I have a 3-year-old, and I’m pretty sensitive about what I’ll let him see on TV. So I’ve gotten to thinking about what my parents wouldn’t let me watch when I was little.
“Eight Is Enough” - Dad thought the kids disrespected their parents.
“Welcome Back, Kotter” - Kids were too disrespectful to their teachers and said mean things to each other. On a side note, every other kid in my neighborhood was going around saying “Up your nose with a rubber hose”. I repeated it at school and got in trouble, even though I’d never watched the show.
“Hogan’s Heroes” - A comedy set in a POW camp was felt to be inappropriate. Mom’s father had been drafted to six hard months slinging hash at Biloxi during WWII, so she was sensitive to portrayals of the military.
“Match Game”, “Newlywed Game”, and “Dating Game” - too ribald. (“Last night, my husband asked me to blank his blank”) Plus, I think my mom hated Gene Rayburn.
I’m sure I’ll think of some others. What didn’t your parents let you watch when you were a kid?
SledgeHammer!: I imagine they felt the humor was a bit mature and the violence a bit more credible than my usual He-man and Transformers slugfests.
My mom wasn’t a fan of The Simpsons when it came out, but by then we all had our own TVs, so enforcement of her (poorly explained) will was nigh impossible.
None. I honestly don’t recall ever having a TV show banned to me. Of course, I was born in '54, so most of the shows airing before I hit adolescence were pretty innocuous – I was in high school when All in the Family hit the air, e.g.
I was never prohibited from watching anything on TV. When I was a kid, there wasn’t that mindset that certain programs were unsuitable for viewers of a certain age or sensibility- because it seems that programs that would fit those criteria hadn’t been invented yet.
The only thing I specifically remember being discouraged from watching was Laugh-In. I think they also considered the Smothers brothers’ show to be a bit racy at times, but we watched both of them occasionally anyway.
In the 70s and early 80s I wasn’t allowed to watch Three’s Company, Match Game, Love Boat, Shogun. It’s easier to say what I was allowed to watch which was kids’ programming, sports or educational nature shows, Bonanza, Little House. When I was about 11 they stopped keeping an eye on what I watched. I was also limited in how much time I could watch. It seems to me there was a one hour on weekday and 2 hour Saturday morning, but to be honest, I think the limits were made up according to the hockey or baseball schedules. We only had one TV and sports was always the priority.
Laverne & Shirley, because while my mother walked past the TV one evening as I was watching, they used that most vile of curse words, “bimbo”. :rolleyes:
When we were quite young very little tv was permitted at all.
This became more difficult to enforce the older we got.
The one show that was clearly despised in our house was Simpsons.
My parents failed utterly at protecting us from that horror, as both my sisters and myself have seen every episode multiple times, and most family conversations are just strung-together Simpsons quotes.
My siblings and I were prohibited from watching every TV show made or shown in reruns from 1959 (the year of my birth) until 1977 (when I went off to college).
No TV in our house. My father hated television. He thought it was the worst thing ever to happen to our society.
In retrospect, I’m kind of glad. I grew up with much better sources of entertainment than the television. Books, my friends and family, and the real world around me, rather than hours of television.
I never got to see Happy Days or Laverne & Shirley until they went into syndication and were on after school. When they were new and on in prime time, my mother thought that they were degrading to women (especially HD, with The Fonz snapping his fingers and women swarming over to him) and we weren’t allowed to watch. Getting to catch an episode when over at a friend’s house was a big, illicit treat.
