I guess I’m another who is quite old. When I was a kid, we only got six channels, and three of them were always snowy.
Anyway, the only show I couldn’t watch was The Twilight Zone, because Mom thought it was too scary for an eight-year-old. Of course, years later, when Mom and I were both late-night TV addicts, we found a local station rerunning The Twilight Zone at some ungodly hour of the morning. We watched every episode at least twice.
I wasn’t allowed to watch “Maude”, because (as my mother claimed) it was a stupid show. But she didn’t forbid us from watching even stupider shows like “the Love Boat.” (Years later, I discovered it was because my very Catholic mother objected to the abortion episodes.)
“Soap” and “Mary Hartman” were also banned, although I still managed to see an episode or two, since my mom fell asleep early and we could watch it sneakily behind her back. (Having seen episodes of “Mary Hartman” on TV-Land, I think the controversy over it seems overblown now; “Soap” however still stands out as a particularly risque show.)
My parents also discontinued our HBO subscription when they found out my brothers & I watched “the Shining” (an R-rated movie) one night when they were out.
“Charlie’s Angels” was forbidden, partly began past it was on at bedtime of 10am (my older brothers weren’t allowed to watch it either though).
I was more or less without restriction, watching the Simpsons was a family activity in my house (I still pause everything just to watch the Simpsons) and I was pretty young at the time, like maybe 6. The only issue we had was with Ren and Stimpy, but me and my sister were allowed to watch it because my dad liked it. Interestingly enough after a while me and my sister stopped watching it anyway, because it had gotten too stupid for us. South Park was never an issue, I never really wanted to watch it anyway.
Phase42: Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! I’m so glad that at least one other person was banned from watching Speed Racer! After all, only one person (except when Racer X was in the episode) ever made it back alive. At least that was Mom’s logic. Anyhow, all it ever made me do was seek out the show at friend’s houses. To her credit, she bought me the Hot Wheels version of the Mach 5 a few years ago (at the ripe old age of very late twentysomething).
Soap was also forbidden, but I can’t imagine that I would have liked the show as a kid.
***The Newlywed Game ** * was strictly forbidden. Again, I don’t think I would have cared for it.
My parents never censored anything I wanted to read, listen to, or watch. I was the only 6th-grader in my school with a subscription to *National Lampoon * (in 1971, when they were still funny.)
I’ve never censored anything my daughter has wanted to watch, either. She can use her own judgement, and I trust her the way my parents trusted me.
My mom initially banned us from watching Happy Days because she read a newspaper article that said that the first episode would include a mention of getting a hickey. She also declared Alice pff-limits because the preview of the premiere featured Tommy, Alice’s son, giving his newly-divorced mother dating advice. When Alice emerged from the bedroom (where she had been dressing for her soon-to-arrive suitor) in a demure outfit, Tommy upbraided her by saying “You’ve gotta show some leg, Mom! You gotta show some cleavage!”
Both of these bans were lifted pretty early in their shows’ respective runs. Indeed, I remember getting upset during summer mornings when I wanted to watch Hollywood Squares, while my brothers and sister all preferred the by-then-all-too-familiar reruns of Richie and the gang. My siblings’ attitude was something like “You’ve seen over 50 Hollywood Squares broadcasts in your life. I have not seen this Happy Days episide 50 times.” Not that I’m still bitter or anything…
A few years before that, Laugh-In was strictly verboten for a multitude of reasons – subversive humor, women in body paint, and generally being “dumb”. Mom (a preacher’s kid who was raised in a racially liberal but otherwise near-puritanical household) also didn’t want us to watch All in the Family, but Dad (who played clarinet and sax in mobbed-up supper clubs, and whose mother called black people “the coloreds” to her dying day in 1996) loved Archie Bunker. So on nights Dad had a job and we were in the house with Mom, we were stuck with the drivel she preferred. When Dad was home, or when Grandma baby-sat, All in the Family got viewed. However, Grandma didn’t think Love American Style was appropriate for impressionable youngsters, while Mom was cool with it because one of the writers was a guy who had lived next door to Mom when she was growing up.
I’m sure there were other shows that were banned as I was growing up, so I’ll quite possibly be doing a follow-up post to this one.
My parents didn’t censor what we watched. They just put us to bed before anything really interesting came on, I think.
My brother, who is a year younger than Merkwurdigliebe wasn’t allowed to watch Beavis and Butthead either, and he thought it was soooo unfair that I could, but I’m six years older and have never set the lawn on fire, ruined an above-ground pool, scratched writing onto a neighbor’s car or did any of the other weird things he did up until that point - my parents were afraid it’d give him more stupid ideas.
I wasn’t allowed to watch Twin Peaks, but I don’t know why. I thought it was because of the time of night it was on, but wasn’t Northern Exposure on that late as well? All I remember is asking about watching it and them saying dismissively " You wouldn’t like it." Maybe they thought it’d give me nightmares or something.
When I was 10, headed toward 11, I couldn’t watch the 1980-81 season of *Saturday Night Live *, at least until Chevy Chase guest hosted, then rights were reinstated. Not that I had cared when it was banned after the first fifteen minutes of the first episode of the season…it was racy, and STILL sucked. Mom thought she was banning me from watching it for the raciness, I wasn’t interested anyway because of the suck factor. It was too hard of a wean getting away from the Not Ready For Prime Time Players as it was.
Mmm…the other bannings were movies: the last five minutes of Carrie when it was on network TV when I was nine (yeah, I don’t get it either…Carrie has a much more explicit problem in the first five minutes, but the last five were the ones that were supposed to disturb me?), and all of The Exorcist.
