Old TV shows you grew up on (feeling nostalgic today I guess)

[Jolly Blue Giant]

As for me, I can't remember further back than Sky King, Roy Rogers, Sea Hunt, The Real McCoys, and Lassie. I didn't really grow up on them, they were the only shows (other than cartoons) that I remember as a small child, and since we only got one channel (CBS), we watched what was available

As I became a teen, the only show I remember that I never wanted to miss a single episode was Lost in Space, as you couldn't record it...so miss an episode and miss it forever

Entertainment wise, a lot of the Ed Sullivan Show, Red Skelton, and Jackie Gleason, that gave way to the likes of The Smothers Brothers, The Glen Campbell Show, and Sonny and Cher. I only got to watch Rowen and Martin's Laugh In at my friend's house who got more channels than I did...and it was worth it just to catch a glimpse of my teenage heartthrob, Goldie Hawn

What I remember was, that The Smothers Brothers were a breath of fresh air compared to Ed Sullivan. Not only did I laugh my ass off, they always had the latest hot band to do a performance...and Glen Campbell used to bring in some world-class musicians and I could watch some incredible guitar playing

I was not into politics as a teen, but being a fan of the Smothers Brothers, I got baptized into the humor as well as corruption of politics in America. Pat Paulson always running for President (LMAO), and vocalized anti-Vietnam War jokes on live TV. And it was the first time I saw a show get taken off the air by a sitting President for daring to criticize the government. That was a tragedy IMO

Watching the Smothers Brothers, I got to watch groups like Jefferson Airplane and see Gracie Slick for the first time to put a face on the music I heard over the radio. How times have changed 

Or Buffalo Springfield

Or The Who, so I finally got to see Keith Moon play the drums, and they smashed their equipment on live TV, shocking many who were watching...not exactly the Ed Sullivan Show which who almost never allowed a band to play live and forced them to lip sync (yup, even the Beatles) to a recording (such as Ed banning the Mamas and Papas because Michelle (protesting having to lip sync) held a banana as a microphone and started eating it while her voice was singing her part...lol, absolutely infuriating Ed)

[LennG]

 I remember watching most of the 'older' TV shows you mentioned, Lassie being a favorite, but I go back a bit further. I can vividly remember watching Howdy Doody, Kukla Fran and Ollie, Mighty Mouse, et al. I can remember watching the original Honeymooners and the entire Jackie Gleason show which I loved his other characters. I used to love 77 Sunset Strip and Peter Diamond (Mary Tyler Moore was the switchboard girl who you only saw her great legs). I loved the 'family' shows, Ozzie and Harriet, Life with Father, Leave it to Beaver, My Little Margie and even Ronald Reagan introducing Death Valley Days. Have Gun Will Travel became my favorite western along with the 'older' Gunsmoke, Rin Tin Tin, and Wyatt Earp. I was never really a huge fan of Bonanza but I did watch when Little Joe or Hoss were featured.

My parents used to watch Roller Derby all the time, so I got into that and we used to battle as they love Ed Sullivan but I always preferred Steve Allen. Eventually, we bought a small portable TV where I watched what I wanted. That gave me the way to watch The Twilight Zone, right from the original first episode, I loved One Step Beyond, and then came The Outer Limits. I was, and still am, a HUGE wrestling fan. I remember watching all the 'old' wrestlers like Antonio Rocca, The Graham brothers, Killer Kowalski, Gorgeous George, and just so many of those guys.

When shows like the Smothers Brothers, Laugh-in, and the original Star Trek came out, I was overseas in the service so I never got to watch them live. I did watch some of those when I got home in repeats. I think, by that time the Smothers Brothers were already off the air.

I could go on for several more paragraphs thinking of more and more shows that I grew up on, but that's it for now.

[ozzie]

I watched a lot of tv growing up. All different eras and all different genres, but the only two I can remember NEVER wanting to miss were MASH, which we discussed in a thread of it's own, and the other was COMBAT with Vic Morrow as Sgt. Chip Saunders. I loved that show.
It's funny that both are shows revolving around war. I do like certain war movies, the Dirty Dozen is one of my all time favorites, but I'm not what you would call a big fan of them. I've never seen Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket. 
So, go figure how those two shows found their way into my heart?

[Jolly Blue Giant]

Lenn jogged my memory of Twilight Zone, Death Valley Days, and Gunsmoke, which I liked. Remember, for me it was one tv for the family and one channel...CBS...and we watched what my parents wanted to watch...mostly westerns, Red Skelton, and Jackie Gleason. But now I recall Rifleman and Rawhide (when Clint was just a young whipper-snapper). As a family, we didn't watch a ton of TV as we had a large farm and it was a lot of work. After school was get your homework done and supper around the table as Walter Cronkite reporting the news playing in the background. Then, it was back out to the barn to do chores, then bath time, and maybe an hour of TV

[LennG]

 I mentioned this to my wife and she reminded me of some others shows she watched which made me remember more shows of my real early youth.

