Ch-ch-ch. look at me. I'm bionic!

Jamie in his McCloud phase.

Let’s talk about child’s play! No, not the movie. I mean actual playtime. 

I think it’s safe to say that children growing up in the 1940s through the 1980s enjoyed less supervised playtime than kids in recent generations, as well as more outdoor play and physical activity. However, all the generations have had their playtime influenced by media, including radio, television, movies, and comic books.

Media influence became more pervasive in the 1970s and 1980s as advertisers targeted children.

Let’s talk about child’s play! No, not the movie. I mean actual playtime. 

I think it’s safe to say that children growing up in the 1940s through the 1980s enjoyed less supervised playtime than kids in recent generations, as well as more outdoor play and physical activity. However, all the generations have had their playtime influenced by media, including radio, television, movies, and comic books.

Media influence became more pervasive in the 1970s and 1980s as advertisers targeted children. Eventually, it came to the point that manufacturers made TV shows to sell existing toys instead of making toys based on TV shows. I’m looking at you, He-Man, and those heroes in a half-shell, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One day, I’ll write an article dedicated just to toys, so for now, let me pivot back to what I want to discuss in this post: how Generation X played. 

If you were a kid in the 1970s, you had a smorgasbord of television programming that inspired your playtime. On Saturday mornings, I got up early (while the local farm report was on…yes, that was a thing), climbed into Mom’s bed, and pulled her eyelids apart to tell her it was time for cartoons.  

In addition to reruns of the classics, like Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, and The Jetsons, we GenX kids had interesting new shows, reflecting the weirdness of the 1970s (especially anything created by Sid and Marty Krofft).

Josie and the Pussycats sang their way into our hearts and inspired children to pursue their musical interests. In the hours after Super Friends aired, we draped towels down our backs for capes and pretended to fly. Jamie and I spent hours in the woods, so when Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, became popular, we mimicked him by giving the famous call while swinging on the grapevines that hung between trees. The Harlem Globetrotters had a cartoon, and soon, I found myself standing below our rickety basketball hoop, trying to emulate Meadowlark Lemon and Curly Neal. This confirmed what I already suspected: I was NOT an athlete. 

Granny’s basement became the cave from the Land of the Lost. I wanted one of those enormous strawberries for my dinosaur-powered cart. And we hissed at each other while pretending to be Sleestaks. Those things scared me even though I could see the zipper running down the backs of their costumes. 

Sometimes, the cartoons inspired our destructive or violent tendencies. Captain Caveman got us in trouble for bonking each other on the head with whatever was handy. Jamie liked to set up LEGO bricks into little cities and walk through them like Godzilla, crushing everything in his path. We destroyed the grass in our yard with our Big Wheel tricycles when we pretended to be Speed Buggy or Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch. We also used old cardboard boxes to imagine we were in the flying cars in The Jetsons. Yes, the flying car will be a recurring topic in these articles. I’m still bitter. 

Nighttime programming and afternoon reruns also inspired our play. When Jamie was very young, he became obsessed with the TV show McCloud and decided that he WAS Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud, AKA Dennis Weaver. He wore out his little suede jacket and cowboy hat during that phase. You can see his costume in the picture at the top of this article. 

I used one of my mom’s “fancy” Avon perfume bottles as Jeannie’s bottle and pretended to turn into mist like Barbara Eden did in I Dream of Jeannie. I learned to twitch my nose like Samantha in Bewitched so I could “do magic.” Watching these shows as an adult female is an entirely different viewing experience than seeing them as a little girl. I’ll attempt to tackle the role of women in these two shows in a later article. 

Jamie and I kicked and chopped each other after watching David Carradine Kung Fu fight his way through the American Old West. Sad fact: Producers passed over Bruce Lee in favor of Carradine in Yellow Face, a white man with no martial arts experience.

When Mom bought me red, white, and blue wristbands, I turned into Wonder Woman, deflecting invisible bullets with terrycloth and elastic. Jamie smashed stuff during his Incredible Hulk phase. We both ran in slow motion around the yard, making CH-CH-CH noises as we pretended to be The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. 

I don’t remember much movie-related play until Star Wars hit theaters. Then, every kid wanted a lightsaber. Some got the inflatable ones or the rigid plastic kind. Those of us who grew up poor had invisible ones or used broomsticks. We made the wah-wah whoosh-whoosh sounds when we dueled. 

Yes, Generation X enjoyed its fair share of screen time, but we counterbalanced it with physical activity, outdoor play, and active imagination without adult supervision. I believe we’ve suffered much more from the screen time we’ve accrued as adults glued to our phones. 

So, what TV shows influenced your playtime?

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Coming next week - Before GenX had MTV, we had The Monkees, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, and The Solid Gold Dancers. Stay tuned!