As a child during the time when we had three television stations in bad weather and five in good, Freddie Prinze was everywhere. You can watch Gone Before His Time: Freddie Prinze, Sr. for free on Tubi. This guy was funny. I highly recommend you watch this after watching Elvis. It’s not just an era thing, it’s a dreams thing. Both films are treatise on what happens when highly driven individuals achieve their dreams too young. Elvis wanted to be Superman like the comic book, but when he was that level of super star there was nothing left to do. Freddie Prinze was a victim of the same drive.
Golden Era of Network Television
You kids will never experience the golden era of network television. You can watch every episode of Chico and the Man, but you will never get the experience of it. This was the 70s, when every commercial network television station reveled in being a equal opportunity offender.
We had Freddie Prinze telling old white man jokes with Jack Albertson as his foil. We had Fred Sanford making endless fun of white people and his son. We had Archie Bunker offending everyone and Sammy Davis Jr. appearing with him making all kinds of white people jokes Archie didn’t get.
It was all cool! The whole family laughed together. These shows took it as their civic duty to tell ethnic jokes of every ethnicity so that all the dirty laundry could be hung out on the line. We were all rather comfortable in our own skin. We didn’t have trigger warnings because we didn’t need them.
The American Family
If you want to know what destroyed the American family it was 500 channels of cable television combined with the Internet. If you wanted to watch television you watched one of the five stations (three if the weather wasn’t good). Everyone you ran into the following day had those same choices. There was a one in five chance people at work you didn’t like watched the same shows so you could at least have something civil to discuss.
Most homes didn’t have air conditioning until after the mid-1980s. If they did have air conditioning they had one window unit trying to do an entire house. I couldn’t. Most homes had one television. You watched with your family.
My God! I watched Roots with my dad! He was the kind of racist that made the Grand Warlock of the KKK seem like a founding member of the Rainbow Coalition. Schools wanted kids to watch it because they were discussing it as part of Social Studies/History classes.
Freddie Prinze, Sr. History
I really have to commend this documentary’s ability to cover his history and rise. They did it soon enough after that most of the people who knew him were still alive. This is an incredibly well done documentary. It’s a cautionary tale about losing your dreams after achieving them all. Oh, yes, it also re-enforces Robin Williams saying.
For more movie rental ideas please see list one and list two.
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