There are some moments that I think the majority of us will all agree on as being very memorable: MASH finale, Who Shot J.R. and so on.
I would like for this to be more personal. Something that happened on a show that sticks in your head, that maybe few others would remember, or something that meant a great deal to you for whatever reason. It could be something funny, emotional, or serious.
My memory is a funny one. The first time I watched ‘Whose Line is it Anyway’, Greg Proops (sp?) was involved in a skit in which they were all assuming different characters personalities. He decided to name his Roman Warrior type character “Testicles”. It was so off the cuff and improvised. It was basically perfect.
Not a show as such, but I was watching when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Of course, the replays since then have aided my memory, so it’s hard to say if the first image alone was enough to seal it.
As for shows:
Johnny Carson’s sign-off
Michael Jackson doing “Billie Jean” on some awards show
Sinatra’s 80th birthday bash
A David Susskind interview with a hit man
Jack Palance doing one-armed pushups on the Oscars
I swear I recall an episode of G.I. Joe when I was a kid (mid 80’s?) where there were some kind of copies or clones made of the good guys, and they (the copies) melted. I was young. . .maybe I dreamt it, but I was pretty sure I didn’t. I thought it was very disturbing.
Also, I will never ever forget sitting bolt upright in bed fairly early in the morning, much earlier than I usually would get up seeing as how I was not in school (college) at the time, and inexplicably turning on the TV to watch the news (again, something uncustomary for me in the morning), and seeing one WTC tower burning, and seeing the second tower hit LIVE on the air. It’ll be cliche to say that’s the TV image that you remember the most, but for me the whole sequence of events that enabled me to see the whole thing live was so unusual, I’ll never forget that morning.
Honorable mentions: the first images from the Mars landing, Homer shooting Marge in the face with the makeup gun in the Edison episode.
I remember this episode well, we must be about the same age. Cobra replaced The Brass with clones, so they would know all of the Joe’s moves beforehand. The Brass broke out at the end, and when Cobra Commander tried to check to see if the guys he was talking to were the real guys or not, he used some device that he accidently set on high and melted all of his own clones. I can’t believe I remember all of that, but that’s the sickness I suffer from.
Muhammed Ali lighting the torch at the Olympics. Was it Atlanta, 1996? I think so. The image of him standing tall, shaking with Parkinsons as he lit the torch was incredible.
I was home sick from school the day Reagan was shot. I was watching ABC, Frank Reynolds, calm anchor extraordinaire, was telling everyone that Reagan had been shot… blah blah blah pauses and announces that Reagan has died. After a few minutes, they find out that Reagan is still alive, and Frank Reynolds goes apeshit. Yelling even, “There’s no cause for this! Don’t give me any more information until you’ve checked it!”
Before this, it just seemed too surreal, but his outburst just brought it home and made it real.
The next, the challenger disaster. I watched it take off from the study lounge on campus, then walked upstairs for a test. By the time I got to the physics classroom, it was over. It was so quick.
As a boy, my parents let me stay home from school to watch Neiil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. They couldn’t stop quarreling long enough to come see it happen. I almost missed it myself, trying to get them to look.
As a boy, my parents let me stay home from school to watch Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. They couldn’t stop quarreling long enough to come see it happen. I almost missed it myself, trying to get them to look.
As someone’s mentioned already, the Challenger disaster, one of the few pictures actually burned into my mind.
Also, a MAS*H moment: Radar walks into the OR to read the announcement that Colonel Henry Blake’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan and that there were no survivors. (I was four when this originally aired, so I know I saw it in syndication. Still, great moment.)
And one on the lighter side: on Laverne and Shirley, Lenny and Squiggy were arguing about who was going to marry Laverne. She thought they were arguing about who had to do it, but they were really arguing about who got to do it. Very sweet.
Actually, this thread reminds me of how little I’ve actually seen live on TV. I was in school when I heard about Lennon, Reagan, the Challenger disaster. I didn’t own a TV on 9/11 (I’m fortunate for that, actually…I would have been a lot more upset if I’d seen it live). The two things already mentioned that I actually saw were Ali in Atlanta and The Simpsons episode.
The two things I remember most from TV were the Columbia disaster (I think I was actually the first person to confirm it here, after I’d jumped off the couch after seeing the pictures on CNN), and the R. Budd Dwyer “live” suicide. (But was it live? I dunno.)
The Challenger disaster, mainly because it’s been broadcast so much.
Johnny Carson’s “Who’s on the Phone?” sketch with him as President Reagan. There might be a video online but I don’t have Quicktime here so I can’t check it out.
Taxi episode when Jim Ignatowski is taking the hack license exam. It was ad-libbed to a large extent because of studio audience reaction.
Jim (to other drivers, soto voce): “Psst, what does a yellow light mean?”
Alex: “Slow down.”
Jim: “Okey doke, what…does…a…yellow…light…mean?”
Alex (exasperated): “Slow…down!”
Jim: “Whaaaat…doooeess…a…yellloooowww…liggghhht…mean…?”
Something specific from 9/11 for me was that being on the West Coast I was watching after the planes had crashed and I remember as if it ws yesterday watching and listening ass Peter Jennnings was interviewing wsomeone and was obviously not looking at the monitor when the first building collapsed completely. Jennings did not comment and it all seemed so surreal because of it. I was saying to myself, 'My God, I think that whole building just collapsed!"
Wow, that sounds about right. I’m glad I didn’t imagine it. The images of those guys melting like that for some reason deeply disturbed me for several years.
Duke, was R. Budd Dwyer the PA state treasurer (or something similar) who “ate a bullet” during a press conference? If I’m thinking of the same person, it was indeed live, and the footage was pretty much unusable for newscast purposes after the fact, as it was extremely gruesome (as you’d expect for a suicide by gunshot.)
There was just no way to show it “edited for television.” If you saw it at all, it was the original live broadcast, I think. Back in… '86, '87?
I remember one time I was really depressed, and I was watching Gimme a Break, of all things, and Nell Carter started singing “He Watches the Sparrow” to one of the characters and I just broke down crying.
The Taxi episode where Louie gives the speech about love… “The end of happiness! Right down the toilet!” It really touched me and I quote that line a lot.
This sounds horrible, but Geraldo Rivera did this show on “The Twins of Auschwitz” talking about Holocaust twin experiments with actual victims on the show. I’m sure it’s not even a footnote in Holocaust archiving but it really, really got to me at the time.