I will start
I disliked Blue peter as a child and still do.
I will start
I disliked Blue peter as a child and still do.
I am embarrassed to say I hated Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
But then again, I was slightly too old for it (around 8-12) and my baby sister wanted to see it after we watched Sesame Street. And YES, I was still watching Sesame Street when I was 12, don’t judge me. It was cool.
But when Fred Rogers came on right after, I would kick the side of the TV I hated him so much. Not sure why he irritated me so much, but that show put me in foul mood every time. I was more a Captain Kangaroo kinda kid during my preschool years.
When I was a kid, the farm report was on Saturday mornings, taking up valuable time that should have been used for more cartoons.
Even as a small child I could tell that a great majority of the animated shows Hanna-Barbera produced were garbage. Granted, this was the early 80s and pretty much everything from the late 60s up to that point, old or new alike, was cheaply produced garbage.
Hee Haw. It was on just before the Muppet Show, and my parents would watch it while I waited for the Muppets to come on. I can’t stand most country music and the kind of hillbilly/hick humor that I seem to remember being a big part of that show.
Soap Operas
Westerns
ALL Soap Operas and ALL Westerns
It ran for an obscenely long time, too:
Three’s Company. I haven’t watched it since.
Rasslin’.
The Pink Panther cartoons. Boring!
The Lawrence Welk show, which my parents inexplicably insisted on watching every damn week for years. Just sitting here thinking about it makes me want to kill myself from boredom.
Three Stooges. My brother was a fan. I wasn’t. It just looked like it hurt.
I hated Top Cat. I think I tried watching it because it looked like it would be as funny as The Flintstones. But I hated it, and I can’t remember why.
That is, I couldn’t remember until I recently brought up an episode on DailyMotion just to see what it was that I didn’t like. It’s because it was boring and pointless and relied on a kind of “Sergeant Bilko” humor that went way over my head when I was a kid.
That doesn’t mean I can’t remember and sing the theme song today!
In the early 1970s, when I was a kid, living in suburban Chicago, I’d be the first one up in the household in the morning. On weekday mornings, WGN had a kid’s show, “Ray Rayner and Friends,” which ran at 7am (i.e., prime time for watching some cartoons before heading to school). But, before Ray’s show, WGN ran “Top o’ the Morning,” a farm news show, hosted by Orion Samuelson. At that time, TV stations signed off during the overnight hours, and Orion’s show was the only thing running on any Chicago station before 7am. So, as I was often up before 7, I’d wind up watching the farm news, because there was literally nothing else on TV at that time.
Many years later, I had the chance to meet Mr. Samuelson, as part of my job. I mentioned to him the above story, and he laughed, saying, “You can’t imagine how many people your age tell me that they used to watch me impatiently, waiting for cartoons to come on.”
Actually, I kinda liked these. In the New York area they bundled up a bunch of old USDA educational and instructional videos and called it “The Modern Farmer”. So I learned about rotary feeders and sorghum silage. It beat the heck out of the “Sermonette” that preceded it.
As a kid, I’d watch anything. Sermonette, with its bland voiceover and endless shots of waves crashing on beaches, was still better than watching the test Pattern, with its boring score (“OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”)
After The Modern Farmer, you got to see those ads for the circle Line Boat Tours that took you up the Hudson River from New York City to West Point and Bear Mountain! Yum!
The Brady Bunch. I still hate The Brady Bunch. I wished for a Brady Bunch Meets The Manson Family spinoff movie.
That sums it up in a nutshell (although I grew up in Saskatchewan, not Illinois).
Another vote for Hee-Haw. It was on at the same time as the Mickey Mouse club and this was the 70s, so we had only one TV in the house. This was a huge issue for me when I was 5.
Fame. For some reason my sister always wanted to watch it and I always thought it was lame how everyone would break out into song in the middle of New York streets. It played against comedies on ABC that I wanted to watch at the time as well (Mork and Mindy, I think).
Akin to the early morning farm reports, there was a religious show that came on just before Saturday morning cartoons in Chicago. It as on ABC, I believe, and it may have been called Reflections or something similar, but the episodes took too long (I think it was only about 5 minutes…) and I wanted to watch the Superfriends.
I grew up in the 1960s, and I detested “grownup shows” like Perry Mason, The Fugitive, and Route 66. They all seemed unbearably talky and tedious. Later in life, thanks to MeTV, I rewatched some of these shows and they were better than I remembered—particularly Route 66, an amazing show filmed on location all over the USA.
Same here. If I was home from school for whatever reason, there was nothing to watch but soap operas, and I resented that. In college, I dated a woman who was into The Young and the Restless; we watched it together and it’s actually sort of fun.
I still don’t understand the appeal of the old TV westerns, but I’ve watched some old episodes on streaming services, and was surprised to see that they are mostly little morality plays with minimal action and violence. As a kid, I thought they were nothing but guys riding horses and shooting at each other.