Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for June 18, 2020

Ah, the old days. You could do that then, when there weren’t 500 channels.

“Today you are a man….”

No point now. 500 channels and absolutely nothing worth watching that you didn’t see back in 1999. Unless there’s re-runs of The Orville or Buffy, of course.

First remote I remember was simply a two button. A remote allowing channel changes 13 only with just 3 maybe 4 had signal and the best part…..sound off or on so you could silence those annoyingly loud commercials! The later improved Zenith Space Command was much better. A remote with four buttons…..on/off, channel up, channel down, volume all in one handy hand held.

26 years later, and women still aren’t trusted with remote controls…

When I was 12, I was the remote. We were line-of-sight with the Empire State Building’s antenna, and had eight VHF channels! Never had an actual remote until I moved out on my own.

Still true with commercial channels, they all air at the same time so you skim the non-commercial ones….manhood changes with the times but stays so much the same (insert french saying here…)

Dad rocking the J. R. “Bob” Dobbs look.

My rich friend’s family had a color TV with a remote. I remember sitting on their living room floor and clicking through the five stations. It got old even faster than turning the knob. Bonus: It worked by sound, so there was a plangent little ‘ping’ each time you pressed the very tactile buttons.

I liked this strip better when it was all about bugs that danced, and none of this topical remote control stuff.

I guess I’m just a damn bug lover.

“Did I do that?”

“You did, son, you did…”

When I was a kid, I WAS the remote control. “Son, go to the TV and change to channel 4 and turn up the volume”.

Almost 30 years back, when we were relatively penny pinching new parents with 2 wee kids, our one TV was a massive Zenith console from the 1970s that a friend donated to us. Rotary tuner…

Then we had a very rare chance to go on a family vacation where we stayed at a modest hotel, which was a first time experience for the kids.

First night there, after a fun day at the beach, we let the kids watch an hour of TV before sleep. We found their favourite show (public television only at our house) and the kids settled in to watch it.

Then a thunderstorm rolled into the area and the lights flickered a bit and soon, so did the television.

That’s when the kids got out of their beds, and without a pause, started to calmly jump up and down in front of the big, fancy digital TV screen.

It took us a few seconds to realize what they were trying to ‘fix’ the room’s TV the same way they learned to fix the TV tuner we had at home: shaking the tuner contacts in by shaking the floor it rested on.

I learned a lot about TVs when I babysat. I’d never heard of a remote control for a TV until I babysat at one house. Theirs was hard wired to the TV and had on/off button, volume up/down and channel up/down slides. That was fun to use. But the best thing was finding out that another family for whom I babysat actually had a color TV. I knew about color TVs but had rarely seen one. Of course there weren’t a lot of color shows in the early 60s so it was just by chance I was watching a show when an ad for Starkist Tuna came on and it was in color! After that I made a point of always babysitting for that family on Saturdays, if they needed a sitter, because “Saturday Night at the Movies” broadcast a lot of movies in color and I was able to take advantage of that.