Yes. I recall seeing them on the independent stations. Of course, after his candidacy was announced, they started showing up more often.
By the way, by 1980 Reagan was not a joke. My statements above, you’ll note, refer to the sixties and early 1970s. Reagan had been a joke, in the same way that Richard Nixon’s candidacy was seen as a joke after his loss in 1960. But comebacks do happen in American politics.
Reagan was largely considered a joke governor, outside California. Not that Texas hasn’t had its share of joke governors, but the guy was a B-movie actor! There weren’t so many movies on TV in those days so I mostly actually remembered him from Death Valley Days.
Then he got elected president & the joke was on us.
What was weird was Nancy had everybody wearing red in a couple years.
I had seen some of his movies and I knew him for his failed bid in 1976 and as Gov. of California. So to me it did not seem too weird. I did find it funny though that Laugh-In had as one of their News-Of-The-Future jokes, talking about Reagan as president in 1982. Big laugh of course due to the time this was first aired. Startling to see it in 1981.
The “Bonzo” thing was constantly brought up and of course “the Gipper”.
Now when Sonny Bono became a congressman, that was weird and stunning.
I was a teen at the time. But from what I can recall:
The media absolutely *despised *him.
The election set off an avalanche of punk rock bands that made it their core mission to deride the president.
The lefties thought it was the end of the world. Literally. They thought he was going to start WWIII.
*“Ronald Reagan for President”.
“Nah, Jimmy Stewart for President, Ronald Reagan for his best friend”.*
I’m probably older than most of y’all, but no, it wasn’t particularly weird. I thought of him mostly as the governor of California rather than an actor. Then in 1984 I thought of him based on his record as President.
Schwarzenegger was a little harder to get used to, but I never got to vote for him.
Regards,
Shodan
It was much weirder seeing him elected governor of California the first time, but pretty shocking that he was elected president. Imagine it being like seeing someone like Sonny Bono elected to. . .d’oh!
It has to depend on your age, doesn’t it?
To me, the weird part is that Ronald Reagan was an actor. To me he’s a politician first, and his being an actor seems surreal. It would be like somehow finding out now, after the fact of his being President, that George W. Bush had been a moderately successful rock star in the 1970s.
Yeah, this is exactly how I feel about it! Of course, I was born in 1980, so I have no memory of him as anything BUT president, but it is very strange to see him in movies. I like your example about Bush; that’s exactly it. Very odd.
Anyhow, I know I’m not the target of the OP, but I wonder if other younger (yes! I’m younger!!) dopers feel the same. I know, I know… start my own thread. 
I think it was a fall of 68 issue, Mad had “The Mr President Pageant”, instead of the Miss America pageant. It was pretty funny. Mad, I think, seemed to me to have Reagan in a special comedic role, whenever they parodied him, somehow. Kind of like having…Pat Sajak, maybe? doing the straight roles. Reagan, although a B actor, IIRC, was actually nominated for an Oscar. He wasn’t a punk, he just wasn’t Clark or one of the giants.
At any rate, I had gone through approximately 12 years of having Mad magazine’s vision of him in my head; but, I was a hard core Conservative, so I thought, I don’t care, as long as he’s not a Commie like one of those Liberals!
Amusingly, in 82 or 84, when Reaganmania was still going strong, my friend and I were watching “Our Man Flint”. The plot was to kidnap the President, and slip an actor into the White House to impersonate him. Comedic effect, when Flint said: “An ACTOR…for President?” We had to do a doubletake, because the movie had been made in 66.
Best wishes,
hh
On the contrary – they were removed from the air, since it would have required equal time for any other candidates.
It wasn’t weird at all to me. He’d spent eight years as Governor, had worked hard to earn brownie points in his party, damn near knocked off Ford in 1976, wrote a literate and well-received op-ed column (that’s what they used to do in the old days, before Fox News) for the next four years while he continued to build brownie points, and won election against an incumbent president.
I despised him, and his administration, and his policies, but he certainly earned his presidency fairly and squarely.
This here. Born in '74, most of my friends are of the same era. I own a few Reagan films on LD and DVD, as do some friends, and the big draw/novelty is that omg, a president is acting in a crappy movie!. Politician first, actor second. I’d love to catch Bush or Clinton in an episode of Red Shoe Diaries or something.
I think it works in Reagan’s favor that he had a long history of climbing the political rungs. It’d be really fucking weird if, say, Ashton Kutcher became president in 2012, since there would be no political growth time. Reagan was SAG president in the '50s (and, yes, I consider labor union work as political work) and a state governor in the '60s, so why would it be so out-of-the-ordinary for the guy to become president in the '80s? Took the guy 20+ years to clamber up, and he had to have attracted notice during the time. It’s not like 1980 rolled around and people said “Holy hell, ain’t that the guy who acted in b-movies? Let’s vote fer 'im!”
Exactly. If you read the Golden Turkey Awards, you will find the authors had a difficult time being able to view “That Hagen Girl”. (The book may have been the Twenty Worst Movies of All Time- been years since I read it).
Reagan was a father figure to me. Every time I saw the President on television, I thought of my father.
Unfortunately, Dad also had Alzheimer’s and I could see so many of the signs in Reagan.
His wife Nancy reminded me of clueless Marie Antoinette with her philosophy of solving the drug issue in the country by proclaiming, “Just say no to drugs.” Wow! Problem solved.
The difference is that Reagan at least had held political office before being elected President. Not so with Trump (and that’s not nearly the primary reason why I won’t vote for him).
Not my country or election, but I had seen his movies on tv as I was growing up and it seemed a little unexpected that a Hollywood actor had become Governor, but then very weird that he had actually succeded in gaining the Presidency.
At the time a lot of us were amused by (re)reading J.G. Ballard’s short fiction piece, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, which had been written much earlier back in 1968. wiki link
At the time, Reagan was elected President his film career had been over for sixteen years. He had been the governor of California for two terms after that and had challenged Ford for the presidential nomination in 1976. So I think most of us saw him primarily as a political figure by 1980.
This song from *Not the Nine O’Clock News *is how it looked for a lot of Brits at the time.