Standalone HBO Go coming in 2015...

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

The moment Ted McGinley becomes a regular on your show is the moment your show achieves completeness.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

McGinley's there by the time Tom Hanks shows up to exact his vengeance.

[Adam54]

My favorite show of all time featured Ted McGinley in a recurring role in the first season.

It lasted two seasons.

[Mal Shot First]

He'll always be Jefferson D'Arcy to me.

[Adam54]

Me too.

Though come to think of it, would Sports Night actually be the show which broke the McGinley curse? It got cancelled the year after he left, after all.

[neglet]

I was a child and I didn't know any better.

There were only THREE channels back then, and no VCRs or other recorders. You younglings can only imagine the sparseness of the TV landscape.

[Adam54]

I can remember having only eight channels! EIGHT!

Now I have a Roku so I have ~2000.

Technology is great.

[Dalty]

And there is still frequently nothing to watch!

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

When I was a kid living in Frankfurt, we only had two. One was the American Forces Network. Hessischer Rundfunk was the other. My parents only watched AFN. I watched a fair chunk of hr, but it's rare that I actually knew what was going on. To hear my mother tell it, I understood every word.

When we moved back to Alabama, we had CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, and APT (the state's PBS branch). NBC looked great, CBS came in clear but had a grainy look to it, and the other three were incredibly spotty. I have a ton of Simpsons and Tales from the Crypt that I recorded off of Fox. I've gone back and tried to watch some of it. It was even snowier than I remembered. I'm not sure why I even bothered recording. The signal would drop out for seconds at a time, and it usually looked pretty terrible when it came back.

I remember standing two feet from the TV (the sweet spot) and touching a clothes hanger to our antenna to try to make the signal look better while recording Fox programs. I did the clothes hanger thing on a friend's recommendation. Don't know that it actually did any good.

We sometimes had a religious channel. It would be there or it wouldn't. Sometimes it came in all right, and sometimes it looked about as bad as Fox.

[Corporal_Hicks]

Fox was always really fuzzy at my house growing up as well. I attribute that as to why I do not "get" The Simpsons. I have tried to get into it as an adult, but I admit I just do not get it. That attitude comes from not growing up with the show, which of course in my case I really couldn't have even if I had really wanted to.

[Jubbers]

We didn't have a FOX affiliate when growing up, so we got our Simpsons through NBC. Not sure how that worked out.

In addition to NBC, we had CBS, a religious station which played Disney Afternoon cartoons after school among horrible religious commercials (see below), The Flying House and Superbook (I guess these were technically my first exposure to anime), and sometimes (luckily often on Saturdays) we also got ABC, which was our source for Saturday morning cartoons. That was it. I did not know PBS until I moved to St. Louis.

Hooray YouTube! Now I can relive my childhood over and over again:




There was a really horrifying one that I can't find that involved Pharaoh holding his dead son in front of a giant dog-faced idol, screaming at it for not bringing his kid back to life. Stuff of nightmares it was.

[Mal Shot First]

We sometimes had a religious channel. It would be there or it wouldn't.

You should have prayed harder.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Those KNLJ PSAs are great, Jubbers.

I didn't pray at all, Mal.

[Dalty]

Now I just make monthly donations to the church of The Lord Our Rupert Murdoch.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I make donations to the spank bank.

[Dalty]

Must be a hell of a lot of spanking. How do you make a withdrawal? And what the hell does an investment appraisal look like?

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

You don't make withdrawals. Sometimes, though, you liquidate.

[Dalty]

Spread the wealth?

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Disseminate it, even.

[Dalty]

Socialist!

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Jubbers is the socialist. I'm the infuriatingly unaligned realist.