Scott Meyer
patreon
How to Identify the Song Fragment Stuck in Your Head
🕑 Added 2023-06-12 07:00:02 +0000 UTCMy memories of the show BJ and the Bear are sketchy at best. It was very much something that we only watched in our house if the weather was bad and there was nothing better on. I hate to go all “in my day” on you, but people who grew up in the age of cable and the internet have no idea what it means to say there’s “nothing good” on.
The concept of only having four options is foreign to them.
On an afternoon in the Yakima Valley, in 1981, you could easily have a choice between BJ and the Bear, One Day at a Time, The Partridge Family, and on PBS, Upstairs Downstairs. If any of those sound good to you, you probably aren’t a nine-year-old boy obsessed with Star Wars.
Because my mother liked old-fashioned country music and my father liked polkas, there are a whole raft of songs Missy was raised with, songs like, “Against the Wind,” or “Ramblin’ Man” that to me are just things they used to play over establishing shots of BJ and the Bear driving into town at the beginning of episodes. I can’t hear the Eagles without picturing a red semi driving over a bridge.
Comments
Scott Meyer
Dude, I saw one episode of H.R. Puffnstuff when I was little, and it gave me nightmares. I liked all the shows you mentioned liking. you're right that they weren't great, but they mostly made sense. The Bionic Man vs Bigfoot storyline was one exception.
Bernie Margolis
The problem with spending six of the first ten years of my life as a first generation Mexican immigrant in the '70s was that I had trouble distinguishing between sheer insanity and cultural differences. Shows like HR Pufnstuf and BJ & the Bear seemed to me like American stuff that I just had trouble understanding. After spending over 45 years immersed in the culture, I can confidently state that they were simply what happens when writers who love to party are granted unlimited access to drugs and alcohol. Not that my favorite shows made much more sense. The Six Million Dollar Man, Gilligan's Island, Buck Rogers, and Battlestar Galactica weren't particularly intellectual, either.
Carl Cravens
I don't remember a lot of it, but I recall liking BJ & the Bear. I was 11 to 13 when it originally aired, and was big into the trucker craze, living in rural Kansas, CB in my dad's truck. The show started 2 years after Smokey and the Bandit, and the year after Every Which Way But Loose, which was Clint Eastwood and an orangutan in a truck... I remember assuming BJ was inspired by the movie.
