Adrift on the Lost Channels: A Love Story of the 1950s: The Long Weekend Review, #9

By David Macpherson

Watching UHF Programs during the 1970s. That was a way of life for the author when he was a kid in Illinois. His memory is filled with Giant Robots, Masked Wrestlers, and Cartoon Rock Stars. It was a good and lonely life.

 

The Long Weekend Review is a journal where each issue allows a writer to create whatever they want. The one rule is that it must be completed in 72 hours.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Macpherson
• Release date: Nov 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393687245

Book preview

Adrift on the Lost Channels: A Love Story of the 1970s

by

David Macpherson

The Long Weekend Review Issue Nine

Adrift on the Lost Channels: A Love Story of the 1970s

Copyright 2020 David Macpherson

All rights reserved.

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Begun on Saturday, November 14th, 2020 at 9am

1

Speed Racer

There was an ongoing plot. There was a forward motion to Speed Racer. It was not just his Mach 5 that barreled to the finish line at amazing rates. There was a complicated plot that had something to do with his lost brother, who turned out to be the mysterious Racer X. This moved forward. This was a driver of motion and interest.

Speed Racer was a cartoon from Japan that I did not see a lot of. I liked it. But I didn’t watch it all the time. I am not sure, but I think it did not play in Illinois in the 1970s. I will be saying this a lot: I am not sure. I do not completely recall.

My memory of Speed Racer was watching it at my Grandmother’s house. It was the only time I could see it. My grandparents lived in New York and we visited several times a year. My mother did not like living in Illinois. She lived in New York City for most of her life. Even when we moved to a house in New Jersey, Manhattan was only a fifteen minute drive or a walk down to the train station.

Now we lived in Naperville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. This was not anything my mother expected or signed up for. Well, she signed up for the marriage to my father and he was transferred to the Midwest. She moved, but she didn’t have to like it. She was now compelled to wonder how a Jewish girl from Brooklyn would want to survive in Naperville.

To mitigate this, her mother flew in from New York often. Every few months, Grandma arrived with offerings of New York. She brought Jew food. It is hard to imagine that there was once a time that bagels were an exotic thing, but it was true. No one had seen such a strange creation before. It was foreign. It was delicious. It was bitter sweet. The taste of being in a place you don’t want to be.

With those visits, we also went to New York. We stayed in Grandma’s guess room at her apartment on Tahema Street. And we watched kid shows that I didn’t know about in Illinois. New York was big and loud and filled with cartoons that never traveled to the middle of the country.

And this is how I remembered Speed Racer, King Kong (there was a cartoon show), and other shows. Speed Racer might have been on in Illinois, but maybe it was aired during the school day. Some channels did that. They played the cool cartoons