EDITORIAL: IS IT THE END OF THE 60'S TV COLLECTIBLE ERA?

I’m a big fan of Irwin Allen TV shows. I love and grew up with Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants, and numerous other TV shows produced in the 60’s. As I watched TV in the 70’s, I not only enjoyed all the reruns of the 60’s shows, but also enjoyed some favorites from the 50’s as well. I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Lassie, just to name a few. Then there was the prime time network shows, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Happy Days, The Waltons, and the list goes on and on.

As the 70’s came to a close and the 80’s appeared one of the first changes that I noticed was the wide spread use of first run syndication. This would have a wide impact on how many of these older shows would get air time. For those of you not familiar with first run syndication allow me a moment to explain. When TV shows such as Gilligans Island ended there network run on CBS, they were offered to local television stations for reruns. Many of these stations were independently owned and were in need of programming in order to sell there commercial spots. Thus, the rerun as we knew it was born. This is the reason that such shows as I Love Lucy and Gilligans Island seemed to run forever on TV.

Many of the local stations could only afford to rerun these older shows, but when the time came that they could purchase ‘new’ shows, shows that had not been on the major networks, it offered them the opportunity to establish there own identity apart from the local network affiliate stations. In the 80’s, shows such as Small Wonder and Star Trek The Next Generation were offered to independents, with much success. Now the smaller independent stations had a chance to compete with the network affiliate stations, ABC, CBS, and NBC for viewership.

This was all well and good for the stations themselves, but what about the older programming? For a while there, many programs got ‘lost’ in the shuffle. At one time when your local station would spend an afternoon re-running I Dream of Jeannie, or Lost in Space, they could now offer something new. Thus the audience that would have been exposed to these shows dwindled.
At the same time, programs that had just finished network runs like The Love Boat, and Fantasy Island, did not get the rerun exposure that earlier shows did. There was no place to put them. Many stations were now running the newer shows, including game shows, news magazines, and movie packages now offered in bulk from studios such as Paramount and 20th Century Fox. Remember some of those award winning shows from the 80’s? Where are they today?

With hundreds of channels available today you would think that someplace there would be room for some of this stuff. Not really. Many of the channels that have aired vintage programming have gone under or like Nick at Nite and TV Land are showing more modern fare in order to compete for the coveted ‘younger viewers.’

A small reprieve is the DVD. There the shows could finally find there audience. The one hang up there is the variety of ways companies release some of these shows. In some cases complete series are released, in others only 1 or 2 seasons. You can buy for example the entire run of Get Smart, but can only buy season 1 of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, and you can’t get the Adam West version of Batman at all.

Is interest dropping for these shows? One only has to check the Internet forums and see how many have dried up in the past couple of years. Some that do survive only survive with ‘off topic’ conversations that have nothing to do with the original TV show the forum was created for in the first place. All and all this leads me to the question for people of my generation. Where has the nostalgia for the classic TV shows gone?

As the fans of these TV shows get older and no new fans come aboard due to the lack of exposure to these shows, then one can safely assume that the popularity of these shows will finally drop.
And with that, all the toys and collectibles associated with these shows will also drop in price. How do you expect a new generation of collectors to buy Lost in Space toys and pay a premium when they have never seen Lost in Space at all?

Most of the people that buy these older shows, like I Dream of Jeannie or Leave it to Beaver have seen these shows before and are now interested in buying them on DVD. But a new generation of viewers is unlikely to pluck down some bucks on a DVD set for a TV show they had never seen before. If it isn’t playing anywhere on TV, then where do they go to see it?

Now I know there are those that say, why should the next generation watch those old shows, they have there own memories of there childhood and if there childhood happens to be in the late 80’s or 90’s then they are going to support those programs from there youth. They are 100% correct. There is no reason that they should be trying to keep our old programs alive when they have there own to watch. But as a kid who grew up in the late 60’s and early 70’s I too watched programs and movies from the 50’s and prior. I Love Lucy is a 50’s show, The Wizard of Oz is from 1939!
We grew up watching The Little Rascals and The Three Stooges.
We had no problem looking back at these gems and appreciating the time period that they were produced in. Today’s youth don’t care about the past at all. Many won’t watch anything that is in black and white, or anything produced before 2000!

Sadly this means that all the stuff that we’re nostalgic for will eventually end. One only has to look at the Western. Once a staple of television programming and collectors it has all but dried up. Once TV stopped showing Westerns, the day of the cowboy went away. Toy cap guns, and TV Western collectibles are on the low end of the collectible scale right now.

Don’t let anyone tell you that the toy submarine from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is worth a thousand bucks.
Oh, you could pay that now, but make sure you turn around and sell it soon if you want to make your money back. Because sadly things like this are of little interest to the next generation of buyers and collectors. Let us all enjoy our nostalgia now. Buy whatever shows you can get, and enjoy them before the studios discontinue them on DVD. I hate to say it, but like everything in life, it all has an end, and it seems that the era of these classic shows and toys are coming to a close.