The episode explores pop culture through historical trivia, examining how perceptions of popular culture have evolved over time. Through nostalgic questions about forgotten television shows and iconic figures, the discussion reflects on cultural memory, its relevance today, and the importance of archiving and preserving cultural artifacts to better understand their significance.

Website: LCC Archives

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Let's talk History. I'm Bob Garrett, Lansing Community College's Archivist. I invite you to join me on a journey, as I delve into the college's past, and ponder its meaning here on Tales from the LCC Archives.

Hello, everybody. I'm Bob Garrett, here again for Tales from the LCC Archives. And with me is Ben Ackley. Tell me about your position here at LCC, Ben.

Yeah, I'm the communications specialist here at LCC's downtown library. So I do some event programming. I do some designing. I'm all over the place at the library and spreading flyers around campus.

And maybe what people don't remember.

Yeah, there are a lot of stumpers in here for the modern reader.

I think you could say that, yes. Okay, so if we start out with one, for example, now here's one that I had not heard before. Who was the teacher on Ding Dong School?

Have you ever heard of Ding Dong School?

Who is the. Yeah. Who is the teacher? What is that?

What is that? The answer, it says is Ms. Francis.

Well, I mean, the architecture of television was really different, too. If you think about what kids watch today versus what kids watched back then.

I mean, it was people in very obvious TV studios and a set of kids on bleachers. You know, like the Bozo show, stuff like that.

Right.

It's,

I guess, what's kind of fun. I mean, I consider myself pretty well up on even older pop culture, you know, and this is something that just went by.

I don't even remember my parents ever talking about this. You know, my parents would talk about Howdy Doody and Pinkie Lee, some other kids, Roy Rogers and stuff that they watched as kids.

But I don't even remember this.

Right. And I'm so far disconnected from any of it that it's like, well, that's.

I mean, you're younger than I am, so I thought maybe you would be a little bit more. Yeah, you're probably more in tune with pop culture today than I am.

Maybe a little. But, I mean, all of this stuff, too. Like, if you're thinking about old television like that, a lot of it wasn't preserved at all.

No.

Just because of the way that it was. Like, it was all done live. And you have kinescopes of some stuff when they would just shoot a screen in the studio, basically.

But if you don't have that for a lot of stuff pre, like, the 60s, we just don't have any evidence that it really ever existed.

Well, I'm glad you mentioned that, because I think a lot of things about one of the questions is what survived? What do people still remember? And sometimes it's because something was really popular. You're more likely to remember it.

Yeah.

Mean, there are shows from that era that even if you've never seen I Love Lucy, you've probably heard of it. Have you ever seen I Love Lucy?

I've not seen it, but I've definitely heard of it.

Okay. So it's out there. So there's something like that that survives. And sometimes it depends on what survives is because what's accessible, what's there.

And I was sort of thinking about TV shows from my youth. I mean, one of the very popular ones. Have you ever heard of WKRP in Cincinnati?

Yeah.

I mean, I remember when I was in high school, people were always. Would talk about that show. People would watch it, people. But nobody's seen it anymore.

And part of the reason nobody's seen it is because of the rights. Because they used to put a lot of music in there. You know, all of this, it sounds like. Yeah. And I think that's sad because it was a good show.

And I mean, a lot of people my age are very nostalgic about it. We'll look back on it and really fondly. But nobody can see it. No one's gonna remember it.

And I used to think about, there's a friend of mine who's really into silent movies. Mm. And he's a big fan of Buster Keaton.

Yeah.

And he told me something one time that really stuck with me. You had the three big comedians of the silent era were Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. And who do you think was the most.

He told me, who do you think was the most popular in their era in the 20s? Of those three.

Right. If you're looking at it from today, you'd say Charlie Chaplin for sure.

Right. It was actually Harold Lloyd.

Right.

And my friend was telling me that the thing with Harold Lloyd is he didn't. Because he had apparently the copyright on his movies or something for A long time. But anyway, he didn't want them shown.

They were not shown for many, many years. And as a result of that, for decades. I mean, they're all publicly available now. You can find them on YouTube.

But for many years, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, those old movies were shown herald. Lloyd's were not. So over time, subsequent generations started gravitating more toward Keaton and Chaplin.

