. Maybe Gil Scott-Heron was right: We just want to go back as far as we can, even if it's only as far as last week.
I may be making too much of this, but look at the commitment to a kind of diseased, second-order, bad-media nostalgia in recent offerings from the marketplace: ancient, adolescent-fodder comic books like Superman and Batman are now live-action movies, with live-action renderings of The Flintstones, Dick Tracy, and Boris and Natasha (from the 60's TV cartoon show Rocky and his Friends) on their way.
George Lucas remakes the garbage sci-fi serials of his youth as Star Wars I-III. Steven Spielberg remakes the garbage serials of his youth as Indiana Jones I-III. (Didn't these guys experience anything real when they were growing up?) Both make literally billions, as an entire generation resonates in harmony. In a weird variation, the old literally become young again in Freaky Friday, Like Father, Like Son, 18 Again, Vice Versa, Cocoon I & II, and Peggy Sue Got Married.
On TV, a seemingly endless parade of haggard reruns of Danger Man, Leave it to Beaver, Perry Mason, I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, The Honeymooners, Andy Griffith, and a truckload of others, wanders across the late-night TV screens of a host of sentimental yuppies, who are all coked up and trying to re-experience a childhood when those shows were the highlight of their existence. Hell, I'd love to rent a couple of episodes of The Outer Limits and wander back to the days when I was about nine, and had to sneak into the TV room to watch it. But that's a thoroughgoing bit of self-indulgence I would never inflict on someone a generation younger than I.
Star Trek movies. Remakes of Mission Impossible. Contemporary 60's radio. The Big Chill. Sequels. Gomer Pyle, USMC on video. The glorious moment when Team Canada's Paul Henderson scored the Only Winning Goal That Ever Really Mattered---that moment which brought history to a close, now available to be relived again and again. Millions mainline video reruns of their childhood while their children shave their heads and rerun the childhood of Nazi Germany in the streets of Anyville, Canada....
Aw, c'mon now. Meaningful contact between people who don't really know each other often takes the form of an exchange of artifacts; offerings left at the edge of the Other's village in the dark of night.
But this? This is crazy: When we awake it seems that the only artifact that the first TV generation has to offer the second is Watching.
-Published in Between the Lines, 1989
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