Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/18/kids-today-would-not-enjoy-h.html
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Tho I doubt The Captain’d be a hit here-and-now either.
He probably spending a lot of his time complaining about Fortnite and smartphones
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It never registered on me that Howdy Doody was supposed to be a cowboy. And Flub-A-Dub was, like Goofy, an unknown creature of some sort. I always wondered who the kids were, where they came from. The whole show seemed weird to me, but so did much of the grownups’ world around me, like the Catholics next door with the statues in their house.
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Although before my time, Doodyville sounds like a place I’d fear to tread. 
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Kids today would be frightened by Howdy Doody. I know I am.
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Remember the last time Howdy Doody was in the news? (Has it been six years already!?)
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Has a certain smell to it, I’ve been there.
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This is the Catain Kangaroo intro I remember:
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Yep. Shit, we’re old.
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There is a little known Howdy Doody album that mentions on the LP cover it features appearances by Winston Churchill, Adlai Stevenson, Nikita Khrushchev, Alger Hiss, Fidel Castro, etc.
It’s kind of a trip and a bit spooky, audio of Howdy running for “President Of The Kids” interspersed with actual recordings of Truman, Ike, John Foster Dulles, etc.
A real head-scratcher, released in 1960 as the TV show was just ending its run, so it’s a little early for nostalgia, but then I have no idea what kids would have made of it at the time.
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I think they used that theme music into the 1970s, but I remember when they added the animated opening (I think when my younger sisters were old enough to watch).
(Also just remembered when The Captain showed up as a guest on Mister Rogers – must’ve been a re-run because the original airing was a bit before I was born)
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I used to watch Captain Kangaroo as a kid. But it always got cut off. The US station that carried it came in here, albeit snowy, but when the adjacent local station came on, it wiped out the US station.
It was awful, I never got to see a full episode, always missing some part of a segment. Though, at least the local stations came on later on Saturday, so a tiny bit more cartoons.
The dumb thing was the local stations came on and aired test patterns for what seemed like a long time, before actual programming started.
It happened with both the CBS and NBC stations. As I recall, ne carried a local (to Vermont) 4-H Club show, maybe fifteen minutes long, and that woukd get lost too when tge local stations slowly woke up.
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If locally produced children’s programming had continued through the decades, I have no doubt that Howdy Doody would have been updated several times by now, probably being a mo’capped CGI entity by this point.
i used to LOVE Captain Kangaroo. i know it’s cool to harsh on him, but come on… he certainly had more appeal than Howdy Doody or the Mickey Mouse Club.
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Still no one is asking, “Would Howdy Doody enjoy it ?”
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We’re all citizens of Doodyville these days. Mind your shoes, and everything else, as well.
Travis Bickle:
Someday a real rain will come and wipe this scum off the streets.
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The puppeteer, second-from-left, reminds me of a more recent Mark Hamill.
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Wait a minute. I watched The Friendly Giant reliably in the sixties and I don’t remember thise people. Just The Giant, and Gerome and Rusty. I guess there maybe were some other puppets too.
I also remember “Butternut Square” which lasted one season, and then morphed into “Mr. Dressup”.
I forget the details, but I think both hosts were from the US. And there’s some connection to Mr. Rogers, either he was briefly in Canada or one of the hosts had worked with him previously. I think wikipedia covers it, but I’m too lazy to look.
We actually had some local kid’s shows here in Montreal. Johnny Jellybean was fun, another American who later wrote for Sunny & Cher and other comedy shows. Magic Tom, who of course did magic, and was enough of a local celebrity that he performed at a restaurant. In the summer he went to various locations like Frontier Town in NY state.
Nationally, there was also Razzle-Dazzle, which made an impression on me, but I only have vague memories.
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Angie and Fiddle at the least, and the Raccoons (who played recorder and bassoon).
I think the guy in the tie is the producer, and every other human except for the Giant is a puppeteer.
I remember the recorders. (plural! He didn’t use the same one in every show.) Bob Homme may be the reason that I play recorder today. (Well enough tp produce a plausible performance of a few sonatas by Bach, Telemann and Heberle; certainly beyond the level of a grade-schooler trying not to squeak.)
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