3. Write about a show you watched as a kid that hits a little different now

When I was a kid, one show that both my sister and I watched – and that I’d put at the top of my T.G.I.F. viewing list – was Full House.

Oh, how I loved this show! I identified with DJ, since I was the oldest sister. My sister was a lot like Stephanie too. Though we didn’t have a younger sibling, I still felt like this show had so much for me as a young child. I loved how they dealt with seemingly real issues and solved them all in 30 minutes! (ok, 22 if you count commercial breaks.)

I didn’t care for Danny Tanner; he was too uptight, but I definitely thought he was a fair dad and when I was little, my dad never seemed fair so this was a polar opposite. Michelle was SO annoying to me but I was able to tune her out for the older sisters’ weekly dilemmas and well, other characters.

I admit that I was always the girl who crushed on guys so of course, Uncle Jesse – have mercy! I thought John Stamos was ridiculously hot. I even traded a Tiger Beat or Teen Bop (or whatever teeny-bopper magazine I was buying) 8×10 glossy photo of Patrick Swayze to a girl at summer camp for one of John Stamos. Could I have found one of him myself in a mag? Sure, but it felt cool to give her a pic of the dude she liked in exchange for one I did. I affixed his gorgeous face to my 80s cheap wooden paneling in my room, amidst other young heartthrobs of the day. To me, Uncle Jesse was the coolest of the cool: he drove a motorcycle, had long hair, dated a lot of women; he was experienced. And when Becky came along and he settled down, I loved that he became the tamed wild man.

I also really liked her character; she was like a proxy mom to the children who’d lost theirs in an accident. She didn’t take his crap and she helped the girls with the female-type issues the men-folk couldn’t quite understand.

About two or three years ago, my kids all watched Full House ad nauseum. They churned through the entirety of it probably three or four times! I really loved how they got into it and still found those values to be important. And I have to admit, I still found it sort of endearing but not in the same way; perhaps more for the nostalgia. I found Danny less annoying, Kimmy to be more annoying, and, well, John Stamos is still hot. LOL.

I am tangentially relaying that this hits differently simply because they made Fuller House and that could be THE worst show on TV. It is so insanely bad that I told my daughter, who seemingly liked it, that she couldn’t play it while I was around because just listening to the cringe dialogue and seeing how they reworked universal issues in today’s new-fangled world was just so awful. They really ruined the sanctity of it. And I wonder if older folks looking at the original Full House didn’t think that it was cheesy too, at the time. Maybe it was but when I was watching it, it was good wholesome viewing.

And… yes, please! I’ll take two. Ha!