A couple of people sent me this for the Geezer file. I have to disagree because the reruns have never left us. Otherwise Lucretia wouldn’t be old enough to know what this was. Neither would I. Neither, I assume, would Barney, or the two people who sent this to me.
I also can’t go along with “violent,” because Ralph is all bluster and nobody takes any of it seriously.
I’m not sure I’d call it misogynist — but if it were, Alice’s comment about Ralph’s weight wouldn’t make it any less so.
Comics I Don't Understand 
It’s not misogynist. He’s not threatening her because she’s a woman. He treats Norton the same way. It’s abusive, sure, but it’s not misogyny. And her body-shaming isn’t a sign of a healthy relationship either, regardless of what that lady says.
I think it might need a geezer tag, though. There are far fewer free-to-air channels playing reruns like they used to back in the good old days. And those are reruns of Seinfeld and Friends and newer things. Things in colour. I think, outside of specialty cable channels, there are few, if any opportunities to see The Honeymooners in most markets.
Yes, it is violent. He may never have done it, and we all may have KNOWN he wasn’t going to do it, the threat is still there. Psychological violence is just as bad as physical violence.
Yes, it is misogynist. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Even tho I realize these were ‘different times’, I see The Honeymooners with today’s eyes, and no longer think the show is amusing, as I once did; it’s now cringeworthy.
“because the reruns have never left us”
I think they have. When did you last see a rerun. You might find a service that streams them but I don’t think they have been on any network station in 30 years. Neither have any episodes of I Love Lucy. I think nerds will always have a vague idea what it is (Although I’ve only seen one episode and only once 35 years ago) but I’m not sure what regular 35 and unders would know. My 24 – 31 year old friends know that there was a show called I Love Lucy but don’t know what actress played Lucy or what the character name of her husband was and they don’t know any other characters or what the premise was. What’s more, at pub trivia they would consider that a tough question and believe it unreasonable for anyone to actually know.
What’s the big deal? Kids have been watching Flintstones reruns for approximately forever. Changing the names from “Fred” and “Wilma” to “Ralph” and “Alice” isn’t fooling anybody.
Oddly, only today I saw an episode of Pointless (UK TV teatime quiz series), in one round of which were questions about the odd middle names of people. An allusive description of the person was shown, plus their first and last initials, and one of them was L (Desiree) B and something like “American comedian and, with her husband, TV producer” – this being Lucille Ball. I remember seeing the show in the 60s or 70s but I couldn’t tell you any of the plots or subsidiary people.
In this quiz, the questions – a whole range of stuff: football, politics, the periodic table, geography – have all in andavnce been put to an online group of 100 individuals to answer within 100 seconds; sometime a lot of these people, maybe 77 or 91, know the answer, sometimes only 19 or 3 or even none. The contestants on the show – teamed in pairs (friends, relations, work colleagues) have to get a correct answer, but have to get the answer the least number of the anonymous panel got. So if they get the answer wrong they get 100 points, if they go for a safeish answer (in this case, for instance, “US President” – F (Delano) R ) they might get 50 or so. And if they know a very obscure answer and get it right they get zero. A pointless answer gets £250 added to the prize pot. The highest score in each round gets that team booted off; there’s a head-to-head with the final two teams, then the last standing pair go for the prize money. “Pointless Celebrities” is a celeb version of the show, done for charity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5GR3K4gqW0 is a reel of bloopers and best bits and out-takes, presented by the hosts. It’s an affable show, where the hosts chat to the contestants about what they do in job and spare time and dig up some oddities (one graphic designer said he had a collection of 1000 airline sick bags, inluding one from North Korea).
Huh. My comment disappeared entirely. Let’s try again.
Not misogyny because he is not threatening her because she is a woman. He makes similar threats to Norton. It’s not misogyny unless you believe that violence against men is okay, but not against women. He’s a violent, blustering bully and is abusive to anyone he thinks he can intimidate. Her body-shaming is hardly appropriate behaviour, but it is socially acceptable to berate fat people.
I was saying the same thing woozy has said. Outside of specialty cable channels, free-to-air channels don’t do reruns very often. When they do, it’s Seinfeld and Friends or other more recent shows. Something in colour. Back in my childhood, all the two dozen or so channels we got would rerun old shows during their off-peak hours and most every one of those channels had a unique selection of reruns. A few, like Gilligan’s Island, were on a few times per day, spread across different channels, but most other shows appeared just once in the selection of channels. So, I think the concept of reruns, as we knew them, is beginning to enter geezer territory.
We still get regular reruns of Dad’s Army (1968-77) on the BBC on Sundays around 7.30-8.00, and there are three Xmas-themed episodes coming up over the festive period. True, the earlier black and white episodes don’t often show up.
On some of the smaller (but still free-to-air) channels like Yesterday we get other 1970s BBC shows like The Two Ronnies, Porridge, ‘Allo ‘Allo, Open All Hours shown regularly.
