Trivial Pursuits: Talking about my generation

Last week my brother sent me a video clip he’d taken of what appeared to be a couple of kids scrambling around some life-size pancakes while a seriously excited announcer gave a play-by-play. I was worried I was going to have to ask Tanner what I was watching until I heard, “Find the flag, find the flag!” And all at once it hit me. The little twerp has gotten tickets to a live screening of Double Dare, and the guy shouting about the flag was none other than Marc Summers.

When it comes to children’s television hosts, you have Fred Rogers at the very top, LeVar Burton from Reading Rainbow somewhere under him, with a healthy, respectable distance, and Marc Summers under LeVar (with another healthy, respectable distance). While Summers can’t compete with his predecessors, he’s still a bit of a living legend in kids’ TV for me and my generation.

We’ve been called the Oregon Trail Generation, but the Double Dare Generation would be just as apropos a term for us. We grew up on both. More often, we’re called “xennials”– a micro-generation born between 1977 and 1983, on the cusp of Gen X and millennials, a bit too young to completely identify with the ironic cynicism of the former and too old to know what it was like to grow up doing book report research on the Internet.

We are the World Book Encyclopedia Generation, the generation who, as teens, had to get off the phone if someone else in the house wanted to use the AOL dial-up Internet (which took no less than forever to work). That screechy sound is imbedded in our brains, an essential note in the soundtrack that scored our lives, like the Muppet Babies theme song and the Toys R Us commercial declaring we didn’t want to grow up.

But grow up we did, from a world of making mix tapes and buying Paula Abdul and New Kids on the Block singles on cassette into a strange new land of Napster and free music and an even stranger new land in which nobody went to stores for music anymore, and our music collections went from tangible shelves of CDs we listened to on our DiscMans whenever we wanted (as long as we moved around very carefully so as to avoid bumping them and making the CDs skip) to lists of music on devices we could play anywhere, so long as the device was charged, but couldn’t see or touch.

We are the last generation who remembers our home phone numbers, who remembers twisting the long cord while taking care not to stray too far from the wall, who remembers call waiting and three-way calling as pretty cool, if not somewhat confusing, breakthroughs, who called our friends and had to ask their parents if we could speak to them.

Before the Internet and pseudo reading devices called tablets, there were books made of paper, and we devoured the babysitting adventures of Kristy, Mary Ann, Claudia, Stacey and Dawn and crammed Choose Your Own Adventure books like they were going out of print.

We were the Nintendo generation, and when our parents shelled out nearly $70 for Super Mario 3, we whacked turtles with racoon tails and hunted for hidden whistles until our thumbs ached. 

We followed the romance of Saved by the Bell sweethearts Zach Morris and Kelly Kapowski with bated breath, we watched the white Bronco chase, with the rest of America, with a strange fascination, and we never got Corey Haim and Corey Feldman mixed up – sure, they were both bleach-blond adolescent heartthrobs, but c’mon, they looked nothing alike.

Nothing was cooler than MTV, nothing was more off-limits than whatever our parents were watching on HBO, Showtime or Cinemax, nothing was more boring than helping Mom fold laundry while she watched Northern Exposure (which we later streamed, as adults, and found out was actually good). 

And later, when we had kids of our own, we watched the make-your-own slime craze with furrowed brows, wondering where the gross factor had gone and deferring our children to old episodes of Double Dare because, by golly, they got it right.