Childhood TV

Cindy Procter-King posted about her childhood TV addictions, and that made me think about what I watched growing up. First of all, we were the last people in America to get a color TV. I don't think we got a color TV till I was close to college age, in the mid-eighties. So I watched everything on an old black and white television. And I wasn't allowed to watch much, anyway. But here are the shows I truly loved:

M*A*S*H. There was a point when I could instantly tell what season an episode was in by listening to the first few bars of the theme song. I also had most of the dialogue memorized. I was absolutely bonkers about this show for years. I have most of the DVD sets even now.

Doctor Who (the Tom Baker series). This didn't rerun endlessly the way M*A*S*H did, and I don't even know if I saw every Tom Baker episode there was-- it ran on PBS at odd hours of the day, and I was lucky to see as much as I did. I adored Tom Baker and at one point tried to learn to knit so I could make myself a long, long striped scarf. When I tried to watch one of these episodes recently, the horrifically bad effects just about ruined my enjoyment of the show, but Tom Baker is still awesome.

Battlestar Galactica. Apollo was boring, but Starbuck was my hero. I guess I liked bad boys.

The Hardy Boys. Sean Cassidy, baby! But in retrospect I don't remember a darn thing about the show except for him, so it must not have been really memorable.

Shows I watched, but wasn't necessarily rabid about, included:

Gilligan's Island (my parents thought this show was wildly funny for some reason). It reran on the station that would later become CBN (this was in Virginia Beach, where I grew up), and the good Christians in charge of the station carefully bleeped the word "beer" so it wouldn't corrupt young minds. Seriously. I am not making this up.
The Brady Bunch
Superman (the old show from the fifties)
Leave it to Beaver
Lassie (which left me with an undying love for large fluffy herding dogs)