Oh yeah, and China Beach was a big deal, too, it having launched the career of Dana Delany.
He died. “Benjy” Carter’s body was found by Friday and Gannon at the end of the episode. The “just desserts” portion reveals that an inquest ruled the death self-inflicted as an accidental overdose of barbiturates.
Unless you were asking about the actor. In which case, after a respectable career as a child actor, he retired from acting, got his Ph.D. at Yale, and became a history professor. He’s written several books about the Dreyfuss Affair, apparently.
Not bad for a drug-addled old Blue Boy!
I sort of remember it, but I found it by Googling “wait till your father gets home lions.”
How about Maude? It’s not forgotten because I’ve often seen it mentioned in works about television history or depictions of women on television, and it also came up when Bea Arthur died, but I’m in my 30s and have never seen an episode of the show. I’ve seen reruns of All in the Family, fellow All in the Family spin-off The Jeffersons, and even Maude spin-off Good Times, but not Maude. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard it mentioned in conversation, not even by older people. But this was a pretty popular show in its day (in the top ten for its first four seasons) and I gather was considered somewhat controversial too. The only episode I really know anything about, in which Maude decides to have an abortion, is one that would probably be if anything even more controversial today.
Wikipedia tells me that Maude reruns showed up briefly on TV Land in 1999 and Nick at Nite in 2001 and that the first season was released on DVD in 2007, but it looks like those were the only chances for anyone in the US to see the show during my lifetime.
You can see Maude currently on the Antenna TV cable channel, if you get that. Weekends at 6pm Eastern. Very funny show, I recommend it.
Man, if glee ended after one season, it’d likely be one of the most fondly remembered shows. It’s almost amazing to think of how good that first season was when watching the dreck that came after (even Season 2 wasn’t completely suck, but then it went sharply downhill)
Did I miss something in the premise of this thread? How on earth have we gotten to this point in discussing television shows that seemed earth-shaking when they aired, were at least moderately successful, but have subsequently fallen off the table completely, without mentioning…
LOST
Or did I miss it as I scanned the thread?
I’ll admit, I was a LOSTEE. Loved it, looked forward to it airing each week, went online and gossiped "but what did that really mean? with all my fellow lostees. I think I own every season on DVD. (goes over to cabinet, yep, there they are) Thought I would at some point watch the whole thing all over again, catching all the things I missed the first time. etc.
Have never watched a single second of it again.
Have not seen it in syndication, have not heard anyone reference it in pop culture. But at the time, it was HUGE.
The Equalizer just had a movie adaptation.
There was a cartoon called Father of the Pride. Was that it?
I doubt it. Father of the Pride was a CGI-animated show from a few years ago, featuring a family of white lions from Siegfried and Roy’s menagerie. In some ways it was similar to WTYFGH (schlubby dad, feminist daughter, precocious boy, domestic mom) but aside from that the comparisons weren’t strong.
As an aside, I thought the best part of FotP was the Siegfried and Roy bits. They were hilarious! The lions, not so much. ("Oh no! I forgot to factor in the cosine of root beer!')
I do remember that show too, but that wasn’t it.
My memory of the lion show is from a documentary about how TV is produced, possibly made in 1980 or thereabouts, so I guess it may not have been a real thing that was broadcast.
Lots of westerns i imagine
[quote=“Shagnasty, post:100, topic:704849”]
I don’t know much about the original Dragnet series in general but I do wonder what happened to the LSD trippin’ Blue Boy from time to time. That is one of the most unintentionally funny episodes of TV ever made. You can watch it on Youtube.
[/QUOTE]I’m glad you mentioned this! I have often thought the same thing. It just…disappeared. Done. Gone. Some cable station could re-run the thing, an episode a night, for years. Why not? What’s the deal with this??
I LOVED the show, I think I missed one episode. I would love to watch it all over again, but I don’t really want to run out and buy a box set. I would love to settle down at a certain time in the evening and watch an episode. I am getting mighty sick of dozing off to the 100th re-run of Everybody Loves Raymond and The King of Queens.
Well, you know how dreams are weird. 
And they do mix and mismatch memories. I think this is another deep past time memory that is changed by time too. (Very interested on this as I have seen this item pop up many times when searching for - Did I dream that - past entertainment media and even I noticed cases of funny scrambled memories that I had)
As soon as you mentioned an animated family that was riffing or that looked similar to Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, I did remember the The Barkleys.
Not a family of lions, a family of dogs.
I did see then in the old country back in the 70’s dubbed to Spanish, the sound track was different to the other show, I thought that it was possible that the same audio was used in English, but then I do remember how productions companies recycled the ideas from theirs or other companies (still happens), and the same voice talent cropped up when studios worked on productions that had similar or same formulas.
So I did a search with both Wait Till Your Father Gets Home and The Barkleys. And my hunch was correct:
So, not the same audio track, just animation groups producing similar things with the same voice talent.
-Ed.
And in a way, that same technique was used for an animated lion family…James Earl Jones and Madge Sinclair played a lion king and queen in The Lion King, six years after they’d played a human king and queen in Coming To America.
My students were digging the old Electric Company shows today. They actually asked me if I still had the DVDs.
A brave effort. Good work.
However, on my brief search after originally posting this, I did find that info the same as you, and like you I wondered if maybe that’s what had happened, a merged and confused memory. But it really doesn’t match what I was thinking of, so I’m still not sure.
However, this does match my memory.
[QUOTE=Another Dude With The Same Memory]
The audio was lifted straight from “Wait Till Your Father Gets Home”, but the animation was a family of lions instead of humans.
[/QUOTE]
But then later he discovers the truth:
[QUOTE=Another Dude With The Same Memory]
Looks like I’m about to answer my own question. A few more careful searches found what I was looking for. It was an unsold pilot called either “Harry Safari” or “Harry’s Safari”. The audio was in fact lifted right from WTYFGH. Some of the footage appeared on a 50th anniversary special for Hanna Barbera in 1989. Whatever show I had seen it on must have been promoting the special.
[/QUOTE]
That Hanna Barbera 50th Anniversary doc was an expanded version of this documentary which came out in 1977. And I am pretty sure that’s where I saw this weird failed pilot, apparently called “Harry Safari”, and inspired by Born Free, of all things. I can’t find any clips of it anywhere yet.
Sorry for this weird hijack, everyone.