What Good Times They Were

My television provider (those monopolists) is providing us with free channels this month. One is a 'Silver Screen Classics' channel where, I get to annoy my wife and watch Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton and W.C. Fields among other fascinating short films.

But it's not all ragtime piano and slapstick comedy. We recently watched one of our favorite movies The Apartment with Shirley McLain and Jack Lemon. Great, great movie. The original Manchurian Candidate also played. Brilliant movie with a shocking ending.

'Deja View is a channel that plays past shows including Magnum P.I.,Three's Company and Good Times.

Good Times especially captivated me. Many shows from the 70s give you a small lens into snippets of American life and Good Times is no different. These are shows created by people who actually lived the scripts. This make explain why, in part, the appeal.

Are these shows dated? In some ways they are. This shouldn't surprise us. They were contemporary shows and as such they are bound to have stale elements. Still, they manage to remain timeless enough to connect to a person like me.

That's because my mind is always wandering off into another era so it's easy for me place things in proper context. But that's something else altogether.

Anyway, enough of this. Like I do for anything I'm interested in, I researched the show and its cast. Along the way, I came across comedian Jimmie Walker's website. Yeah, you all remember dyn-o-mite. Even us Quebec kids from the 'burbs used to copy JJ. He even has a makeshift blog on the site where he comments on various issues.