“Did you ever watch ‘Fantasy Island’?” One of the many terrible television programs from my younger days had been on my mind since Hervé Villechaize was in a Times crossword puzzle about a week ago. Ellis, in the passenger seat on our way late again to school, said no and asked, “What was that?”
Villechaize might have been described as the co-star of “Fantasy Island,” but in my memory he was written into the script as Ricardo Montalban’s sidekick, Tattoo. Tattoo’s “De plane! De plane!” — called out from a bell tower in the opening sequence — to this day occupies a small but important place in the enduring lexicon of the late 1970s. Montalban, who had a side gig as a pitchman, put “rich, Corinthian leather” into pop culture. Not that Ellis was interested in the least.
As he and I sat in silence, making our way toward the Amagansett train station, the thought occurred that the endless TikTok he watches was no dumber than 1970s TV. In fact, I told him, “Fantasy Island” and the rest of them arguably were stupider because, while TikTok videos are mostly the work of sole creators free to be as stupid as they cared to be, the ’70s shows were made by huge teams of adults spending tons of money to make pure crap.
“Who’s stupider?” I asked him.
“You, definitely,” he said.
Ellis is 14 and believes that anything that came before “Power Rangers” does not matter one bit. Sometimes I think he has a point.
There is no obvious way to measure the dumbness factor of late-’70s television against social media of the 2020s. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each is stupider in its own way. One difference is reruns; a certain sibling of mine watched a lot of TV during those days, surely seeing the same “Fantasy Island” or “Six Million Dollar Man” uncountable times.
TikTok may be self-referential a lot, but it is more of a one-way stream of stupid. During the 1970s, ’80s, and most of the ’90s, we let the sewer pipe fill our living rooms all the way up to the windows and we just sat in it, unfazed. It’s no wonder that 40-some years later, we Boomers are still chuckling about Corinthian leather.