That makes a lot of sense. I mean, you think about that with the rights issues and like, we were talking about already sort of technological limitations.

You watch that happen over and over again, where stuff becomes inaccessible or disappears just because the framework wasn't there to save it. Like with early silent movies. A ton of those early silent movies are totally missing or destroyed. There are no copies of any of them.

And it's the same with early tv. And then it's the same again with the early Internet. There are tons of things that were on the early Internet that are just totally gone now.

Yeah.

Totally inaccessible. Or even if they are kind of accessible, they're pretty broken.

Right.

And that's, I think, just sort of a hurdle. Like, in archives, you're always kind of catching up, right?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

And it's like, okay, so now we have this new technology. How do we save this? And not only how do we save it, but how do we keep it?

If it's something interactive, like a webpage, how do we keep it interactive? Or if it's some old film, how do we keep this?

You know, when they were doing silent films originally, the music was all being made in the room with the movie. So, like, how do you most faithfully recreate that?

Lots of really interesting problems come up with this kind of ephemeral pop culture stuff that wasn't made to be saved forever.

Oh, right, absolutely. Well, and webpages, archives, archivists are already debating the best way to save those. And that was a big, ongoing debate.

Yeah. And things just get obsolete. And I mean, in the Internet age, things get obsolete so much more quickly.

They do. Well, and that brings me to another thing.

This occurred to me, actually, just as an aside, we were talking about, because WKRP in Cincinnati as this big show from my youth that I can't see anymore. And yet every Thanksgiving, when I look on Facebook, I see this whole meme about, oh, my God, I thought turkeys could fly, which is from that show.

I remember watching that episode when it first aired. And now I'm guessing that a lot of people your age have probably never seen that episode, but they know that Meme. They know that joke.

Yeah.

And it's strange when you think about that because, I mean, that wasn't even my favorite episode of the show. I don't think it was funny. But, I mean, it's just. Why has that survived and not a lot of the rest into meme? I guess it's memeable, but one thing is.

Because it's Thanksgiving.

Yeah.

It's tied to the holiday and a lot of holiday stuff. I think you get that.

Yeah. It's interesting how those just little kind of tendrils lead out of different big properties like that.

I mean, you can go all the way back with that if you want. All the stuff that.

All the terms that Shakespeare coined that we use every day and we don't even think about being attributed to him or where they originally came from or anything like that. That's a pretty extreme example relative to a meme on Facebook. But it's essentially the same thing.

You know, it is. It is. Well, Shakespeare and then the movie Casablanca, the first time I saw that, I remember, oh, my God, that's where that comes from.

That's where, you know, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship and blah, blah, blah. You know, all that is from Casablanca. But a lot of people that have never seen those movie know those terms.

Right. The stuff sort of just infects the culture eventually.

Right.

And we were talking before this, too, about, like, the monoculture, how much that has changed in the last 20 or 30 years. Right.

Once the Internet came around, especially now with streaming, it's like, we're not all sitting down to watch WKRP in Cincinnati on a Thursday night, you know? No.

Like, if you're doing it at all, you're doing it on your own, and maybe you have a friend who watches it and that's who you're going to talk to about it.

Well, that's the thing. I remember the days when you talk about, quote, unquote, water cooler shows.

Everybody watched this show the night before, and then the next day at work, supposedly, according to this, they gather around the water cooler and talk about it. Or when I was in school, we'd all, you know, in high school, we'd all talk about it in study hall or whatever, what have you.

Is there anything like that today? I mean, there are shows that are popular.

It seems like there are still kind of vestigial parts of that. Like, there will be things that get popular. There'll be big popcorn movies every summer, whatever.

But it's much less of a big deal than it Once was like, if you're looking at the stuff that everyone knows from a given year, I assume that that list is probably a lot shorter. And stuff just moves so fast now that it's really easy to miss things.

Like when it comes to, you know, whenever there's some popular show out, I almost always miss it until it's six months too late and no one's talking about it anymore because you just do it all on your own time.

Well, there's so much content. I was thinking the last TV show that I watched, because I'm a big spy fan, I like a lot of spy movies and spy books.

But I'm just watching it now, and it seems like nobody is anybody even talking about it now. I guess the part thing is a lot. There are all these shows, but nobody's watching them at the same time, number one.

