Flash from the Past

I don't quite understand this story. It's about 48 years old, now, and key details seem to be missing, both because of the number of years that have passed and because of how young I was when it happened. Still.

I must have been about ... 8 or 9 years old, and my parents were at a party somewhere, and my 2-year-old sister and I must have had a babysitter, though I have no memory of that, and it was about 11 pm or midnight, and I was ... awake watching television. This makes no sense. Maybe I came downstairs and the babysitter was watching TV and I joined her? Maybe ... no, no idea.

Anyway, back in the very last pre-cable-TV days, late night TV was ... terrible. But wonderful. But terrible. Other than the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, there simply wasn't much on. Maybe a late movie (inevitably "adult," which meant either boring or terrifying), or, sometimes, old serials.

Because what I remember watching this night was the old 1938 Flash Gordon serials, with Buster Crabbe, 15 minutes each, strung together. For a 9-year old in 1976 in Ann Arbor, they were awesome. With Flash and Dale, and Ming the Merciless, and cliff-hangers, and lasers, and robots. It kind of ... made me think ... growing up must be so much fun, because it meant you were able to stay up to watch those shows whenever you wanted. Indeed, those shows must to some extent have been made for adults — why else would they be shown when all the kids were asleep?! What a great life adulthood obviously was!

Buster Crabbe, I presume?

I think even a lot of the truly obsessed Star Wars fans today don't realize how much what George Lucas was doing was an overt homage to those serials. All the fans trying to do Star Wars world-building are wanting desperately to believe that Lucas was somehow trying to put together an adult and serious complete and thorough world, rather than a simple modern version of those crazy, violent, profoundly insane and fantastic (in the true meaning of the world) entertainments from the 1930s. 

In any event ... I don't understand how I could have been watching TV alone at midnight, with my parents not there, but ... I did. And thank goodness. Watching old Flash Gordon serials certainly helped prepare me for Star Wars when it came out a year later. And made me more eager than ever to get to adulthood: So many fun TV shows and movies to watch!

(It occurs to me, now, that at the time those Flash Gordon episodes I watched were less than 40 years old. In other words, more recent, then, than Star Wars is now. I can't quite believe 9-year-old kids today find themselves watching Star Wars for the first time with the same ... sense of accessing secret treasures the way I did, then. We just consume media in such different ways, now, and there are so many TV channels available that it's difficult to imagine kids at that age already knowing all about it. Eh, I don't care. My way — late at night, secret, staring open-mouthed at the TV — made it infinitely more wonderful and enticing.)