1 Adam-12, 1 Adam-12…

We still don’t have flying cars. I’m a little bit upset about that. We were supposed to have flying cars by now. As a kid growing up in the 60s watching the Jetsons every Saturday morning, that’s what we were promised. Sort of.

But we have almost everything else the Jetsons had, and a few things more. Like Netflix. How crazy is this? You can watch movies, miniseries, documentaries and entire TV series (with no commercials) all at the touch of a button. Some of you might say, “I remember when you had to drive to the video store to get something like this and had to pay for each one individually.”

To that I say, video store, what’s a video store?

I remember when there was no such thing as videos. All anybody had was a TV, many of them (like in our family) were black-and-white. There were no cable channels; everyone used antennas to get often fuzzy reception on only one of three available channels. NBC, CBS and ABC. That’s it. If you didn’t catch the show when it was on, too bad. It would never play again.

We didn’t even have remotes. We had to get off our butts every time we wanted to change the channel or adjust the volume. Our parents would say, “That’s why we had you kids.” And we had to sit through every single TV commercial. It was barbaric. And movies? You had one chance to see those, in theaters. When they left the theaters, you had one last chance to see it when it showed up on TV, one time only, three years later. You weren’t home that night, too bad. No way to record it.

That was then. This is now. Now we have Netflix.

So, the other night I’m searching through our 10,000 choices (as my wife groans beside me) when I come across Adam-12. All 174 episodes, from beginning to end, one click away. Back in 1968 we had to eat our spinach and do all our homework just to see one of these episodes prime time. “You want to watch one?” I asked. “Sure, why not,” she says.

4 episodes later (they’re only 24 min each this way) we couldn’t stop talking about how much life has changed since we were kids. It was shocking, really. But great fun. If you grew up in the 60s and you have Netflix, do yourself a favor…watch at least a few episodes of Adam-12. Here’s a few of the things we observed without even trying:

Everybody smoked, no one thought a thing of it.
During morning briefings, the cops wrote down what the sergeant said using paper and pencils.
They booked suspects using manual typewriters.
Once the cops left the squad car, they had no ability to communicate with each other or headquarters.
They came across an unconscious child in an apartment and had to ask to borrow a telephone to call for an ambulance.
Nobody swore, all the women dressed modestly and the bad guys didn’t seem very bad at all.
It was set in LA, but the streets were mostly clean and free of traffic.
The big crimes depicted were a thief stealing color TVs, a prowler throwing rocks through windows, and a stoned hippie breaking into the house.
Every episode had at least 2-3 glaring bloopers.

Folks, this is great entertainment. The thing is, at the time this show seemed perfectly normal and perfectly consistent with life as we understood it to be. Of course, 1968 ended up becoming a pivotal year in the cultural revolution sweeping through the country.

This was the year:

Martin Luther King was assassinated
Bobby Kennedy was assassinated
The antiwar protests became extremely violent
The Vietnam war escalated and public opinion began turning against it

But the harsh realities of life seemed to fade when we heard those familiar words: “1 Adam-12, 1 Adam-12, see the man…” You knew Reed and Malloy were on it, and they would make things right.

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