And then the other thing, there's niches, like I said, I like a lot of spy shows and spy stuff. There's a lot of that out there, but I get to it in my own time. So now I'm watching things like four years after they went off the air.

So it's not like everybody watched a lot of the same shows the night before and then goes and talks about them.

Right.

And you know, you probably, if you wanted to get really grand with it, could tie that and just sort of the modern media landscape into like the loneliness epidemic and how everyone feels kind of isolated.

Right.

Because there is just less common stuff that we can all talk about together.

Right.

I think that there's probably something to be said there. I don't know that I'm the guy to say it, but it's. It does. It does feel a little bit isolating, but it is.

It's a give and take too, you know, like, there are lots of shows from the 60s and 70s and 80s that were great shows, but only ran for two seasons, didn't make it to syndication, and then just get forgot about. And at least now those shorter shows have a place to live and hopefully actually be seen.

Well, you can see stuff get popular again after it came out, which is very different than what happened most of the time with movies and music and TV shows back in the day. Like, one of my favorite recent movies is this movie, Dinner in America, which was shot here in Michigan. It was Shot mostly in Detroit.

And then it got really big on TikTok like last year or the year before. And now a ton of people know about it and it's become like sort of a cult favorite, which is something that was very rare back in the day.

And it's a lot easier to manufacture now, I guess, through social media.

Well, that's an interesting thing because there's more access to a lot of this older material than ever before. So, I mean, a lot of it is out there. You know, I'll. Every once in a while I want to. I'll see what older.

What classic movies are on HBO Max, because they got the Turner Classic. So that stuff is there, but you kind of have to know to look for it. I mean, I think you're always going to get people that are interested.

Yeah, you're always going to get people that are interested in older pop culture. But how do you sift through all of that, through all that content?

Right. Well, it is a lot of work and it is something you have to kind of dedicate yourself to.

That's a frustration that I have with a lot of people my age, just because I like so much old music and stuff. And I like a lot of things that I feel like, oh, this should be common knowledge or more people should know about X, Y or Z thing that I really like.

But the algorithm doesn't serve it to people and people don't really know where to look. Like we talk about in so many areas, so much information that it's really easy to get lost in if you're not good at parsing that stuff.

Well, I'm gonna go back to the Lookout trivia questions again because one thing I thought about, obviously we were talking about access being a big deal, but also just kind of popularity.

Yeah.

Because I mean, I Love Lucy as an example from something that the 50s that people remember.

Right.

And why do people remember I Love Lucy? And again, part of that is access. But what. Let's look some of this old older stuff and think, what do we remember? What don't we remember? Yeah.

And then maybe think about what might we remember now? But I. Here's one who played Superman on the radio.

Couldn't tell you.

Couldn't tell you. Well, it's kind of an interesting one. The answer is Bud Collier and some people out there who like. Who like us.

Know, a little bit of older pop culture goes way back. Wouldn't I know that he also hosted some game shows like later on in the television era. But here's an interesting.

You've never heard of Bud Collier, but you know who Superman is? Yeah, yeah. And that's an interesting thing. So Superman has survived, but nobody's seen that radio show. Do you remember who played.

I know. I just recently watched an old Unsolved Mysteries episode where they talked about him and I still can't remember the actor's name.

I guess that says something.

Yeah.

But I guess the character of Superman has survived and I think that kind of interesting.

Yeah, it is this established. I mean, well, that's just become such a popular thing now. Ip.

Right.

Making movies out of things that exist already, making TV shows out of properties that have existed already. It's not a new concept, but it's become like the bread and butter for movie studios especially. Right.

And I don't know, people have been trying to solve that for a long time.

Is there.

Is Hollywood bankrupt of ideas or anything? I don't think it's that extreme. I think that it's just a easy source for stuff. It's. It's sort of a proven market already. Right.

The superhero thing especially. We saw how big that became in the last decade.

Well, I guess the superhero thing, because I think about that, that survives some of these other questions. Like there's one about naming the foot the seven dwarfs from the Disney movie. And of course Snow White is a fairy tale that goes back centuries.

Yeah.

But the names of those dwarfs are from that movie and people remember that. Probably.

