Smile if you know the name "Mr. Green Jeans."
When I was a kid in the 1960s, my favorite television show was "Captain Kangaroo."
If the children of the 1970s were co-parented by Fred Rogers, of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," and Kermit the Frog, of "Sesame Street," we late-stage baby boomers were baby "roos."
Captain Kangaroo's sidekick was Mr. Green Jeans, who, predictably, wore green denim. I'm tempted to hyphenate Green-Jeans, because I don't think Green was his first name. Sometimes he wore green overalls, and other times he sported a green denim jacket. In the days of black-and-white television, "green" was just another shade of gray anyway.
Mark KennedyView other columns by Mark Kennedy
"Captain Kangaroo" was the anchor for children's programming in the 1960s. It aired nationally on CBS from the late 1950s until the early 1980s. The Captain himself had a bowl haircut with bangs that made him look like a geriatric Ringo Starr. He also wore a jacket with white piping outlining big front pockets. Hence, Captain "Kangaroo."
The Captain talked to puppets. One of his pals was Mr. Moose, who would tell "knock-knock" jokes that triggered buckets of ping-pong balls being dumped on the Captain's head. To a 5-year-old in 1963, this was hilarious.
A typical episode of "Captain Kangaroo" also included an episode of "Tom Terrific," which served as the house cartoon series.
By the time I became a first-time dad 40 years later, children's television had changed a lot. Our older son, a millennial, grew up watching "Barney & Friends." Somewhere between the early 1960s and the early 2000s, the puppets became life-size, took over the set and banished the adults.
Barney and his gang held court over a bunch of kids, some of whom later became pop stars - witness Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato. Barney, if you don't know, was a big purple dinosaur with a bubbly voice.
The whole idea of "Barney & Friends" was to hypnotize babies so that mom and dad could rest from the rigors of parenting.
If our oldest son ever tired of Barney, we would pop in a DVD of Thomas the Tank Engine, which involved toy trains and was narrated by a person with a British accent.
To this day, I believe you could sit our 16-year-old in front of an old Barney video and he would immediately become slack-jawed and his eyes would glaze over.
By the time our younger son was a preschooler, television was barely a thing. I think that future sociologists will see this period as an important inflection point in human development.
Instead of being captive to a shared, early-childhood culture - witness Captain Kangaroo or Barney - today's kids are total freelancers, experiencing whatever floats their boats. We've gone from the boob tube to YouTube, and the implications are profound.
Our younger son is a serial hobbyist. At points he has been passionate about different things: cooking, fishing and gardening, to name a few. He can feed any interest with just a few keystrokes and quickly become educated on almost any topic. It's like the difference between reading a children's book and having an entire library at your fingertips.
I've got to believe that this is a healthy culture change.
I've notice recently that some days he puts away his iPad and retires to the garage, where he sits in a camp chair swinging his legs and looking out across the backyard.
At first I didn't get it, but then it dawned on me that he is thinking. He is taking a break from information overload to make sense of what he has learned.
Sorry, Barney and Mr. Green Jeans. It was good to know you, and thanks for the memories.
But I trust the future to this new generation of kid thinkers - fueled by the vast internet but ultimately reliant on the transformative power of the human mind.
What thoughts they will think when information is infinite.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.