HA! I loved that show also as a kid and I too bought the complete series on DVD and was disappointed. I also bought the Black Sheep series too!
I’m definitely with you on #1.
For #2, I’m the same way, but I’ve done kind of a hybrid of the two. Every DVD and Blu-Ray I own is in fully digital format on an 8TB hard drive that I can stream from with my TVs.
Heh…I bought the complete series of Airwolf because of how much I loved it as a kid. Yeah…it was really a hokey show that only a kid could get into as it turns out.
Tank Builder,
Very good memory.
Number 2 is Commando Cody, Sky Marshall of the Universe. The guy wore a jet pack and flew around chasing bad guys.
Number 4 is Ding Dong School. It started in Chicago but eventually went country wide.
How about this one
Oh yeah, “Combat”.
Vic Morrow as Sergeant “Chip” Saunders.
OOPs- I forgot to mention “Captain Video and his Video Rangers”, a widely popular series on the DuMont network. It was kind of a weird show, with poor, dark kinescope recordings, and strange, dark plots, but sometimes it was interesting to me.
OK I’ll bite and spew some old codger memories in somewhat chronological order…
Riding the 26 miles into town standing next to my mom on the bench seat of our 56 Ford panel truck (man I wish I had that thing now). She had the fastest right arm in the west. If she had to hit the brakes hard, out came her arm to keep us from face planting into the unpadded steel dashboard.
Dad running recap tires on said panel truck
Being turned out of the house to play in the summer with the only instructions being “stay out of trouble and be home by supper”.
Cuts and scrapes from those long days of fun being treated with Mercurochrome or Merthiolate. It stung like heck but was like a badge of honor because it turned your skin a nice shade of orange. Nobody worried that it actually did contain small amounts of mercury. Heck the funnest part of the science lesson in school was passing around the bottle of mercury and getting to play with that amazing, shiny, liquid metal!
Every boy had a BB gun as soon as he was old enough to hold one up in front of him. Dad’s sternly given warning, “Never point this at anyone and don’t shoot the songbirds”.
My assignment of holding the Coleman lantern for my dad while he finished up the brake job on the old panel truck. The light it put out was bright and pure white due to the thorium coating on the mantles!
On the rare times a road trip could be afforded the excitement of looking for the orange roof of a Howard Johnsons along the highway.
There was no Siri to tell us where to go, it was this guy named Rand McNally[:)].
Eagerly anticipating the Sears Christmas Wishbook.
Drooling over the Major Matt Mason astronaut stuff in said catalog.
When we finally did move into town they had these places called hobby shops and I was mesmerized! Many of them also had a big slot car layout.
Looking at the Hasegawa 1:32 scale stuff and dreaming of the day that I could earn enough money to buy one of those. Also being totally convinced that not even Michael Angelo could create art as beautiful as those box tops.
When I was in jr. high my generous older brother spending his first few paychecks from McDonalds on Christmas presents for the family. Mine was a Binks Wren airbrush and I was over the moon. I still have it to this day.
The “sweet” smell of Floquil square bottle paint flowing from that Binks Wren.
The first “aftermarket” items I saw were squadron vacform canopies.
Saving money to buy my first SLR and the excitement and anticipation of waiting for the slides to be developed at the corner drugstore.
The “click-clack” sound of a GAF carrousel slide projector rotating through those images and projecting them up on the wall. Eventually saving enough money to show them on a real, honest to goodness projection screen!
Working at McDonalds with my best high school buddy after school and on payday Fridays going to the record store in his 69 Pontiac Lemans to buy a new LP.
On Sunday morning you would usually see a few 8 track tapes lying in the gutter with the tape streaming in the breeze. Some poor guy had been out cruising with his friends, listening to their favorite tunes when the deck decided to “eat” his tape. In exasperation it was yanked out and thrown out the window into the gutter.
Being thrilled when cassette tapes came along and I could record those albums to cassette and have more reliable tunes in the car.
Taking two years to pay off a TRS-80 4P computer while I was working days and taking college classes at night. It had two floppy drives, a whopping 128K of memory and a 9" green phosphor monitor built in. It was “portable”, more like “luggable” at about 28 pounds. Those were tiring times but I was thrilled and fortunate to have an employer that would pay my tuition if I kept a B average.
