When I was kid Welk was a double bill with Hee Haw. The two shows are similar but also vastly different. I too, miss variety shows. They were solid musicians. Hearing their arrangements now makes me laugh and cringe.
What I love best about seeing the show now is the clothing and hair styles, not just the performers but sometimes they show the audience dancing. OH! MY! GOD! These people are ‘dressed up’ and my god the fashions of the time are horrible.
They were sufficiently similar to be joined in the “Lawrence Welk-Hee Haw Counter-Revolution Polka” http://www.top40db.net/Lyrics/?SongID=72622&By=Year&Match=1972
I think it’s a hoot to watch just for, as others have said, the clothing and hairstyles–especially the great shots of the audience.
I actually found a Lawrence Welk 8-track tape this weekend, so good timing for this thread.
I’m 46 and have unpleasant Lawrence Welk memories, but they center around my grandparents. Mom liked Elvis and his avatars (notably Tom Jones) and Neil Diamond. Dad listened to whatever was on the top 40 and also country. Neither of them liked Champagne Music.
Both sets of grandparents, though, loved the Lawrence Welk show and I can’t figure it out. They weren’t terribly elderly people. In the mid-to-late 60’s they’d have only been 50-something years old. They had danced in earlier years to real Big Bands. They liked Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack and their musical/comedic stylings. They were, in their own way, hip.
What spawned their love of Lawrence Welk’s styrofoamcheezwhiz music remains a mystery to me.
I’m grateful to Lawrence Welk. Had he not existed, Stan Freberg would not have been able to write and create Wunnerful, A-wunnerful.
“Turn off a-the bubble machine!”
The Greatest Generation was nothing if not conformist. The world they knew before mass militarization and consumerism was not one they wanted to see again, so they tended to adjust their tastes en bloc.
Besides, hip got so radically redefined in the 60s that there wasn’t much point in trying to be sophisticated past age 40 outside of very rarefied urban intellectual circles. For most, the rewards were few and the risks huge.
46 and I just have fond memories of watching it w/ Grandmom who LOVED LW… and Liberace.
I never look for it now but if I happen on it, I watch for a few minutes & move on.
I never liked him, even though the Lennon Sisters were supposed to appeal to my generation. I couldn’t relate to any of them, not the Champagne Lady or Myron Floren and his accordion or any of the lounge-lizard-looking male singers. They creeped me out!
I did sorta like that Hit Parade show though. I was just learning the clarinet and bought sheet music so I could play those songs. Skokian, anyone? “Oh ho, far away in Africa, happy happy Africa, they sing the binga banga bingo, they have a ball and really go” – or something like that. Stupid song, at least the way I played it.
My dad would watch LW every now and then. But, Mom, me and my sister loved Hee Haw. I was creeped out by the LW Show. It had the same “happy zombie” feel as those Christian variety shows.
As soon as Lawrence Welk came on, we kids would go and find something else to do. I have the same reaction to most TV shows my wife watches today.
When my grandmother would insist on watching it, I would think "You *bitch!*and get all upset since we only had one TV back then. I would never actually watch it because it was beyond old fashioned and unentertaining. I guess I would read. Even if she wasn’t there, it’s not like there was anything else on in those pre-cable days.
I too, have a fondness for bizarre cheez… I’m only 38, but I remember watching the show with my great-grandma as a kid, and even now I don’t mind watching. It’s mindbending. 
In the mid- and late-1960s, Lawrence Welk was pretty much the only thing on TV that even came close to Big Band music. Your grandparents took it because it was all there was.
Some people like elevator music.
52 years old here.
Both of my parents hated music, so LW was never watched in my house. I only had vague knowledge of it as a corny show that old folks watched. My husband’s mom and grandparents watched it avidly, though, with the predictable result that he despises it.
Nowadays I’ll watch a little of it when it’s on PBS, mostly for the surreal factor, and to gross out my husband. I also marvel at how television shows used to actually employ real live musicians, singers and dancers - not to mention bizarre costumers and designers.
My mom always watched it and even bought their albums so that we could hear it every day (Oh joy). When we were little we would try to escape and when we got older my sister and I would waltz around imitating Guy and Ralna until she threw us out. The bubble machine was OK though.
Kids today will someday feel this way about Carson Daly. 
Or, as it’s known chez twicks, “smooth jazz.” barf
That’s my understanding on why the show lasted as long as it did. Welk was one the last Big Band dinosaurs that remained so if you liked that type of music, you really didn’t have too many other choices since nearly everyone else from that era (e.g., Goodman, Shaw, Miller, the Dorseys, etc.) was either retired or dead. That realization never made me think Lawrence Welk was any less cornball and stupifyingly boring but it did make me a little sad over the fact that the generation that came of age likely listening to people like Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and even Glenn Miller in the end was listening to Lawrence Welk. It also made me wonder what kind of lame acts the Baby Boomers would spend their declining years listening to after growing up listening to the Beatles, Dylan, and the Stones or–for that matter–what type of pallid musical pablum I’ll be consuming at the end my life. [shudder].