One issue with 1960s shows is that in those days professional videotape was a very expensive resource and people didn’t realise there would be a market for repeats of these shows within a few years, let alone 40 or 50 years, so the original tapes were often wiped and reused. Sometimes old lost episodes of shows turn up when tapes sent abroad for screening overseas get rediscovered.
Narmitaj, I have to say I find Pointless to be darn near that. I like Richard Osman when he’s on Would I Lie to You or The Unbelievable Truth and other panel shows, but I think he’s not allowed to shine on Pointless. As for Armstrong, he’s cracking in Armstrong and Miller, but come across as supercilious on Pointless. When it comes to posh gits, I much prefer David Mitchell.
Huh…would you look at that. My original comment is there now.
She calls it misogynist because of Ralph’s comment to Alice. When Alice stands up for herself, she realizes the show isn’t against women, it’s against everyone equally.
I have never seen even part of an episode of the Honeymooners, except for the very brief clip that appeared (twice) in the original “Back to the Future” movie, and similar extremely short “reference” segments. I don’t think the series was ever offered as a rerun on any of the channels we had access to, despite a wide variety of other (mostly later) black & white shows that we did watch all too much of, such as Addams Family, Beverly Hillbillies, Dennis the Menace, Gilligan’s Island, Green Acres, I Love Lucy, Mr. Ed, Munsters, My Favorite Martian, My Three Sons, Petticoat Junction, et cetera ad nauseum.
Nick at Nite has never aired The Honeymooners, and that was a major source of old TV reruns.
It’s not violent because he would NEVER hit her, she KNOWS that, and he knows she knows that. And it’s not misogynist because Alice has it all over Ralph.
The Honeymooners worked because Ralph and Alice were actually crazy about each other. Hence the name. It wasn’t the Bickersons or the Lockhorns.
The Flintstones was actually LESS imitative than most of the Hanna Barbera cartoons, mainly because Mel Blanc refused to imitate Ed Norton. So it became reminiscent of the Honeymooners instead of a dead imitation. The real Ed Norton imitation was Yogi Bear. And Doggie Daddy was Jimmy Durante. And Top Cat was Phil Silvers.
Huckleberry Hound = Andy Griffith was the first of the Hanna-Barbera imitations I picked up on.
Those cable channels that run old shows and such are swell if you already want to see the show, but they’re not like the reruns of our youth. We had perhaps a couple of dozen channels to choose from and we watched those shows because they were on. It was reruns or turn off the TV and go outside. Today’s youngsters have so many other options that they will never watch a rerun of It Takes a Thief or Petticoat Junction again.
Nobody’s been sent to the moon since Princess Luna on “My Little Pony.”
“Outside of specialty cable channels, free-to-air channels don’t do reruns very often.”
This informaytion is severely out-of-date, as there are (and have been for over a decade) whole broadcast networks that are nothing BUT reruns. When the FCC made us switch from analog to digital televisions, one of the things they did for the broadcast stations to make up for having to buy all-new equipment was they gave each station TWO channels, and the rerun-channels quickly moved in to fill up all these new broadcast stations with programming.
For an example (and one of the earliest I came into contact with) there’s “AntennaTV”. If you’ve been enjoying cable or satellite service and 200+ channels of programming, you didn’t notice. But if you got by for the last ten years with over-the-air programming, you would have run into this.
All-rerun channels have low viewership numbers, but also close to zero programming cost.
It’s funny how we fixate on the early years of “The Honeymooners”, when there were some episodes in color (with some of the cast replaced) that were included as part of The Jackie Gleason Show in the ’60s.
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/the-honeymooners-color-episodes-to-air-again-color-television-history.17432/
Colorized episodes of “I Love Lucy” have been broadcast on a major US network in recent years:
https://www.cbs.com/shows/holiday_central/news/1009566/i-love-lucy-christmas-special-adds-a-newly-colorized-episode-for-2019-on-cbs/
We get Antenna TV through our cable co as well as a variety of other channels that show reruns from the 1950s though the 1970s. Happened on “My Favorite Martian” a week or so ago.
Reruns originally were bad as kinescopes were made of the show as it was broadcast – a movie camera was pointed at a television screen while the show was broadcast. When Desi Arnaz came up with the 3 camera idea to film TV shows – they had not wanted to move to NY from CA to do “I Love Lucy” that changed and reruns looked good. (Shows would be done live in NY and the kinescopes would be shown in CA 3 hours later to adjust for the time difference – not sure what they did for Central and Rocky Mountain time.)
When I was young TV shows did close to 26 episodes (less some specials that took their time slots) and then they were rerun in the summer. The concept of reruns going on infinitely was not something that I think they considered at the time.
As late as the 1970s and 80s when “WKRP” and “Bosom Buddies” were on the future of reruns were not understood. As a result WKRP had a problem in reruns with a number of the songs played by the station as they had not allowed for same in their copyright contracts for use of the songs and Bosom Buddies could not use it’s original theme song due to same. In addition actors and actresses are not always paid residuals for the reruns as same was not negotiated originally.
