Yeah my 18 year old is kind of like that, we were watching The Holdovers and I speculated “oh, I wonder what movie they’re at?” during the theatre scene and my kid instantly said “That’s Little Big Man”…it was only on screen for a few seconds.
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Most of Fridays is available for free streaming on Tubi. Both Kaufman and Michael Richards totally commit to the bit.
I found the show to be very tiresome with some occasional clever bits in there. Unlike SNL, Fridays tended to have long running sketches that wore out their welcome.
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More like Ernie Kovacs, a comedian with fleeting fame whose works have been immortalized on screen in old videos.
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Its not them being “into the same things we were”, it’s introducing them to things that we love, and want to share with them, in hopes that some of them become things we can love together. In music, especially, we will never connect to theirs the way they will, even if we like it… but they might connect to some of ours. If so, that’s a wonderful thing to share.
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As Hugh O’Brian used to point out, there are five stages in an actor’s life:
- Who’s Hugh O’Brian?
- Get me Hugh O’Brian!
- Get me a Hugh O’Brian type.
- Get me a young Hugh O’Brian.
- Who’s Hugh O’Brian?
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I hope Elliot Gould is also remembered for that tweet about the tv guide cover with him and Grover https://twitter.com/CBThorburn/status/1251103369428680705?s=20
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Plenty of us do that… none the less, kids are going to have their own interests, and expecting them to be cultural carbon copies of us, and sneering at their tastes in the exact same way our parents and grandparents did (often times) isn’t particular helpful. 
And honestly, what I saw in some of the posts here was people bemoaning how the kids just don’t get what we happen to like… but, honestly… so what?
Maybe not. But then again, no one is going to connect to someone elses musical interests in the same way, whatever the age. We might have shared connections with other fans, but few people have the exact same tastes, and when they do, it’s often for different reasons…
They might though… the thing is, that it’s easy for people to seek out a variety of things from across the 20th century, and they might very well connect to it, despite it being well out of context for them.
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I’m concerned that today’s pop culture has the shelf life of skim milk and see an accelerated rush towards the vapid “new” obliterating everything that came before. I’m a young Gen-X and grew up on Lily Tomlin or Gilda Radner and just get blank looks if I mention them today, it feels like I’m from another planet at times. 
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All hope is not lost, my 40 year old daughter was a big fan of Grace and Frankie.
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That’s the nature of mass culture. You do realize just how much pop culture from our generation is now totally ignored, right?
She’s very much still a thing… and RIP Gilda… Carol Kane was in the last season of Star Trek Strange New worlds…
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John Peel would disagree with you, if he was still alive.
I still remember him talking about borrowing his kids happy hardcore and gabber records so he could play them on his radio show. This was the guy who did a Black Sabbath session before they were famous and played punk in the late 70s.
And now nobody under 20 will have heard his radio show when it was on the BBC.
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Peel was definitely someone who never lost his love of exploring the world of music and who didn’t buy into the industry created mythology of generations being unable to “understand” the culture of each other. He really understood that was bullshit, and appreciated a wide variety of music right through his entire career.
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I’d describe Andy’s schtick as “protometa”. Big fan here, I still remember him well. I think you hung with a more sophisticated crowd than I growing up. Most folks I knew at the time tolerated Andy Kaufman merely as a novelty if they tolerated him all. Once of the first pop-culture based “conspiracy theory”" I recall is the “Andy Kaufman faked his own death” rumor. For a long time, I expected some clever culture jammer (Bob Zmuda?) would “bring Andy back” in some prank fashion. Done right, it coulda been funny…
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Back in early 2017 I kept joking (and yet in total secrecy I remained ever hopeful) that once Donald Trump was inaugurated, that he would stand at the podium and pull off a thick, rubbery orange prosthetic face, and SURPRISE it was Andy Kaufman!!! The most AMAZING FUCKING COMEDIC PERFORMANCE ART piece in the HISTORY of humanity!!! He faked his own death and crafted a caricature so preposterous that in retrospect NOBODY should have ever taken seriously, and we’d all Kumbaya My Lord and all humanity would laugh at its momentary period of madness and the whole stand up comedy genre would be revealed as the ultimate foil to human vanity and the antidote to any kind of dogmatism and delusional moral purity.
Sure, I was high on LSD half the time. But… who wasn’t?
Anyhow, I still hold out hope.
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As anyone who reads his gravestone would guess
‘Teenage dreams so hard to beat’
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Here’s a headline us old people never thought we’d read.
Who’s Richard Simmons? They’re kidding righr? Everyone knows Richard Simmons.
No? Crap.
American fitness guru Richard Simmons battling skin cancer. Who is he?
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Whenever we saw a “Peel Sessions” LP, we knew it was worth buying.
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Thank you so much for mentioning him! I first learned about Kovacs from a documentary on Showtime back when cable TV was still a relatively new thing. The main point of the documentary was that while technology has made creating amazing images on TV a lot easier Kovacs was an innovator who saw TV as more than just putting vaudeville on screen. A description that’s stuck with me is, “While everyone else on TV was playing checkers Ernie Kovacs was inventing Pac-Man.”
That really dated reference says as much about technology as it does about culture.
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I’m pretty sure that hope has long since faded…
OMG, if you look up Andy Kaufman gifs in the widget, it seems to be dominated by a bunch of animated, probably AI generated gifs of him?!? 
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