Growing Up in the Peanut Gallery

by Fulano de Tal

            I grew up in the ninteen forties and fifties when television was new and we received only the three major networks.  It was the age of the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes when society seemed bland and conformist.  People were encouraged to adjust and fit into society instead trying to reform society to meet their needs.  Boys and girls were expected to grow up accepting traditional gender roles.  When television came into our home, these values were communicated to children through popular programs such as Howdy Doody, The Mickey Mouse Club and the Lone Ranger. 

            The Howdy Doody Show was one of the first children’s programs and it stuck in many people’s minds, especially the catchy tune “It’s Howdy Doody Time.”  The children sitting in the “Peanut Gallery”each day were white, middle class visitors and they just watched the characters.  The lead character was a puppet whose strings were pulled by a fatherly male master of ceremonies.  The girls and women on the show had submissive, feminine, marginal roles, including Princess Summerfall Winterspring and Clarabelle Hornblow the clown who did not talk but only tooted a horn.  The children on the show had much less personality than those on a show I watched a bit later on, The Mickey Mouse Club.

            The Mickey Mouse Club was the first Disney show for kids, and the same children were on the show every day.  They were also all white and middle American in appearance.  But they had distinctive personalities so viewers could identify with them, especially Annette Funicello, who later had her own acting career.  The girls on the show were more assertive, but they aspired to conventional lives, and were always cute and attractive.  This show may have appealed more to girls, while boys often watched westerns such as the Lone Ranger.

            The Lone Ranger rode a white horse, shot silver bullets and always wore a mask because of some mysterious problem in his past.  He was white and lived in the frontier west among middle American white families, but he was accompanied by an Indian named Tonto who addressed the Lone Ranger as “Keemosabe” but said little else.  The lone ranger was an archetypal individual who single handedly triumphed over evil and injustice each and every week.  Women were damsels in distress who greatly admired and appreciated his help, but could never get close to him.  He protected an idyllic world from dangerous forces that threatened it.

            The children’s television of my era reinforced traditional norms, it did not promote change.  None of the shows explored diverse gender roles or portrayed minorities in diverse roles.  Only the Mickey Mouse Club had characters with individual personalities who made efforts to shape their world.  The only minority individual with a significant role in these shows was Tonto, a man with very limited verbal abilities who was only a sidekick.  When my generation went to college we became the rebellious generation of the sixties, but we certainly did not get our countercultural ideas from the television shows we watched as children.