Undertaker > Hogan

[PeteF3]

I believe I've also read that The Brady Bunch was also more popular in the late 80s than it was during its first airing.

Unlikely. The TV movie did well, but the re-launched series died a death even quicker than the one in the early 80s. There was nostalgia for one-offs. Not true popularity to sustain a show.

 

I think Loss was talking about syndie reruns. I don't have any hard data but I've heard the same thing--the show wasn't any kind of ratings monster in first-run, but had a resurgence in repeats, just like Star Trek though obviously to a lesser degree.

[Jimmy Redman]

I think the whole "watching shows from decades ago just because they're on telly" thing is true of every generation. I was born in the 90s and I still grew up watching the Brady Bunch, old Scooby Doo cartoons, Get Smart, the Golden Girls, 'Allo 'Allo, Blackadder, the Addams Family...a bunch of shows that were made years and sometimes decades before the late 90s. My favourite childhood movies were the original Star Wars trilogy and Airplane.

 

Now with the explosion of the internet and what have you, it might become different in the future. But as goodhelmet said above, it's not about the age of the show itself, but about exposure to it. If you were exposed to older shows as a kid (and liked them of course), you watched them. Now with the myriad of choices available, I think exposure is just becoming more and more of a conscious choice. But that doesn't mean people won't be exposed, or expose themselves to things that aren't completely up-to-date. Five years from now, do you not think 'young people' will be watching the shit out of shows like the Sopranos, Seinfeld, The Wire, early Simpsons, etc.? They will be 10-20 years out of date by that point, but people will still watch them, if they are exposed to them and like them.

[PeteF3]

I did record every episode of the old Batman series when it was on that Christian network.

My brother did the same thing! IIRC the show was on the channel that eventually became the Family Channel and aired weekday mornings when we were at school

 

Add me to the list--it was the Family Channel by the time I was watching it. And of course now I wish I'd kept and converted the tapes since a DVD release seems all but hopeless in the near future.

 

It's almost scary how into old things I was (in the same timeframe that Will talks about):

 

- Watched as much Nick at Nite as I did Nickelodeon, and it should be noted that Nick itself was still almost entirely second-hand material--minus the game shows--until the early '90s. My dad was obsessed with the old '50s Superman as I was with Batman, so I saw most episodes of that also.

 

- Most music I listened to was oldies radio, or my Dad's record collection which consisted of the same material. Never was a big MTV watcher.

 

- I actually did have access to old '50s wrestling, thanks to some commercially available tapes my father had. And some '70s-era wrestling books which had title histories. Between that and seeing the various History of WWF Championship Coliseum Videos I knew way more about the Backlund/Graham/Bruno era than was healthy for a child of my age.

 

- I watched almost no first-run '80s primetime TV, nor did anyone else in my family. My mother watched Cheers and I absorbed a little of that at the time. That stood as about the only exception to penetrate my household until the rise of The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and to a lesser degree Frasier and Home Improvement.

 

- Sports? Ohio State was at or near its lowest point in the late '80s and the Browns and Bengals were breaking hearts all over the state. And the less said about the Indians... Meanwhile I was consuming these books written in the late '70s for every NFL team that my school library carried. I could name most of the 1968 Jets lineup but I probably didn't know who Ken O'Brien was. I wasn't totally sheltered, but my modern-day knowledge was mostly limited to quarterbacks, Browns and Bengals skill players, and whoever had Starting Lineup figures made of them.

 

- Movies...like Will, it was down to a case-by-case basis. That said, most of my childhood movie love was directed towards Disney, Don Bluth, and the Godzilla franchise. More old shit.

 

I'm not the guy to ask about what younger folk are exposed to these days. That said, my gut instinct tells me that the Internet does in fact make exposure easier rather than harder. They have access to just about any piece of music and many TV shows and movies that they want, rather than be subject to the whim of a TV schedule. They just need an incentive to view it, and that can still come accidentally through a Tweet or a shared link, just as it did through channel-surfing back in the day.