Interestingly enough, Mom made up for all this pretty quickly within about a year of my turning 11. Saw a lot of late night showings of Hitchcock films (like The Birds and Psycho, not just with permission, but with her active encouragement. I saw the first NBC seasons of SCTV, and when one of the independent channels started doing all-night weekend showings of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, Mom really encouraged my staying up to watch them, quite probably and understandably thinking that I’d never get to see them again.
Like a lot of people posting, I was more of a reader and a music fan, so no rules were imposed about Three’s Company and the like, since it was just background noise for me anyway. Having said that, at the time Mom was one of those people who actually said things like, “but why do you want to get another Pat Metheny album? You already have one” (as if they all sounded exactly alike, whatever the artist or era or genre…an argument she later dropped after I used it regarding her great love of Alabama’s collected works).
No restrictions. When I was two, my father pinned a Mork and Mindy poster on my bedroom wall. I loved it. I watched Love Boat, Dukes of Hazzard, Three’s Company, whatever else was on.
When I was about 10 or 11, the Simpsons came out… and though it was on much too late for me to stay up and watch it, my father actually *taped * it for me to watch - he thought it was clever, harmless humour. They allowed me to watch In Living Color in that era, too. I loved Jim Carrey and Keenan Ivory Wayans.
I was also allowed to listen to whatever music I wanted - that’s where my father and I actually locked horns. I was only 10 years old, and he thought I was far too impressionable to be listening to such drivel as New Kids on the Block. He enjoyed a deep sigh of relief when I “outgrew” them a couple years later.
Considering I was put into the “gifted” class at age 11, I don’t think all that “bad” television had any adverse effect on my young mind. I was shocked when a girl in my class told me there were shows she wasn’t allowed to watch, such as the Simpsons. I thought she was being punished! :eek:
Back in the 70s and 80s my dad was convinced shows showing blacks and whites as friends was brainwashing us into believing it was actually ok. So watching any shows that featured interracial mixing or harmony was disallowed (at least while he was home to know about it). He still believes there is going to be a race war someday, a la Nat Turner’s Bloody Rebellion.
My parents showed absolutely zero concern about what we watched on TV, with one exception (more on that in a moment). I’d be sitting on the couch next to my mother watching The Exorcist on HBO; or that torture scene in Roots; or whatever.
BUT, for some inexplicable reason she had a hissy fit if I ever tuned on Fantasy Island.
In fact, it became something of a Sunday-night tradition in my family. Every Sunday we’d go to my grandparents’ for Sunday dinner. Afterwards, the kids (my brother and I) would go to the living room to watch TV while the adults played cards and quickly lost interest in us.
So we’d site there, bored senseless, waiting for Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom to end so we could watch The Wonderful World of Disney. Then, after that was over, I’d ever-so-sneakily make sure no one was watching, and I’d ever-so-sneakily shimmy over to the TV (this was before the days of remote control) and ever-so-sneakily turn it over to FI.
And then I’d fall fast asleep before the first half hour was over. :rolleyes:
My father wouldn’t let me watch little house on the prairie. He thought it was unrealistically upbeat and would simply confuse my sister and I about our own life. “Dad, how come the Ingles don’t live in a cardboard box too?” Then it was also past our beating and family devotional time.
I’m glad to know my parents weren’t the only unsufferable freaks about this stuff. The list of things I was allowed to watch is way shorter than what I wasn’t allowed. I’ll be 28 next Saturday and technically I’m probably still not allowed to watch The Simpsons. It was weird; they rarely objected to violence (unless it was monster-related, which would make it satanic, including Count Chockula), but any sexual content or bad language was right out. :rolleyes:
Born just barely in 1954! 
I grew up in the '70s and the ONLY thing I can think that was totally banned from my viewing was the TV “Helter Skelter” movie. I was SO mad because a friend of mine (same age, but he had older sibs) got to watch it.
“Happy Days” was okay in our house because of the “moral episodes” like not to smoke, or it’s okay to wear glasses and Fonzi getting a library card. My parents dissueded shows like “Green Acres” and “Gilligan’s Island.” My mom didn’t like “One Day at a Time” becasuse she didn’t like Bonnie Franklin’s acting.
My ex (who also grew up in the '70s) wasn’t allowed to go to the movie “Grease” becuase it was rated PG. A good friend of mine wasn’t allowed to watch reruns of the '60s “Batman” show; his mom thought it was too violent and had homosexual overtones.
The only TV show my mother tried to outright ban me and my brother from watching was “Diff’rent Strokes” and it was because of the paternalistic liberal fantasy the show espoused of two street smart black boys from Harlem going to live with the permissive white millionaire employer of a MAID who somehow convinced her boss to adopt her two sons as his own kids when she died. My mother hated, hated, hated, HATED the premise and forbade my brother and I to watch… which, of course, only made the show that more inticing to us. If she had just watched it with us and panned it – about how formulaic and stupid it really was – I probably would have quit watching sooner.
We weren’t allowed to watch (and would get a beating from our father for doing so) Three’s Company due to sexuality and, get this now, G.I. Joe due to the violence. :rolleyes:
That’s some parenting for ya.
Reading this thread, it seems a lot of the restrictions were arbitrary and based on what the parents did or didn’t like rather than being a bad influence.
We got a TV back in 1953, when I was 3, but the only programmes we were allowed to watch were the children’s hour - I remember only ‘the Lone Ranger’ and ‘Champion the wonder horse’ … and, for some reason we were allowed ‘Sunday night at the London Palladium’. At boarding school the only things we were allowed to watch were Kennedy and Churchill’s funerals - the headmaster brought his TV into the assembly hall for the occasions.
I think this was why we never even bought a TV until I was nearly 40 - my late husband preferred music and Radio 4 - but then he suddenly rekindled a long lost interest in Trek, bought a TV and video, and turned me into a trekkie too - we watched TNG and DS9 so many times.
I don’t know what I’d do without it now though - since I’m living on my own and disabled.