Mom always did like you best!

I know I've said this before, but whenever you take time off to write, you always end up doing a million other things to procrastinate. It does make sense to plan little breaks from having to think so hard about your fantasy world. One thing I did tonight was catch up on my mail and pay bills. I put the TV on while I did this, and I caught a little bit of a show on the WB, or CW, or UPN...one of those. It was on for a while before I realized it was Veronica Mars, the show a lot of people rave about. It seemed pretty good.

Anyway, at one point, a character said to his brother, "Mom always did like you best!" It made me wonder about cultural references. The 15-year-olds who watch the show probably wouldn't know that the line was from the Smothers Brothers...or would they? Sometimes those lines get passed along, even if kids weren't old enough to see the Smothers Brothers' show. I wasn't old enough to have ever seen the Smothers Brothers show either (it was canceled before I was born) or heard their comedy albums, but I still knew the line - likely because it was in some TV commercial in the '80s that featured the Smothers Brothers.

I wonder how careful TV writers have to be to make sure the references speak to the generation they're writing for, and not to people their own age. Of course, those WB/CW/Whatever shows are often watched by people older than teenagers anyway, and are written at a higher level (or at least they try). It's also true that you could enjoy the line without knowing it's from the Smothers Brothers. It still interests me, though, to think about the cultural phenomena and references that end up getting passed down.

TV has only been around for a few generations, so there are a lot more pop culture references to get and understand. In fact, I'm not sure there was ever such thing as a catch phrase before the last century (except maybe from military and political campaigns). Since people my age learned some of their parents' TV references as well as their own, will the next generation develop its own arsenal of culled lines from the best from all three generations? Which ones will prevail?

I'm sure most people reading this have heard hundreds of times about the Beatles' appearance on Ed Sullivan even if we weren't born yet, or maybe even know where the term "Sock It To Me" comes from. I think you tend to pick up a lot of your parents' generation's references as you grow up. What about the kids of the kids of the Baby Boomers...will they know my generation's TV and '80s references, and will they still know all the '50s and '60s stuff too?


Random things that I bet are different about school now

No filmstrips. I heard they have those things called DVDs now.

No "dittos" or "dittomasters."

No one page at the end of a history textbook with three paragraphs on Vietnam, that you don't really get to by June anyway.