I’ve mentioned this before, but our kids won’t let us get rid of our landline, because one night at 2 am, my wife answered a call from a drunk who slurred “Didjoo know your phone number spells Beer Keg?” “No, actu…” “Well, I want (414) BEE-RKEG, and they won’t give it to me!” “Umm, even if we gave it up, I don’t think…” “click.”
One of the annoyances of my youth - the Jim Hutton Ellery Queen TV show used that mystery. I could usually (OK, sometimes) figure out the killer when Queen/Hutton turned to the camera and announced that there was now enough information to solve the case. In this case, you had to know that a long time ago that phone numbers were only 6-digits (and even that probably depended on where you were).
Speaking of Parkay, I had to explain this joke from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 to my daughter.
There’s an old thread where old dopers talk about their old exchange names. Mine was DAvenport. I remember when they started to drop the exchange names. My dad resisted that as long as he could. He never did handle change well.
In the mid -90s when I worked at Taco Bell we had 3 or 4 kids age about 12-13 who would skip school and try to hang out in our restaurant. They were rude, obnoxious, begging soda thieves and we got tired of telling them to leave so we dug up a number for truancy and called them. The guy showed up and had a talk with them. One of them: well, my dad’s a lawyer. She got shut down fast. She also told the guy " I’ve skipped school lots of times. Why do they care today?" I was all “you just admitted to skipping a lot to the truancy officer!?”
It was the last we saw of them for quite a while.
I had to explain this scene from the 1996 Homerpalooza episode of The Simpsons to my son.
Homer is in a record store (no, I didn’t have to explain that part) looking at a Lollapalooza parody poster.
Clerk: Hullabalooza is a music festival; the greatest music festival of all time.
Homer: There can only be one truly great festival a lifetime and it’s the “Us Festival”.
Clerk: The what festival?
Homer: The “Us Festival”! Geez! It was sponsored by the guy from Apple Computers.
Clerk: What computers?
I had to explain to a kid born after the first iPod came out and who was 5 when the first iPhone was released that there was a time when Apple wasn’t one of the biggest companies on the planet, and in fact was widely considered to be a has-been that was expected to either go belly up or get bought out by a competitor.
Hey! Mine was DAvis!
When I think “Dog catcher” I think of what classic cartoons had, a guy driving a beat-up old truck on patrol up and down the street looking for any random animal he could grab and then throw into his truck bed which was covered with only a thin wire mesh and every single loose animal was back there together.
I really don’t think modern animal control are on “patrol” anymore unless they have specific instructions to find a loose animal in an area, especially not just grabbing the first animal they see collar or not. So the cartoon dog catcher is definitely a thing of the past.
This thread is so fun that I’ve created a spinoff: Jokes that, in the future, will need explaining
This doesn’t exactly fit, but it does show how nothing is ever constant. In a Lou Grant episode, the staff is screening high school-age contestants to award scholarships. Their top prospect is a young black man who’s the high school quarterback, class valedictorian, and so on. Lou describes him as “A cross between OJ Simpson and Martin Luther King Jr.”
You’ll have to explain it to me, too. I watched the ‘Butter!’ ‘Parkay!’ commercials when they were first run, but I don’t get the mosquito or why being bitten by one turns butter into margarine.
The other day I saw a bit of a Phineas and Ferb episode where someone visits NASA and sees the various rovers - the Mars rover, the Moon rover and the Irish rover. That’s a bit of a joke right off, since “The Irish Rover” is a folk song (and “The Irish Rovers” a folk group), but the real “You need to explain it” joke is further on Phineas and Ferb - Irish Rover - YouTube - see the guy cutting a bar of soap with a knife is a reference to a commercial for Irish Spring soap, from the early 80s.
I’m not at all sure that the “patrol” ever existed outside of cartoons.
The child catcher, on the other hand…
Feral dogs were a problem in many cities in the late 19th and early 20th Century, and were a health concern due to rabies. In Edmonton the city dogcatcher was reported in 1911 to have captured, killed, and cremated 2,400 dogs in the past two years. To catch that many, he certainly would have had to have been out looking for them.
Here’s an actual dogcatcher with his truck from 1921, although the truck is labeled “city pound.” Dogcatchers were often known as poundmasters.
I remember some of those. I grew up on Long Island, and many of the businesses advertised on TV were in the city.
I can still hear in my head the end of a commercial for … something, when the announcer said, “Call Murray Hill 7-0700. That’s MU 7-0700. MU7-0700.”
The earliest phone number I can remember — the house we moved into in 1962 when I was 3 — was ORiole 1-3261. The town had two exchanges; everyone was either OR1 or OR6. And yeah, we mostly said “OR” rather than “oriole.” By the time I was in junior high school (roughly), it had become 671 and 676.
Define “beginning.”
On the wall behind me is a framed poster from the movie theater two towns over. The feature for December 27-28 was The Bank Dick, so I guess the poster is from 1940. At the top, right under the name of the theater, it says, “TELEPHONE 118-2.”
ALSO: I apologize to the OP for continuing this hijack, but I’m enjoying it.
The town near me had three-digit local numbers in the late 50s. You could make local call with only four digits up until the 60s, though you needed seven from another exchange.
I got a call like that many years ago, because the last four digits of my number spelled “guys.” An obviously-drunk woman called me and said, “Somebody told me to call 246-GUYS to get the thrill of my life! Now you gonna thrill me or not?” (I didn’t.)
Now, how will you get into the Penthouse Forum with an attitude like that?
(Uh, oh, now I’ll have to explain that reference to the next generation…)