[ohtani's jacket]

In New Zealand, shows like Get Smart, The Munsters and The Addams Family would fill that 17:00-19:00 time slot along with stuff like Dr. Who and children's serials, while the morning time slot before the afternoon soaps might be filled with WKRP in Cincinnati, The Bob Newhart Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show or what have you. These days, they're filled with stuff like Friends or The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but I think the real point is whether kids today watch as much TV as we did.

 

When I was a kid, I watched TV pretty much from the time I got home until I went to bed and you watched whatever was on. If I stayed home from school, I watched all the daytime stuff. If I was a kid today, I'd probably be on the computer.

[JerryvonKramer]

The Undertaker is ranked as the 2nd biggest celebrity in the world in a study published by Cambridge University Press and this is the shit we're talking about?

 

Just in case you missed it:

 

 

!!!!

[cheapshot]

I love this thread.

[Matt D]

As a kid in 1986 or whatever, I freaking loved the Monkees. For the first few years of my life, that, Danger Mouse, and He-Man were my favorite shows. And maybe when I skewed just a bit younger Bananaman.

[cheapshot]

As a kid in 1986 or whatever, I freaking loved the Monkees. For the first few years of my life, that, Danger Mouse, and He-Man were my favorite shows. And maybe when I skewed just a bit younger Bananaman.

I have yet to hear anyone come out and say they were a fan of the Little House On The Prairie re-runs. Hardly surprising. Those re-runs were all over early morning C4 schedules for years here in the UK as well.

[Log]

Something I hear at work out of the younger people (early-20's): "How am I supposed to know that? It happened before I was born!"

 

I mean, this is something I hear a LOT. Bugs the shit out of me.

 

I'm fine with people liking whatever they want to like. If you want to be up on the latest stuff and aren't really interested in things from the past, that's great. Just don't act like you can be ignorant of anything that happened before the year you were born.

[cheapshot]

Something I hear at work out of the younger people (early-20's): "How am I supposed to know that? It happened before I was born!"

 

I mean, this is something I hear a LOT. Bugs the shit out of me.

 

I'm fine with people liking whatever they want to like. If you want to be up on the latest stuff and aren't really interested in things from the past, that's great. Just don't act like you can be ignorant of anything that happened before the year you were born.

I liked it recently when people were watching the *I THINK* 15 year re-release of the Titanic movie, they didn't realise it was based on true events and it blew their minds. Lots of examples of this were on twitter at the time. Quite depressing.

[goodhelmet]

The Undertaker is ranked as the 2nd biggest celebrity in the world in a study published by Cambridge University Press and this is the shit we're talking about?

 

Just in case you missed it:

 

 

!!!!

 

I wonder how the data was collected and if it was collected in 2008 when Taker and Edge were the main event of Wrestlemania. That was the first thing I thought of when i saw that list. Also wondering if Vijay Singh won a golf tournament of note around that time.

[cheapshot]

The Undertaker is ranked as the 2nd biggest celebrity in the world in a study published by Cambridge University Press and this is the shit we're talking about?

 

Just in case you missed it:

 

 

!!!!

 

I wonder how the data was collected and if it was collected in 2008 when Taker and Edge were the main event of Wrestlemania. That was the first thing I thought of when i saw that list. Also wondering if Vijay Singh won a golf tournament of note around that time.

 

Vijay Singh was the leading money winner in 2008 and won the FedEx Cup, so it sounds like you've hit the nail on the head as it pertains to that year.

[Matt D]

I make my eleven year old watch TCM all the time. He tends to want to watch TV whenever he can because he gets relatively small amounts of it and he'll take what he can get and enjoy almost anything, so he's seen probably 70 movies that were made before 1970 at this point. I control the horizontal and the vertical and what not. I also had lists of TV and movies from the 70s-00s that I thought he should watch at certain ages (Ducktales, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, The Muppet Show/Fraggle Rock, Bill and Ted's, Original Gundam/Macross/etc). I really came to appreciate older things when I was in high school but it really ought to be fostered by the parents and it's easier than to be exposed to things now with DVDs/Streaming/etc.

