DAY ELEVEN:
Your Favorite TV Shows
Ok, this is another hard one for me, because I have been into MANY TV shows over the years. There are reasons why I used to weigh 337 pounds, and my love of tv shows is one of them, particularly animated programs. Looking back over the past 32 years, 9 months, and 6 days, I can see four clear standouts. And since the title says “TV Shows“, I guess I can settle on four.
The first one is “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”. To be specific, the cartoon, and to be more specific, the classic one that most people in my age group remember. This show ran for ten seasons (1987-1996), and broke records for longest running animated program, and I think maybe for longest running TV series in general or some such.
Chances are if you’re in your mid-twenties to mid-thiries now, you have at least some knowledge of what the gist of this show is, and probably are not needing to know more. So rather than explain WHAT it was, I’ll get into WHY I look at it so fondly.
When I was young, my thing was playing with action figures. Especially those that had their own cartoons (i.e. 30-minute toy commercials). I’m from a generation of boys that had A LOT of toy/cartoon fads thrown at them, and I have MANY fond memories of my childhood best friend Corey and I playing He-Man, Transformers, G.I.Joe, etc. The thing that makes the Turtles stick out is the fact that it was the last such fad I was into when I was still at what society considers an acceptable age…and the fad lasted into what most would consider too old, but whatever.
TMNT was the last toy line and cartoon I enjoyed as a child with Corey, and due to the fact that I had gotten older, was also the cartoon I seemed to get into the most. By this age I was able to/allowed to use the VCR (I know kids nowadays come out of the womb using electronics, but keep in mind this was the early 90s) and as such I embarked on a super geeky mission to tape every episode. Which I eventually did. Not something that I think is that cool nowadays, but I have fond memories of doing that.
I’m also the type of guy who will typically root for the villians, and Shredder and Krang are two of my all-time favorites.
So enough rambling on the subject of mutant turtles, and onto number two…The Simpsons! If you’ve never heard of this show, then crawl out from under your rock. This show started in 1989 and is still going today. This is the show that actually took the title of “longest running” from the TMNT in 2000.
But to me, this is the show me and my Dad had. This was our bonding experience every Thurday night, then Sunday nights, and then like 6 days a week when it hit syndication. We started watching it around the time I was taping the Turtles, so my Dad suggested I tape some of the Simpsons episodes so we could watch them on off-nights (pre-syndication), which i did, obsessively.
The third show is more recent, but getting older now: “Spongebob Squarepants”! Another popular animated show, this one is also still running and has also passed the 10-year mark. Like the other shows, I have fond memories of watching this with others. Namely three of my parents friends kids who used to come over a lot to visit: Morgan, Tiffany, and Sara. I was probably WAY too old to be into Spongebob, but they were all just the right age, and we had a lot of fun laughing at my Spongebob DVDs.
My fourth and final favorite lasted exactly ten years (seems to be some kind of prerequesite), and is the first show Jenn and I shared together, after she got be hooked: “Friends”! This is another show that I imagine most people have heard of, and is the one of the few non-animated shows I’ve been really into in the course of my life. Jenn has all ten seasons on DVD, and we watch them in the morning while we have breakfast in bed (that’s right, we know how to live!) and a lot of nights when we fall asleep. We’ve almost made it through our third go-round of all ten seasons in two years.
I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s extra long post!
