This will be part one of a nine-part series of quizzes about the Baby Boomer era. The sections covered will include a Historical Timeline 1955-1975; The Golden Age of Television; Top U.S. Song Hit Singles 1955-1970; Drugs; Famous Pairs; Who Gave Them Their Big Break?; Top Movies; Top Rated TV Shows of the 60s; and Miscellaneous.
There will be no grading system for these quizzes, I created them just for the fun of it. Play it with your friends. The answers will be immediately available in case you're not so good with delayed gratification (as they claim about us).
Feel free to share, but give me credit, dammit. The first quiz, the Golden Age of Television, begins after the fold. Copyright 2008 Maggie Jochild.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF TELEVISION
(Being a fan of Nick at Night will not help you much with these questions; you had to have been there. NOTE: Despite my earnest effort to be inclusive, note how few females are in the lists above and how extremely few [to none] characters of color there are. Hence The Revolution, still underway.)
TV WESTERNS
(My dad watched every one of these) -- Match each show to its star in the column that follows:
Bat Masterson
The Big Valley
Cheyenne
Death Valley Days
The High Chaparral
Laramie
Maverick
The Rifleman
Sugarfoot
Wagon Train
Wanted Dead or Alive
Gene Berry
Ward Bond
Richard Boone
Chuck Connors
Robert Crawford, Jr.
Victoria Cristal
James Garner
Will Hutchins
Steve McQueen
Ronald Reagan
Barbara Stanwyck
Clint Walker
SPACE AND SPIES
Match each show to its star in the column that follows:
The Avengers
Dr. Who
I Spy
Land of the Giants
Lost in Space
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Mission Impossible
The Prisoner
The Saint
Star Trek
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Richard Basehart
Gary Conway
Bill Cosby
Peter Davison
Peter Graves
June Lockhart
David McCallum
Patrick McGoohan
Roger Moore
Diana Rigg
William Shatner
DETECTIVES AND DOCTORS
Match each show to its star in the column that follows:
Ben Casey
Dr. Kildare
Dragnet
The Fugitive
Honey West
Ironside
Julia
Marcus Welby, MD
Mod Squad
77 Sunset Strip
The Untouchables
Raymond Burr
Diahann Carroll
Richard Chamberlain
Vince Edwards
Anne Frances
Peggy Lipton
Richard Janssen
Robert Stack
Jack Webb
Robert Young
Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.
LAWYERS AND TEACHERS
Match each show to its star in the column that follows:
Perry Mason
Mister Novak
Room 222
Raymond Burr
Richard Chamberlain
Karen Valentine 
CHILDREN'S PROGRAMMING
Match each item in column one with its most closely associated item in colum two:
Alfalfa
Buffy
Bunny Rabbit
Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent
Crusader Rabbit
Davey
Dondi
Dudley Do-Right
Flipper
The Funny Company
Gumby
Jonny Quest
Lassie
Mark Lester
Mighty Mouse
Mr. Magoo
Mr. Peabody
Pippi Longstocking
Quick Draw McGraw
Ricochet Rabbit
Ruff
Schoolhouse Rock
Sky King
Tarzan
Tom Terrific
Underdog
Yogi Bear
Boo Boo
Bud
Captain Kangaroo
Cheetah
Dishonest John
Droop-a-Long
El-Kabong
The Explorers Club
Goliath
Hadji
His boy Sherman
I'm Just A Bill
Jack Wild
Jody
Nell Fenwick
Manfred
Nephew Waldo
Mr. Nilsson
Oilcan Harry
Penny
Pokey
Ragland Tiger
Reddy
Shrinkin' Violette
Spanky
Sweet Polly Purebred
Timmy
[ANSWERS TO ALL THE ABOVE ARE HERE.]
Saturday, January 12, 2008
BOOMER QUIZ: GOLDEN AGE OF TV
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
OK, I was frighteningly good at that. Sky King and Penny! I adored that show. Sometimes when I am watching Star Trek or Battlestar Gallactica I know I'm watching souped up Sky King plots. Seriously. I'll mutter, "Oh, oh, Penny's in trouble again."