[cheapshot]

I make my eleven year old watch TCM all the time. He tends to want to watch TV whenever he can because he gets relatively small amounts of it and he'll take what he can get and enjoy almost anything, so he's seen probably 70 movies that were made before 1970 at this point. I control the horizontal and the vertical and what not. I also had lists of TV and movies from the 70s-00s that I thought he should watch at certain ages (Ducktales, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, The Muppet Show/Fraggle Rock, Bill and Ted's, Original Gundam/Macross/etc). I really came to appreciate older things when I was in high school but it really ought to be fostered by the parents and it's easier than to be exposed to things now with DVDs/Streaming/etc.

You should of shown him Fraggle Rock when he was 6, it would of blown his mind.

[Loss]

John, the point is that a lot of old shows were marketed as new for a second run. The Monkees performed at the MTV Video Music Awards and had second wave of popularity in the mid 80s. The Brady Bunch is a show that became more popular in syndication. I can pull out a "These glasses make me look positively goofy", "His name? George, George Glass" or "Oh my nose!" in just about any setting with just about any age group and get a laugh, because it is probably the most re-aired sitcom of all time. By and large, I agree with you that most people are interested in what's current. That's probably true at least 98% of the time. But there are exceptions and I think we're downplaying the impact of things like syndication, re-runs and parents.

[JerryvonKramer]

I feel like I explained all this stuff perfectly well 6 weeks ago.

[S.L.L.]

I am shocked - SHOCKED - by the notion that people of any age group in any generation gravitate towards things that are readily available rather than things that you have to go out of your way to hear about and find. That's unpossible!

[Marty]

Late to the party, but add me to the list of those really into the old stuff during my childhood years. The Beatles, some 15 to 20 years after they broke up, were something I enjoyed just as much as VideoHits on CBC. Cartoons? Watched The Mighty Hercules, Rocky And Bullwinkle and AstroBoy just as much as Masters Of The Universe and Transformers. Other TV? Full House and Family Matters actually weren't as funny to me as a show like Welcome Back Kotter. Sports and wrestling were different, in that they didn't have the historical pieces on TV like they do today, although I started learning more when Pro Wrestling Plus showed some old stuff. Needless to say, though, I was a growing history nerd from early on.

[anarchistxx]

A lot of it depends on your parents. Mine listened to The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Peter Green and The Band, so that was what I listened to as a young kid. The access point is valid too - The Prodigy, The Fugees, Pulp and others were topping the UK charts back then, so a lot of my memory is listening to that stuff on the radio. Just luck that good music was around in both the home and the chart when I was that age. Didn't stop me also listening to Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, Peter Andre and the Spice Girls either though. You tend to be into whatever you get exposed to.

 

I also had lists of TV and movies from the 70s-00s that I thought he should watch at certain ages

Not into this concept at all though. Kids should discover things organically, not be led by hand into the art their parents consider to be good taste, made to feel guilty if they watch High School Music.

[JerryvonKramer]

I am shocked - SHOCKED - by the notion that people of any age group in any generation gravitate towards things that are readily available rather than things that you have to go out of your way to hear about and find. That's unpossible!

Was this some snarky attempt at lampooning my position on this? If so, go fuck yourself. One of the least considered, most ill thought out contributions anyone has made to this thread to date. Dick.

[tigerpride]

You sure showed him

[jdw]

I am the wrong person to ask John because I actually cared more about old music.

As am I.

 

But you went to school. How much of the kids in your school, from elementary through high school, would regularly talk about an old TV show that was repeated the prior day... or something current?

 

Same with music?

 

Same with movies?

 

Just because we're oddball's who like old shit doesn't mean we can project it onto the mass of kids we grew up with. I don't recall a whole lot of conversations about what Alice and Al The Butcher did the day before, but lots of kids were talking about Cheryl Ladd in a bikini the next day. :/ Or Roots... or Family Ties, etc.

 

John

[jdw]

I believe I've also read that The Brady Bunch was also more popular in the late 80s than it was during its first airing.

Unlikely. The TV movie did well, but the re-launched series died a death even quicker than the one in the early 80s. There was nostalgia for one-offs. Not true popularity to sustain a show.