The main reason some shows “live on” as reruns and other don’t is related to syndication. The preference in syndication is to “strip” shows… put them on at the same time every weekday. That means that you have to have a large number of episodes, so that you don’t run out right away. If you have 25 episodes of a show, that’s only 5 weeks’ worth of daily playings. You need more like 100 -120 episodes, which is about 5 seasons of first-run episodes. Shows that ran that long got syndicated, and shows that didn’t run that long tended to not get syndicated, or get weekend-only slots for rebroadcast, which isn’t memorable.
Does ‘in syndication’ mean the same as ‘going into reruns forevermore’? Something I’d read or Hubby (a great TV fan – if it moves, he’ll watch it) mentioned about a series going to episode 100 to get ‘into syndication’, which means money coming in every time the show is rerun. Don’t know if this is true; didn’t care enough to verify.
That is pretty much what it means, Andréa. Shows can be syndicated with any number of episodes (provided the production company is willing to offer the show), though they are most attractive for syndication when they have 80-100 episodes or more. Shows can enter syndication even if they are still airing new episodes on the network. Television studios love syndication because it generates (sometimes huge) revenues with practically no costs.
Syndication is so profitable (even today) that networks will often even keep middling shows on the air long enough to hit an attractive number of episodes for syndication, especially if the network itself owns the rights to the show and did not buy them from another studio. It is also not uncommon for shows to lose money or break even in their first run and only become profitable once in syndication.
In addition to reruns, syndication also covers first-run shows that are sold to individual local television stations and not to whole networks. These shows are typically daytime talk shows, game shows, judge shows, entertainment-focused news magazines, and such. There was a time when scripted shows entered first-run syndication (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Baywatch, and Mama’s Family, for example, achieved significant popularity using this model) but that ended in the early 2000s as cable cut into much of their audience.
” Shows can enter syndication even if they are still airing new episodes on the network. Television studios love syndication because it generates (sometimes huge) revenues with practically no costs.”
Generally speaking, networks will have exclusivity for NEW shows, but once a show has enough episodes for syndication, it will be. So, Big Bang Theory generated huge piles of money in syndication for seasons 1-5 while season 6 was still airing on CBS affiliates, and the Simpsons has been in syndication for almost 25 years straight. Almost as long as “Law and Order”.
Nearly all shows lose money in first-run broadcast. The network doesn’t pay as much to air the show as it costs to produce. The shows that make it to syndication pay the bills for all the ones that didn’t.
” There was a time when scripted shows entered first-run syndication (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Baywatch, and Mama’s Family, for example, achieved significant popularity using this model) but that ended in the early 2000s as cable cut into much of their audience.”
Stations want shows that have proven that they can draw eyeballs, and tend not to go with unproven shows. Star Trek had a rabid fanbase that was ready to sit and watch more Star Trek. Scripted shows are expensive to produce and difficult to market in first-run syndication. But there’s huge piles of money. Judge Judy makes millions of dollars from being on TV, and the people who bring their “cases” to the show make hundreds. The prize money in game shows is often a lesser expense than paying the hosts and the crew, and the producer makes the most of all… if the show finds an audience.
There was a time when syndicated shows running while new episodes were would have their titles changed.
“There was a time when syndicated shows running while new episodes were would have their titles changed.”
Must have been a long time ago, because I’ve never heard of that. Can you offer some examples?
@SingaporeBill – if Richard Osman feels he is not “allowed” to shine, he has only himself to blame, after a fashion. The show was invented by him and some colleagues at an independent production company. He took the role of sitting-down commenter in the demo pitch to the BBC without intending that should be his position in the broadcast series, but the BBC honchos liked his style and asked him to do it for real (previously, he had always been behind the camera; this started his front-of-camera career). He then sought out Alexander Armstrong, a university friend who had already turned down another game show as he didn’t want to get too high a profile as a presenter – he’s also a comedian and singer, of course – but Pointless then went and got a rather higher profile than expected, playing just before the 6 O’Clock News on BBC1.
@James the only case that I remember was “The Dick Van Dyke Daytime Show”, episodes rerun during the day (five days per week) at a time that new episodes were appearing in the evening (at a rate of no more than one per week).
I was very young at the time (that is, the mid-1960’s), but I remember well being impressed that someone could be so big a star that he had a “daytime show” as well as a prime-time show. For all I know, the daytime reruns had that name only on our station in Cleveland, Ohio. But it’s possible that this is an example of what Brian mentioned. I can’t think of others, though.
One conceivable rationale would be to distinguish viewership for first-run episodes from viewership for reruns in the same week, for the purposes of “ratings” in a given television market.
I can’t resist adding this fact:
Most of the time I don’t have access to television of any kind, so I watch The DVD Show on DVD.