Our Miss Brooks (Richard Crenna was a kid here)
How can I have forgotten The Lone Ranger
And, the original Adventures of Superman with George Reeves
Maverick with a very young James Garner
William Bendix in The Life of Reilly
And, how can we have any list without Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Sgt Bilko with Phil Silvers
Car 54 Where are you
M Squad with again a very young Lee Marvin
How could I have forgotten Sid Caesar and Your Show of Shows
Maybe the best of them all Dragnet

You know, I was never a big fan of Lucy, although she always topped the charts. I never really watched that show though my parents always did. Same with Uncle Milty, the Milton Berle Show.

Some shows we always watched together
This is Your Life (every week we watched this)
We always watched some of the great drama shows that presented a new story every week like Playhouse 90
Another we never missed watching was the Danny Thomas Show
And since we are Goldbergs, there was a show called The Goldbergs that was not to be missed

[Jolly Blue Giant]

I forgot about Maverick...just seeing the words, the original soundtrack to the show's opening and ending gets stuck in my head. And yeah, Garner was really young. Another one was Paladin...man, really wracking the brain to bring back those memories. A couple more were Candid Camera and What's my Line

[Sem]

Cool idea Ric. So I guess I'm around the same age as most of you guys, or perhaps a little younger, I was born in 1957. I do remember watching many of the shows listed, though I'm sure I was watching some of those during their syndication run. Some of the earliest shows I remember watching were Captain Kangaroo, Tom Terrific, Beany and Cecil, and Mickey Mouse Club. A little later I used to love watching the old Henry Aldridge movies that aired locally on Saturday mornings. I definitely have more memories of cartoons, tv shows, and movies that I watched in the mid to late 60's. But those are for a different thread.

[squibber]

What I watched on our old black and white Zenith console TV:

Star Trek
Time Tunnel
Twilight Zone
Outer Limits
Wild Wild West
Combat
Have Gun Will Travel
Johnny Yuma(Bet you forgot this one)
Batman with Adam West
The Monkees series
Gunsmoke
Dick Van Dyke Show
Honeymooners
Lassie

[Jolly Blue Giant]

Cool idea Ric. So I guess I'm around the same age as most of you guys, or perhaps a little younger, I was born in 1957. I do remember watching many of the shows listed, though I'm sure I was watching some of those during their syndication run. Some of the earliest shows I remember watching were Captain Kangaroo, Tom Terrific, Beany and Cecil, and Mickey Mouse Club. A little later I used to love watching the old Henry Aldridge movies that aired locally on Saturday mornings. I definitely have more memories of cartoons, tv shows, and movies that I watched in the mid to late 60's. But those are for a different thread.

You're a whipper snapper Steve, compared to a lot of us...LOL. I remember Captain Kangaroo being on the TV as we waited for the school bus. A lot of interesting background stories with Captain Kangaroo (Bob Keeshan)...one of the more interesting gossip pieces about the show, was that Hugh Brannum (aka Mr. Green Jeans), an old pal of Keeshan, was apparently abnormally well-endowed and used to pull out his tally wanker behind the curtains and wave it around like a propeller that only Keeshan could see whilst doing skits with Mr. Bunny Rabbit or Mr. Moose, in an attempt to get him laughing and break character. I guess the guys weren't all that serious during the show...lol

An interesting trivia question I got one night on my trivia team (the "Rocket Surgeons") at McGirk's Irish Pub was, "What was the name of Tom Terrific's dog in Captain Kangaroo's show?". I knew it in an instant, and our team was the only team to get that question right. Of course, I was the old man in our group of five (mostly young women). Sadly, trivia nights have gone the way of the Dodo bird since everyone started cheating by using their cell phone and Google. Sadly, I haven't played in quite a few years now. Used to be a lot of laughs and an excuse to hang out with friends and over-imbibe on cocktails

Squib pointed out a show I forgot that I used to love, "The Wild Wild West"...loved that show

[LennG]

I knew the dog's name also

Mighty Manfred, the wonder dog.

I had completely forgotten about that until you mentioned it but as soon as you did it was just there.

[LennG]

 A good friend and I were reminiscing about this subject and came away with a few more shows that, I know I watched, did you?


