When your childhood and his childhood collides...

I have to report a rather alarming fact: my twelve year old has found the Saved By The Bell reruns. They play early in the morning on weekdays. He gets around early, plops down in front of the TV, and watches with all of the active interest of a cultural anthropologist.

Seriously. I think this is some adolescent way of discerning the pop culture that came before his generation. Over and over again he asks, “Did you really watch this?”

It gives me the heebie-jeebies. I don’t like being reminded that I, in fact, watched the same show when I was his age.

He’s one short step away from taking field notes.

He’s a smart kid. He’s realized that there were certain aspects of the eighties that were just a black hole of cultural imagination. You know, I think people who were in their twenties may have fared better in the eighties. Those of us who hit adolescence at the time, however, well; we were subjected to some really weird crap.

Of course, he’s suffering from the same problem we did. We got sucked in, and couldn’t look away. It’s worse than rubbernecking to see the car wreck on the highway. We became invested. We lived for the summer specials where a whole bunch of teenagers were able to leave the school, and work at the resort with relatively no adult supervision.

Oh well. There must be some value, some worth, right? I mean, this show has lived this long. It is influencing a whole new generation of pre-teens. High art it is not. And yet, here it is, still showing up…