Yeah.

I'm guessing a lot of people. Could you name the seven dwarfs?

No.

Okay.

All right. I am not. I'm not enough. I'm not dedicated enough to Disney for that.

But I really, I mean that that movie is just a really great example of like how a piece of art can stand the test of time. Like a lot of. A lot of this is chance and things being in the right place at the right time.

But something like that specifically I think is just an example of such great and creative work that it like can't be forgotten for a really long time. Like. Like Metropolis or something, you know.

That's true. That's true. The Disney movie was the first full length animated film, if I remember correct.

Yeah. And I mean it just. Just pioneering so many new processes. That's all of that early Disney stuff is really great.

And I Think has stuck around because they were being so inventive at that time.

Yes.

You know, which was also unusual at that time. And Metropolis. Yes. Also very groundbreaking at the time. I mean, I watched that on YouTube one time because I thought I had to see it. And it's.

It's worth seeing, if any. For anybody out there who hasn't.

Definitely.

Yeah.

Well, yeah. I mean, so a lot of stuff like there. There's artistic merit there. I think that's a. That can be a big reason that stuff sticks around.

Okay. Artistic merit.

Not always.

Not. Oh, well, I guess that's a question. Is there anything from there that has stuck around from older eras that you think didn't deserve to.

I mean.

Well, I mean, people talk about Plan 9 from outer space.

Yeah, that. That is. That's an interesting example because I. I'm a big bad movie aficionado. I really like cheesy sci fi and horror from that era. And it's.

Honestly, Plan nine is bad, but it's not particularly outstanding relative to a lot of other stuff I've seen from that time and relative to other stuff I've seen from that director.

Right.

He definitely has worse. And I have seen worse from that era too. So it, you know, a lot of that stuff too can be ascribed to just like a certain book.

There were a few different books around the same time when like B movies were becoming popular again in the 80s that wrote about Plan 9. And I think that's a really big reason for that.

Something that comes around and I guess that's another thing, is something that was forgotten and is also remembered later. The movie It's a Wonderful Life, for example, was not a big hit when it came out.

It was forgotten for a long time and somehow it fell in the public domain is my understanding. And then all the TV stations started running it and everybody's like, oh my God, this is a great movie. I mean, it's my favorite Christmas movie.

I love that movie. Makes me cry every time that. Yes. Yeah.

I mean, that similar thing happened with Night of the Living Dead too, where Night of the Living Dead just accidentally fell into the public domain and then it showed up over and over again on home video because it was so cheap to do. And it showed up on TV all the time and became a really big deal. Is a super groundbreaking movie.

Is the reason that we have zombies in the popular culture the way they are today.

Right.

But just public domain.

Right. So I Mean, obviously, artistic merit does have a role. Yeah, I think often.

I think so.

And I.

Well, actually, we're talking about bad movies, but even in that case, I think you can make the argument the really bad movies are the ones that are just boring.

Yes.

If it's bad. But you laugh at it, like, yeah, there is a.

There's a big dip there in the middle of all the stuff that it's just like, okay, I get it.

Right. But I think, okay, artistic merit matters. Well, think about what's popular now.

What do you think the next generation or the generation that will at least have heard of.

That's so hard to say.

Especially because, like, the landscape of art and the way that we consume it and the way that we interface with it has changed so much in the last 20 or 30 years. It's really, really difficult to say what it's going to look like 30 years from now because it seemed like streaming was the big thing forever.

I know there's been a really big groundswell of people my age interested in owning things and physical media and having DVDs and Blu Rays and MP3 players and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Well, physical media, though, there's also the question of how long that's going to last.

Right. If you think about optical discs, actually,

here's a story for you. Yeah, I was for over last year, toward the end of last year, because sometimes when I go to the gym, I'll watch a phone.

I'll watch a TV show on my phone. I watch something on my phone while I'm working out. And I started watching old episodes of MASH, and I was watching those on my phone.

Welcome January 1st. All of a sudden, it wasn't on Hulu anymore. Well, hell, I had like. I had four more seasons to go. I felt like I have to watch the rest of this.

So I found a DVD set and I look at it and it was interesting that something I hadn't noticed was on Hulu.