 

I think Loss was talking about syndie reruns. I don't have any hard data but I've heard the same thing--the show wasn't any kind of ratings monster in first-run, but had a resurgence in repeats, just like Star Trek though obviously to a lesser degree.

 

I've read similar stuff. But it's usually, like the article being quoted, bullshit. :/

 

Star Trek is a bit different: it bombed when it aired. The SciFi watching generation came after. It's "popularity" is that it had:

 

* an original small base of fans who were hated that it was cancelled and obsessively wanted more

* "new" fans who came along after via re-runs... and wanted to see more

 

My brother and I were part of the second group: we were far too young to have watched the original one.

 

What you end up with is a cumulative fan base, which if (like the WWE counting up the "viewers" of all their programs), gives a bit of an artificial number for the popularity.

 

Think along the lines of Dark Side Of The Moon. The thing has sold 40M+ albums. A large % of people who bought that "liked" it. Sure, some folks have dropped dead since the early 70s... but the majority of people who bought the thing are still alive.

 

20M people are fans of Dark Side of the Moon in 2013

2M people bought the album in 1973

Ergo: DSotM is vastly more popular in 2013 than in 1973!

 

Really?

 

If you asked me in the late 80s whether I watched Brady Bunch and liked it, I would have said, "Sure... watched it when I was a kid and liked it." But I wasn't watching it in 1989.

 

It's highly unlikely that the daily viewers of TBB in 1989 were higher than the first run viewers when the show was at it's peak, especially if we factor in the population growth in the country. Someone was just adding up viewer numbers in a week, like adding Raw+SD+NTX and pretending that the same person doesn't watch more than one.

 

John

[jdw]

I don't think anybody is claiming that teenagers and young adults don't prefer the fresh and new. The argument is, in the past, if you wanted to be entertained, there were times you had to watch something old because it was the only option on the TV that was viable at all. Sure, The Brady Bunch was old, but it was better than watching something even older or doing your homework. As a result, you may get into or even like something older because that was your only option.

Understood. Though while we think of today as having 200 options, there actually were more back in the 80s and 70s that folks care to remember. Shit like Family Affair and The Courtship of Eddie's Father was in re-run-o-rama. Lucy was around forever. Andy Griffith was. F-Troop was. Etc. Go deeper into UHF and you'd have a ton of Westerns. Really the same shit as now, and as in the 80s

 

 

Now though, there's always something new and fresh. There's eighteen zillion Youtube channels, Tumblr blogs, and Instagrams to look at. There's no reason to go back to the past because there's a metric ton of new entertainment coming out daily.

Youtube, and other things like it, have done big views of Old Shit. In fact, there's old shit on them that hasn't seen the light of day in ages. You know how we get all hyper about new Lawler Shit or Puro Shit showing up? People hung onto stuff like The Johnny Cash Show and were tossing them up on Youtube before they got their official releases.

 

My point isn't that people, including I, didn't watch it.

 

It's that it rated low for all of our generations relative to what was Current.

 

In 1977 when I was 13, Brady Bunch vs Star Wars as a thing kids talked about? Not close. Brady Bunch vs Happy Days, at it's *peak*? Not even close. Brady Bunch vs Suzanne Somers chest on Three's Company? Not even close.

 

I doubt it was terribly different in any of our generations when we were 13 if we care to recall our school and classmates.

 

John

[jdw]

The Undertaker is ranked as the 2nd biggest celebrity in the world in a study published by Cambridge University Press and this is the shit we're talking about?

 

Just in case you missed it:

 

 

!!!!

Actually, we saw it and thought it was too stupid to comment on. Even the authors wouldn't claim Undertaker was the #2 celeb in the world, or that Cena is #16. Looking at their website:

 

http://www.whoisbigger.com/entity/john_cena

 

http://whoisbigger.com/entity/Dwayne_Johnson

 

Cena and Rock appear to have dropped just a bit.

 

Oh... wait... who is the #2 celeb in the world?

 

http://whoisbigger.com/entity/Curtis_Bush

 

-The Ninth Doctor

 

John