RIVER CITY JOURNAL: FOR A MINUTE THERE, I THOUGHT `ZORRO' MIGHT BE NEXT

Watching a movie made nearly 40 years ago on TV for the first time can be both enjoyable and memorable.

Talk about a visit to the past. It all started when my wife and I faced the question we ask ourselves almost every evening: Is there anything to watch on TV?

I'll tell you the answer, in just a minute.

First, let me say that my wife and I were part of that generation that learned to amuse itself before there was a TV set not just in every home, but in virtually every room of many houses.

Some of you may remember those bygone days, prior to TV. What did we do without TV? For one thing, we listened to the radio. We used to sit around the big, furniture-sized radio receiver in the living room and listen to our favorite programs: comedies, dramas, westerns, private eyes, suspense. On Sunday afternoons, after church and while getting ready for a big dinner, it wasn't unusual in my wife's home, for example, to listen to the Kansas City Philharmonic on WDAF, one of the big Kansas City stations.

But we did a lot of other things too. In those days, children has to invent many of their own games. And a lot of those activities relied mostly on imagination. Let's pretend. Let's playlike. And you would be occupied for hours making up the game or role playing as you went along. Much of the time was devoted to arguing over the instant rules, but you had plenty of time, so that's what you did.

A bath towel out of the dirty laundry -- you wouldn't dare take a clean one out of the linen closet -- worked just fine as a superhero's cape or a pioneer woman's shawl or an Indian's loincloth. Sticks and long pieces of scrap lumber could be just about anything you needed: guns, spears, railroad-crossing barriers, city curbs. Well, you get the picture.

You played outdoors when the weather permitted: on the front porch, in the garage, in the barn, in the yard, down by the orchard, in the woods, over in the creek, out in a field, along the lane that went to the mailbox.

And you didn't have to play any particular game at any particular time. If you wanted to set up your toy trucks in the dirt pile over yonder, you just did it.

Then TV arrived. The appliance store came out and installed the antenna so you could get the only station available, KFVS. I didn't know until I went to college that there were other networks besides CBS. I thought CBS was television.

And our lives changed. We became regulated by the half-hour segments of our lives marked by TV commercials. We moved indoors, where the TV set was, to watch every program that came on. Thank goodness CBS had a heck of a lineup in those days. We call those programs classics nowadays. Some of us wish they would televise all those old shows -- remember "The Millionaire"? -- again, not out of nostalgia, but because they were good shows.

When everyone started staying inside during the summer, it quickly became apparent that it was hot in most of our houses. So everyone got air conditioning. Thanks to TV and air conditioning, new houses don't have front porches, and few of us know our neighbors.

Sorry, I can't change all that.

Which brings us to the question about what we might watch on TV on any given night. CBS is still there. So are 40 other channels, unless you've gone digital or satellite. Then you have dozens more choices.

With all those options, my wife and I are surprised at how little TV we want to watch. There are dozens of popular series being televised, and we haven't seen a single episode of any of them. But I could tell you the plots of almost every "Have Gun, Will Travel" ever made.

So one night this week we were looking at the TV listings, trying to decide whether to watch something or read our books. I spotted a movie on the Disney channel that neither of us had ever seen. It was "The Parent Trap" with Maureen O'Hara and Brian Keith as the parents and Halley Mills as their twin daughters. Most of you probably saw it in 1961 when it came out. But here we were, 37 years later, watching it for the first time.

Guess what? We watched the entire two-plus hours of movie. We didn't fall asleep in our recliners, which is awfully easy to do. We enjoyed the simple, easy-to-predict plot. The acting was fine. There wasn't a single bit of foul language. We were guaranteed a happy ending. We got it.

I can't say every movie made in 1961 or before will be a winner. There were some bad movies even then.

But it was, for about two hours, a visit to the safety of a past time when life was simpler, and most of our values were still intact.

It was fun.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.