How could I have forgotten some of these
You Bet Your Life-- with the great Groucho Marx
The original Jeopardy with Art Fleming
Beat The Clock
The $64,000 question-- remember the isolation booth
Queen For a Day
Truth and Consequences
Twenty-One (the start of all those scandals.)
Name That Tune
I've Got a Secret with Garry Moore

Remember George Gobbel, and the Jack Benny Show, and then there was the Abbott and Costello Show, and The Little Rascals, and a show that was hilarious but cannot be shown today Amos and Andy

Dobie Gillis (with a very young Bob Denver (later Gilligan))
Bachelor Father with John Forsythe (I was watching a repeat of this when I heard the JFK had been shot
Highway Patrol with Broderik Crawford (everyone walked around--"10-4, over and out")

[kartanoman]

Wow, great topic and many of you have listed programs, even the "ancient" ones, by today's standards, that I nearly have been able to watch all of them.

I think it's safe to say, being born in 1969, and being the baby of the household, the television babysat me for periods of time in my formulative years. The other thing, living in a two-family home, with my family and I upstairs, my maternal grandmother, her brothers, her elderly aunt she was caring for, and my mother's younger sister, we had two televisions on and I got to watch a wide variety of programs depending on whether I was upstairs or downstairs.

Most of you have identified shows from what was known as "The Golden Age of Television." Amazingly, I've watched a good many of these programs as reruns in the 1970s and 80s. I didn't even know that Jackie Gleason debuted on early television, before "The Honeymooners" or the "Jackie Gleason Show," when he starred in the TV version of "The Life of Riley" in 1949. But I managed to lay eyes on Gleason in the one season he portrayed the aircraft worker "Chester Riley" on the program. It was in 1950 he began his "Cavalcade of Stars" show, which I managed to find some VHS tapes of back in the 80s to watch. It was an earlier adaptation of what would become his "Jackie Gleason Show" that most of us are familiar with.

As a young kid, I didn't get into Jackie Gleason until I was a little older. 1969 was a revolutionary period in public television where government funding, supplemented by grants, helped usher in what we know today as PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). Prior to 1969, Educational television and its funding was sparse and more regionally managed. NET, the National Educational Television network, was the precursor to PBS; however, it needed considerable funding in order to distribute its programming throughout the entire country. It was Mister Rogers himself, who stepped up and delivered what is now considered the most impressive and powerful testimony ever delivered to Congress. Lifted directly from Fred Rogers' Wiki page:

In 1969, Rogers testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, which was chaired by Democratic Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson had proposed a $20 million bill for the creation of PBS before he left office, but his successor, Richard Nixon, wanted to cut the funding to $10 million.[71] Even though Rogers was not yet nationally known, he was chosen to testify because of his ability to make persuasive arguments and to connect emotionally with his audience. The clip of Rogers' testimony, which was televised and has since been viewed by millions of people on the internet, helped to secure funding for PBS for many years afterward.[72][73] According to King, Rogers' testimony was "considered one of the most powerful pieces of testimony ever offered before Congress, and one of the most powerful pieces of video presentation ever filmed".[74] It brought Pastore to tears and also, according to King, has been studied by public relations experts and academics.[74] Congressional funding for PBS increased from $9 million to $22 million.[71] In 1970, Nixon appointed Rogers as chair of the White House Conference on Children and Youth.[75]

Wikipedia - Fred Rogers

I don't have to go any further as to whom I enjoyed watching the most out of "Sesame Street," "Mister Rogers Neighborhood," "The Electric Company" and, a little later on, "Zoom." Without Fred Rogers, there may never have been ANY of those programs for children in the late 60s, the 70s and future generations. The Wiki IS correct. It is nearly impossible to view Fred's testimony before Senator Pastore without getting emotional. It is a tremendous lesson of expression of care, of meaning, of importance for something that is good, a vision, presented by this humble man from LaTrobe, PA. The response from the senator says it all. This piece of film remains one of the most inspiring I have ever seen in the soon to be 56 years I've been alive.

I can go on, but I'm done for today. Good evening, all!

Peace!

[GordonGekko80]

Great thread...

Mine were

Alf
The Wonder Years
Star Trek
Family Matters
Growing Pains
Bill Cosby Show
Prince of Belair
A-Team
Seinfeld
Married... with Children

I know, I am probably to young to talk here, but nostalgia kicks in nonetheless.

[GordonGekko80]

What I watched on our old black and white Zenith console TV:

Star Trek
Time Tunnel
Twilight Zone
Outer Limits
Wild Wild West
Combat
Have Gun Will Travel
Johnny Yuma(Bet you forgot this one)
Batman with Adam West
The Monkees series
Gunsmoke
Dick Van Dyke Show
Honeymooners
Lassie

THIS! 

[Trench]

Batman
Honeymooners
Happy Days
Emergency
Brady Bunch
This Week in Baseball
NFL Films
Dallas
All in the Family
Good Times
Taxi
MASH
Quincy
Odd Couple
Trapper John MD