What TV shows did you watch as a kid?

I was raised on TV shows like Gilligan’s island and the Brady Bunch. My reruns included I Love Lucy and the Honeymooners and the Dick Van Dyke show. My Saturday morning cartoons were Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Sesame Street was the new show of the bunch. Because I’m Canadian, I watched Mister Dressup and the Friendly Giant and Kukla,Fran and Ollie. There were only 3 channels, and I was the remote control.

I was born in 1965,which makes me one of the oldest possible Gen Xers.  It was a far more ‘innocent ‘ time, but there were some horrible things happening in small town Canada in those days, too ,like serial killing of young girls and genocide in indigenous schools. Small towns were where sexual predators were hiding.  While some would call the TV, I grew up on classic TV, I look back on it as just another lie from my childhood, meant to sugarcoat what was actually happening to children . It was the era before TV began looking at the tougher conversations. Before After-school specials,before Diffrent Strokes and the episode where Arnold met a predator in the bicycle shop. Before helicopter, parenting was even a thought. We played games like lawn darts, and our parks had swings that were just a piece of rubber suspended by rusty chains and slides made from metal that took layers of skin from us during the summer months. Many of us spent the hours between after school and the time our parents got home from work at home alone, blissfully ignorant of the fact that we were prey. It’s a wonder that any of us survived. This means that those of us who did are likely the strongest  people on the planet .