And I think you are right. You had to be there. Not just because so few of those shows are seen anymore, but because they were so iconic to the age, and it's a lived felt thing. You just know that James Garner is Maverick. Even when he's being Jim Rockford, he's still Bart Maverick.
Well, Liza, yet another point of cultural consonance between us. I, too, think of Penny when I think about flying. I have not seen Sky King since I was young, so I can't say WHY it's left such an impact -- wonder how many of us there are, eh?
I have a cassette tape of theme music from the 60's -- Peter Gunn, Peyton Place, Alfred Hitchcock, Dr. Kildare. I bet you can hear those in your head, with each name. When I play it, such strong emotions are evoked. Is this because it's our childhoods being resurrected, or because the era was so contradictory?
Here's a story I've not told in any context. When my family gave up the house in Lafayette to buy a trailer and begin following my father around -- the sea change that ultimately doomed us -- it was because my mother was "making a deal". She had intended to divorce Daddy, but when my older brother, then 12, got wind of it he went into hysterics and begged them to stay together. Not because he loved my father, per se, but to avoid the humiliation of divorce. This was 1960; divorce was still shameful.
So, we sold a great deal of our belonging and crammed into a New Moon, 10 feet by 50 feet. My room was so small I had to sit on my twin bed to open the drawers on my built-in clothes chest or else there wasn't room.
Our first stop was Pecos, Texas -- Traypark (I've been back there as an adult, to look at it -- the photo of me and Bill, when I'm 5 and he's 2, is from that summer). To bribe us about the loss of so much, Daddy bought me and Bill toy guns. Bill's was a copy of Steve McQueen's, from the Bounty Hunter. Mine, gloriously, was Paladin's from Have Gun Will Travel (I adored that show) and, to make it perfect, the gun came with a small set of Have Gun Will Travel cards I could hand out to people. You remember those cards?
Anyhow, not long after we got there, we were playing in the big central area where there were swingsets and a giant sandbox, and a storm began blowing in. Mama came to the door and yelled at us to get in the house, quick -- she was worried about lightning. Bill and I skedaddled, leaving our guns behind in the sandbox. When I got to the house and realized it wasn't the emergency it had sounded like, I pleaded to go back and retrieve our guns, but it had begun raining and Mama wouldn't let us.
I sat at the window, watching the storm and worrying about my gun, and so it was that I saw two boys a little older than me, brothers, one of whom was named Corky (I'll never forget Corky) emerge from their trailer as soon as the last drop fell, head for the sandbox and steal our guns. They ran back home with them, triumphant.
I pitched a fit, and Mama tore out the door with me in tow. I led her to Corky's trailer and Mama knocked. She began nicely enough, but when Corky's mother just laughed at her and said if Mama's kids had been dumb enough to leave their toys behind, well, they were up for grabs then -- Mama blew her stack. Mama could really swear, and she went on for a while after Corky's mother slammed her door in our faces.
Mama didn't shut up about it the rest of the day, and slowly it rolled around to it being, in fact, stupid of me and Bill to have left our guns behind. But then, by the time Daddy got home, it had changed to the fault of having to live in trailer parks with white trash, which was laid at his feet.
After that, when Mama told us to behave in a particular way or else we'd be like "white trash", I for one paid strict attention. It wasn't until I was grown that I reclaimed the title for myself. Yes, we were educated and bookish in ways the title doesn't fit, focused on culture and social change as a result of Mama's influence -- but in terms of concrete circumstances, we were white trash to everyone else. The "bad poor", according to how Dorothy Allison analyzes it. The ones at the bottom of the "white" class ladder who are suckered into desperately supporting racism because otherwise we're permanently at the bottom (as the delusion has it.)
Incidentally, my father looked a fair amount like James Garner. They both have Native American in their recent ancestry, so we always claimed it was that. And you are SO RIGHT about the Maverick ID, and how we granted him some slack to be Rockford because he did it so well (ditto his occasional roles as Doris Day's husband) but we knew it was Maverick playing those parts.
Post a Comment