Those kids today have no idea how lucky they are that they have things like the Internet and eleventy billion television channels to choose from and all the High Fructose Corn Syrup aggressive food corporations can stuff into them. In my day, we didn’t have any of those things. One thing we did have, though, is “Davey and Goliath.”

What was “Davey and Goliath?” “Davey and Goliath” was a claymation show about the adventures of a boy my age and his dog, Goliath. “Dave and Goliath” was one of those shows that kids had to watch because there was nothing else to watch. (The other one was “Hee-Haw.” I still have nightmares about that cornfield. Guaranteed, if you were out of town visiting relatives and you couldn’t sleep late at night, there was only one channel you could pick up: whichever one was running “Hee-Haw” at that precise moment.) In the case of “Davey and Goliath,” the reason there was nothing else to watch was because it was programmed on Sunday mornings, the sacred bastion of church TV in my youth. If you’d already read all your comic books and re-explored the woods and your tree fort, there was nothing else to do but watch “Davey and Goliath” and do your best to convince yourself that you were actually enjoying it.

I don’t remember much about “Davey and Goliath” except its pointed churchiness, in which an obvious moral lesson clarifies everything for Davey (and his reluctant audience), and Goliath’s mournful voice bemoaning something or other every episode with the declaration, “Ohhhhh, Daaaaveyyyy….” At least once a week, I still do this impression. I suspect that there are millions of American white men in their 40’s who do.

Today, on my birthday, I thought I’d celebrate our liberation from the strictures (and scriptures) of our youth. No longer are we shackled to one bad TV show we don’t want to watch. Now we can choose from an endless supply of bad TV shows we don’t want to watch. And, thanks to the Internet, we can also do other things, like find delightful parodies of childhood shows we despised. Here’s one of the best.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at 3:41 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.