But I don’t know! I don’t know what the dynamics of middle-high school was in the 50s-60s! Maybe people were too busy worrying about getting drafted to go around saying, “One of these days!! POW ZOOM!!!”
And if the answer is yes…how obscure did you/they get? Cause I mean, in the 70’s we’d quote something as obscure as ‘Carter Country’* Or Benson on “Soap”**
If anyone cares, I was inspired by watching a series of clips of Major Hochstetter on Hogans Heroes saying “Who is this man???!!”
As a 7th grader in the mid-60s, I can remember us using “Bat-whatever” as a catchphrase anytime we could. “How’d you do on the Science Bat-test?” A couple of years later, we were telling each other to “Sock it to me.”
The Honeymooners aired from 1955 to 1959, long after the Korean War and long before we started sending troops to Vietnam, a period of peace other than the Cold War. So being drafted wasn’t a big concern. Though those damned communists were!
Same with the 60’s when I grew up. In the late '60’s we were aware of the Vietnam War, but it was waaaay over there and we were waaaay to young to be worried about being drafted. In the early 70’s, when it seems like Vietnam would never end, I asked a friend what he would do when he turned 18 and he said he’d run to Canada. I said I’d probably join him.
My childhood in the '60’s was like any other. As pre-teens we were blissfully unaware or concerned about anything other than homework and what we were going to do on the weekends and summer. As Kent_Clark said, “Bat-something” was ubiquitous, though I couldn’t stand the show. So were phrases like “I see nuthing!” and whatever was said on the previous night’s shows.
As for obscure references, I’m sure I said things that the majority of my friends didn’t get because being the much younger last child, I was forced to watch shows that my older siblings did. If I referenced something from “adult” shows like The Outer Limits or One Step Beyond, few of my friends were allowed or inclinded to watch them.
This is local to Hawaii, but “Mr. Checkers!!!” and “Super Spy from Pigstyvania!” from the afternoon kid’s show, Checkers and Pogo were catch phrases everyone in grade school knew.
Edit: Bottom line, if the reference was obscure, I probably don’t remember it because it bombed.
In the mid-'60’s, catch phrases from TV show Get Smart were very, very popular. From Wikipedia:
The show generated a number of popular catchphrases during its run, including “would you believe…”, "missed it by that much ", “sorry about that, Chief”, “the old (such-and-such) trick”, “…and loving it”, and “I asked you not to tell me that”.
I remember the “Bat-” stuff, especially people saying “See you tomorrow, same Bat time, same Bat channel!” Here are a few others :
“Just the facts, ma’am.” (Dragnet)
“Sorry about that, chief.” (Get Smart)
“An’ a one, an’ a two!” (Lawrence Welk)
“Say goodnight, Gracie.” (Burns and Allen)
“Say, Baba Louie, you all right?” “S’all right!” (Quick Draw McGraw)
“And away we go!” (The Jackie Gleason Show)
From Laugh-In:
“The devil made me do it!” (Flip Wilson)
“Here come da judge!”
“You bet your sweet bippy!”
Hogan’s Heroes - “I know nothing”
Get Smart - “Sorry about that Chief”
The Adventures of Superman - “Sorry about that chief” - “Don’t call me chief!”
The Honeymooners - “To the moon Alice!”
Most of the examples I instantly recognize. Most are from people like me, who were born in the late 50s & did middle school & high school in the very last of the 1960s and most of the 1970s.
That’s 10-15 years later than the OP was talking about. Someone attending high school in the early 1950s was born in the late 1930s. Folks in middle school in the late 60s were born in the late 50s. Those were much less media-besotted eras.
Though as a kid in the early 60s I can remember my Mom using catchphrases from the radio shows of her childhood in the late 1930 & WWII era.
I remember the many Get Smart catchphrases quoted upthread. Also “I know nothing” from Hogan’s Heroes (and another from HH, which I can’t recall the context of: “Chop, chop, chop”.)
Commercials contributed at least as many. “Try it, you’ll like it”. “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” (both from Alka-Seltzer ads). Mennen Skin Bracer contributed “Thanks, I needed that”–whenever someone was slapped, there was a race to say it first.
When I was in grade school in the 1960s, a kid came to class with a black eye. The teacher asked him what happened, and in response to his answer, she replied, “Oh, OK. I thought you’d rather fight than switch”, a reference to a Tareyton cigarettes ad campaign.
Another, from Hawaii Five-O: “Be here. Aloha”. Jack Lord would say it to wrap up his description of the following week’s show. As recently as 1983, a math prof said it to us on the last day of class, after announcing when the final exam would be.
And, first of all, walk where we will, we cannot help hearing from every side a phrase repeated with delight, and received with laughter, by men with hard hands and dirty faces, by saucy butcher lads and errand-boys, by loose women, by hackney coachmen, cabriolet-drivers, and idle fellows who loiter at the corners of streets. Not one utters this phrase without producing a laugh from all within hearing. It seems applicable to every circumstance, and is the universal answer to every question; in short, it is the favourite slang phrase of the day, a phrase that, while its brief season of popularity lasts, throws a dash of fun and frolicsomeness over the existence of squalid poverty and ill-requited labour, and gives them reason to laugh as well as their more fortunate fellows in a higher stage of society.[2]
Wiki also has a list of catchphrases. The oldest phrase on their list is from 1930.
My parents had a lot of catchphrases, which I later learned were quotations from movies, comic strips, and radio shows from the 1930s and 1940s.
Lots of children’s shows spawned catchphrases. Beany & Cecil, Captain Kangaroo, Howdy Doody. Davy Crockett’s frontier talk was copied and so were the cowboys on the westerns. And the kids’ space shows created slang terms that were everywhere. Here’s an article in Life magazine, September 1, 1952. Scroll to page 79. I’ve found lots of space talk articles in many magazines.
The one that always trips me up is “making love.” Today that’s a euphemism for straight out sex. Back then, though, it was equivalent to “pitching woo,” strictly words. So people kept making love in public and I kept doing double takes. They’re doing what?!?
I, as a child of the 70s, use this. My dad had to explain it to my mother. They are the same age and even grew up in the same tiny town.
The other one I heard was about the peanut gallery, from Howdy Doody. Fortunately/unfortunately it was on television again in the late 70s, so I got to see it myself. I think it was part of the Smothers Brothers or Hee Haw.
I first noticed this in a Three Stooges episode, in which they’re consoling a married woman who fears her husband doesn’t love her anymore. Moe recommends that she make her husband jealous by “find(ing) another man to make love to you”.
If I did something bad, my parents would say to me threatingly, “Tain’t funny, McGee!” which I much later found out to be a catchphrase from Fibber McGee and Molly.. They also used “That ain’t the way I heer’d [sic] it.”
Of course, I’m sure kids were already using “Hi-yo Silver, away!” from the days of the Lone Ranger radio show, and saying “That’s all folks!” and “What’s up, doc?” when Looney Tunes were shorts before the main feature.
