Married with Children always creeped me right out. I mean, they were so cruel to each other–not in a mildly bickering but making up later kind of way, but in a deeply, darkly hateful sort of way. And there was one episode I’ll never forget, I was like 10 maybe when I saw it, when that sleazy bastard Bud was played for a fool by some girl he went to school with. His revenge was to tie her gagged and naked to a wall on display in front of the whole school. How is that not fucked up beyond all belief?
Another one–The Simpsons. One of the greatest shows in the universe, but I still cringe every time Homer chokes Bart. On the commentary Matt Groening insists, ‘‘We have to make it spontaneous and not premeditated or else it’s just too disturbing.’’ I hate to break it to him, but it’s pretty disturbing to see a man strangle a small child for an extended period of time regardless of whether he did it in a spontaneous fit of rage or with premeditated malice. And don’t even get me started on Itchy and Scratchy. I can’t even watch that shit.
The guy/gal who posted this Pepe le Pew video on youtube claims it’s the first-ever episode (1945) - the male cat is the main character, and Pepe chases him back to his “alley cat” life. The rest of the episodes that I’ve seen are girl-cats. Although there’s a Tiny Toons character Fifi le Fume who chases boys.
(I’ve watched a lot of Pepe/Fifi videos recently, as one daughter thinks they are the funniest - call me silly, but I don’t consider them inappropriate for kids [maybe the rape/bondage subtext is masked by the slapstick].)
This doesn’t really prove anything, but Richie et al certainly thought he had sex. An ex-girlfriend of Fonzie’s came to town in one episode and she was either pregnant or a mother, and Fonzie’s friends assumed the child was Fonzie’s and talked about how he had to take responsibility for what he had done.
Did Harlan Ellison by any chance guest-write that episode?
Did the article mention the amount of illegal activity most soap opera villians get away with. Sami Brady Reid Reid Walker (almost Kelly, Reid, Roberts) would have been in prison a dozen times over, yet here she is pregnant and planning her seventh wedding! That aspects always disturbs me.
Let us consider HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER where the lead character persists in telling his teen age kids details of his of his relationships before he met their mother. Auny Robin indeed.
Not too creepy, I guess, but on Cheers, everybody in the bar took an unhealthy interest in Sam’s sex life, as if he had merely made a lateral career move from one spectator sport to another.
Well, the premise of that show was that the man had a job too – he was the woman’s live-in housekeeper. And the two of them had a kid each and no romantic relationship with each other but there was a clear mutual attraction (allowing the writers to constantly hint and tease). Sound just a little bit weirder yet?
In the old South, there were some towns where blacks were not allowed to live, period. Not a legal exclusion, but quite effective nonetheless. (Sometimes there was a sign at the town line: “Nigger! Don’t let the sun set on you here!” Or words to that effect.) I always assumed Mayberry was one of those.
I think it was meant to be left ambiguous, so the kids and teens could groove on the implied sex while their parents, reflecting that this was a show set in the '50s and presenting no serious challenges to the prevailing values of that time, would not object.
Just like it was IRL in the '50s, I suppose, for a lot of people. That is, a lot of people, especially girls/women, pretended chastity when they were actually non-virgins or “technical virgins.”
Both of those shows though are satire. It’s supposed to be seen as disturbing.
Whereas something like The Honeymooners was just straight forward.
One thing that bothers me about The Brady Bunch is that there was never any mention whatsoever about the kid’s former parents. I think ONCE they show Bobby or Peter with a picture of their birth mother, who had died a few years ago. But they immediately settle into calling Mike and Carole “Dad” and “Mom” with no issues of being a step family whatsoever.
Or even later. My husband grew up in a very small (population <800) town in central Wisconsin. He never met a single black person until 1976, when he went to boot camp.
Actually, it was Kelly who tied Tiffani Amber-Thiessen to the lockers, not Bud. Bud himself had been stripped naked with his underwear tied to a rope in front of the whole school (for the second time, since she’d done it to him years before too), and Kelly was looking out for him. She wrote the sign “Never Mess with a Bundy” and put Buck there with the rope in his mouth.
The subtext of MWC was that the family deep down loved each other, although the creators violently resisted bringing it to the fore.
Now, Marcy Rhoades D’arcy and her husbands–that was a scary subtext! “She scares me to death, Al!” - Steve
One gag that ran through the first few years of MWC is how the Rhodes thought they would bring the Bundys up to their level, but in reality vice versa est vertias
