I watch a lot of Bonanza episodes. One was a “funny” Hoss ep where he teamed up with a guy who invented a machine that could detect gold in the ground. It was a big steam powered Rube Goldbergian device with many gauges and levers that had to be operated in a specific sequence. At one point Hoss worked the levers in the wrong sequence and the device exploded. Hoss was left with torn up clothes, a blackened face and a chastened expression, but otherwise unharmed, just like Wile E. Coyote. Plenty of the funny clown music you mention was involved.
This was in contrast to another serious, dramatic Bonanza ep I had recently watched where Ben, his sons, plus another man and his sons had to transport crates of nitroglycerin over a mountain pass for plot reasons. It was very tense and suspenseful, and (spoiler alert) one of the other man’s sons (the favorite son, of course) gets himself blowed up. Not funny blackened-soot face blowed up, nothing left to bury blowed up.
Sorry about that. I was a married employed adult when ER started, but I’m trying these days to acknowledge that things that happened before some of my coworkers were born do count as “old”
Oh gawd yes. In th Sharona years, he could use a cell phone, a tv remote, and even smiled. By the later Natalie years he was confused and frightened by our modern world, and relied on Natalie to “make picture freezer” with the remote. And it was “known” that Monk never smiled.
The Sven and Lena couple in The Searchers were embarrassingly bad. Every time it gets serious out on the titular search, the movie cuts back to the Norweignian joke stereotypes acting like a Minnesota joke.
The premiere of ER is closer to the Apollo 8’s trip around the moon than to today. Kids born when ER premiered could have kids of their own in kindergarten.
I’ve been watching a lot of 30s and 40s movies recently and I notice that a lot of serious films will have out of nowhere “designated comedy bits” with wacky music, and the comedy films will have a bunch of weird serious scenes in them. There’s always the most unnecessary romance in Abbott and Costello films featuring completely third-tier characters and the romance will usually have some weird “life or death” aspect to it.
Sure, it makes me feel old - but that doesn’t cause me pain. When you consider what the sole alternative to growing old is, I’m happy to be getting older!