But then when I went back and looked, I mean, I was watching it on my phone, but then when I looked back and look at my laptop, I saw it was that this white surgical gowns that these doctors were wearing had like a pink tint to it. Oh, yeah. And it was really strange. And I'm like, what the heck? Is this a bad transfer? Is this a.

But I. I talked to somebody who knows something more about these things, and, yeah, that can happen, you know, to color film after a while if they haven't remastered or whatever. So I guess future generations will never watch MASH and realize that those hospital gowns aren't supposed to have a big tint to them.

But you're talking about preservation issues. And this is a show that's, you know, we're talking from 50 years ago, which, I mean, okay, 50 years ago, half a century, but still there's.

I mean, that. That's. In some ways, it's almost the technology. The more stuff it adds, the more preservation issues you have. In a way, too.

Black and white is always easier to definitely preserve than color.

Yeah. Well. And you think, too, like, looking at these trivia questions, one of my favorite parts here is this.

And I think the first one you sent me, there's a part at the bottom that just says remember? And then it's a list of a bunch of significant musicians from like a decade or so prior.

Bobby Socks and the Blue Jeans and Chuck Willis and the Five Satins and Huey Smith and the Cadillacs and a bunch of like, really great R and B and rock groups. And I think a lot. I'm very into 50s music. That's a lot of what I listen to is music of the 50s.

Yeah.

And I think a lot about. When I am 55, a lot of what I listen to is going to be 100 years old.

Well, you know, when I was. When I was young, I was this kid who knew all this old stuff. And now I'm. Now I'm an older guy that knows really old stuff.

But, yeah, my parents grew up in the 50s and did a lot of that too. And actually, one thing we haven't even touched on too much yet is the. Is what.

What that culture says about the time, which is also a whole nother thing. But I was looking at the songs you were talking about.

Yeah.

Johnny Horton, for example. Have you heard, like, Sink the Bismarck and Battle of New Orleans?

Yes.

Has an historian. I find Johnny Horton kind of fascinating because it's that post World War II thing where everything was the great white man of history.

And he's right. And it's all military. All his songs are about military victories. And the US Is number one and.

Right. And you. You notice that that's not the kind of stuff that they play in American Graffiti.

I actually haven't seen American Graffiti. I should one of these days, but

they're hitting the cool rock and roll hits of the time there. They're not playing that stuff. Well, it does say a lot about.

It seems like the popular culture isn't even necessarily always what defines a certain era. It's usually a lot. It's usually a countercultural thing, thing that defines a certain era.

Like, if you think about the 50s, rock and roll is like the thing that really defines it. And that was countercultural. It was popular amongst young people. It wasn't popular amongst the general population.

There is a book I would recommend to anybody interested in music history. I forget the author's name. It's called how the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll. It's not actually about the Beatles. It's a buzzy title.

And it goes into things like technological innovations, things we talk about how the jukebox changed, how we listen to music and how many musicians were out of work now because it was so much easier for these establishments to just get a jukebox.

Definitely.

Right. And how that went with the top 40 hits and how, you know, and it was just. It's a fascinating book.

And again, I wish I remembered the author's name, but I would recommend that to anybody.

Yeah. And I mean, that does go to show kind of how much of this is manufactured.

You think about, like, Alan Freed is mentioned in these trivia questions, and he was sort of a king of paola. Yes. He was making sure that the right songs ended up, you know, whatever they thought the right songs were, ended up being big hits.

And I think that that's a tradition that carries on very strong today.

Oh, yeah, there's.

Yeah, but it's.

You know, I guess if I had, like, any sort of thinking about pop culture and thinking about what it looks like today and what it looks like for the future, you can kind of make your own, really. Like, there's a lot of digging to do, but everything is out there and accessible now.

It's not like 30 or 40 years ago where you had to go to the record store and dig through bins and hopefully find something cool. Now it's really easy to find whatever it is that totally speaks to you. You can do that. With the power of the Internet.

This has been Bob Garrett with Tales from the LCC Archives. To listen to this episode and other episodes on demand, visit LCCconnect.org. Please join me next time on Tales from the LCC Archives, as we explore, share, and preserve the tales that make Lansing Community College what it is today. Once again, this is Bob Garrett reminding you, look at the past to understand the present.