Being able to remember important stuff like Gilligan’s Island and Star Trek trivia, but struggling to remember my login password at work.
Wow I am an old fart. I’m sure there is more but it’s almost time for a Gilligan’s Island rerun.
Rat Patrol gave me my love of Jeeps, but only ever launched one off a dune…6000 lbs of Wagoneer, and swore never again.
And of course the biggest guy on Combat was named Little John
Pay phones on many streets around every town.
Dial-up modems that I could log into a compiler at A&M when I was taking BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL courses - and forgetting to input the code that could be appended to the dial-up phone number that would block your call waiting feature. Yeah, I had all this work done on an ugly COBOL program, had not saved it, and my mom called. Lost it all.
Other old TV shows like Emergency, Adam-12, and Hazel.
Stores like K-Mart, Target, or even drug or hardware stores sold model kits.
Which of course begs the ‘eternal question’…
…Ginger or Mary Ann? [;)]
I am 60 and bought it and still love it. Anyone remember this
Why choose? [:P]
At my first engineering job I was coding on a VAX/VMS cluster of 4 11/785s and when I would travel I would take this Silent 700 so I could check on my batch jobs
It was the first of the crime/police shows that implied thermal (infrared) cameras can see through walls and windows, which is fantasy. But all sorts of shows now imitate this.
I started with mainframe. Had to take my punch cards to the temple, then go back hours later to see if printout was there. Then they installed a new computer with time share, and teletype terminals at nearest coatrack. We could punch out program and data on paper tape, and if we were lucky in about 30 seconds the printer would either print out our results or the error message. Later on, departments started getting their own VAXs and DGs.
Hey it’s a win-win [:D]
And my wife got a big laugh out of your response[:)]
Ahhh the Silent 700, I remember those! It’s kind of ironic to me that things have come almost full circle. I remember much celebration when it reached the point that everyone had a workstation on their desk and didn’t have to rely on mainframes and network connections to get work done. Now the push is to get everything onto “the cloud” including all of the everyday software like MS Office. The more things change the more they stay the same I guess.
I found quickly that I would starve if I had to write good software for a living and ended up more on the hardware side. I remember programming our EPROMs using a paper tape programmer. You lifted a small “gate”, placed the paper tape on the toothed drive wheel and closed the gate and watched it pull the tape through while it read the codes punched into the tape and translated that to bits in the memory of your EPROM. For it to feed correctly you stacked three nickles and two pennies on top of the gate lol. The memory chips were UV erasable so we stuck a piece of lead tape over the erase window so the device wouldn’t “loose it’s mind” over time when exposed to light. Pretty crazy to think that we now carry phones in our pockets that have many orders of magnitude more processing power than the mainframes that were relied on “back in the day”.
Maybe that’s one reason I still find scale modeling to be so relaxing. Technology is making big differences in our hobby as well, but when it comes down to it our satisfaction and success with a build still usually boils down to a good set of nippers, an X-acto knife, some sandpaper, paint and brushes and probably and airbrush. The basics are still pretty much the same and I like that. And I guess I now have to include more magnifying devices since I am officially “chronologically challenged”[8-|][whstl]
Being told to come home when the daily air raid siren test goes off.
Walking down to the dairy at the end of the street to pick up a extra bottle of milk, or maybe two.
My Father having the cream from the top of the bottle for his cerial.
Having the milk truck leave the new bottles in the insulated box by the fromt door. I have a metal model of a milk truck and oddly enough I find that it’s one of the more memorable vehicles from back then.
Listening to my Father go on abouit how the new music is usually about girls crying, bad relations, or just music that wasn’t all that good to begin with.
When returning home from my first tour during Vietnam, seeing the banner welcoming me home.
My parents first visit to Little Rock AFB. They showed up at the gate in their camper and the police desk called me to clear them. I had them get directions to the base lake where I met them in my 1974 Chevy pickup mounting red lights and a shotgun. My Father said he had just seen a very large black plane fly overhead. The first time he had seen a B-52. Sometimes I wondered if he was proud of me and This was the first time I got the feeling that he really was.
Listening to the Lone Ranger on the radio.
Playing board games with the family.
The Korean war.
Party lines and dial telephones.
The political conventions of the 50’s on television.
It"s been 52 years since I got out of the Corps.