“Share in our children’s interest phase” 😭

~Last week I was commenting about how wives started to be portrayed as more capable and better all-around human beings than their husbands, and that right around here ('88-'89) with Foxtrot and The Simpsons, that shift roughly happened in common media.

But this one also hearkened me back along somewhat different lines-- the husband & wife who are best friends, and love to chatter away. There was a version of that in The Bob Newhart Show in the 70's, which I enjoyed as a kid. Bob and Emily would often end an episode in bed, talking about this & that... maybe Bob's crazy patients, or their crazier mutual friends.

One of the crazy-brilliant TV moments was the finale of his later series Newhart, which ran in the 80's. In turns out it was all just a dream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McVWkGWMHKI

And then of course, Breaking Bad brilliantly ran with the concept for their alt-finale, hearkening bad to Malcolm in the Middle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVdB36lmbII

Eheh, bit of a ramble I suppose. 😅

Okay, Roger deserves whatever shit he gets after this one.

Imo its cute because his love is turning him into an idiot

Yeah, I remember Es being the biggest engines Estes models took when I built them as a kid. F onward was serious business.

I think Es are about where they start requiring a license.

I never found a store that sold Es. Best we could get were Ds but the kits that used them were expensive. Speaking of lack of parachutes, I lost so many Mosquitos...

RIP his rocket. Those things were fun, but I remember the sound of the launch getting dogs very excited.

I thought your interest was more in the mechanics of storytelling in that genre than it was.

OMG, no... that would be a Titanic-sized issue to try to tackle!

I cut mine daily, if I miss more than two or three days I get comments about it.

I do not know if you saw yesterday's strip, this is the direct follow up to it.

Ah, I see. Because your original comment seemed to confine the question to American media and TV specifically, I thought your interest was more in the mechanics of storytelling in that genre than it was.

I had no idea this was about a haircut until I read your comment

I dunno... kinda seems like you're off an a tangent there, which is a very interesting tangent IMO, but still not really what I was trying to focus in on.

I'm not gonna state my theme point ad nauseam, but I suspect there are some very significant reasons why shows like The Honeymooners were rare in terms of the skewed husband-wife dynamic. Patriarchy probably being first. Patriarch and patriarchical tradition across pop media.

That is the real point I was trying to get at, explaining why it took so very long for a show like The Simpsons to finally break through.

Oh, I'm sure my examples weren't the best. This was all off the top of my head.

There are better examples, I think, but they come from shows where the cast was large enough and the plots complex enough that the drama of the show wasn’t as necessarily centered on husband/wife conflict. Many shows aren't like this and in these, if you have a competent partner, most likely you will be a buffoon.

It's never made a difference, so I mostly just get it cut with the seasons. Start of year, and start of summer

If you cut it more often won't people be less likely to notice?

I toast your interesting thoughts!

I Love Lucy, Bewitched

These are reasonable suggestions, but I feel like it's not decisively clear that the 'stay at home' spouse in those cases was notably smarter & more talented than the other, unlike Foxtrot, The Honeymooners and The Simpsons. I feel like in all three of those latter shows, it's near miraculous that the husband was able to bag the attractive smartie, so to speak.

Actually, in I Love Lucy there was indeed something of a super-improbable marriage, in old man Fred somehow marrying much younger Ethel. I do recall reading that Vivian Vance felt borderline humiliated by being matched with chronic drunkard William Frawley, who was on thin ice in terms of taking 'one more strike' before being fired. He turned out to be pretty great though, IMO.

I specifically don't cut my hair more than a couple times per year because I don't want the attention

I think that there have always been shows that do this, to some extent. In addition to the Honeymooners, you might include shows like I Love Lucy, Bewitched, Everybody Loves Raymond, etc. Shows like these were typically set mainly in the home, rather than following the work life of one of the characters.

I can see why it wasn't the most popular format. New shows need to distinguish themselves from established shows, and setting a new show in yet another American home probably wouldn't do that. Also, a home-based show eventually gets monotonous because of the limited setting, and so these shows can go to ridiculous lengths to break out of that setting (how many times did Lucy scheme to appear in Ricky's club).

I'm all for homemakers having better representation, but I can understand why they are less focused on, which I believe is why they become relegated to sidekick status (which I think is why they often become comedy relief or serve more as plot devices than real characters)

I remember when i was a kid my mom would get so mad when no one commented on her hair cut.

I'm trying to think about when the American media dynamic shifted to allowing family scenarios in which the clearly smarter, more talented spouse was the one who wound up being the homemaker. Almost always the wife, of course.

Obviously by the time of The Simpsons the doors had been blown wide open, but what was the critical media franchise that was the lever? Maybe just the Simpsons itself? The Honeymooners came ~35yrs earlier of course, but I'm not aware that it changed the overall media dynamic much.

Yeesh.

Oof.

One thing that always bugged me a bit is that Amend basically drew the same face & head for most or all of his characters. Now, it's easy to spot the signal differences when it comes to the Foxes, but with groups of girls I was always getting confused which one was Paige and which, her friends.

That said, he always made sure to put in just enough little details in to their hair and whatever else to help loyal readers spot the differences. I'd be tempted to call it a Peanuts / Schulz technique, but certainly the tradition of similar faces goes back to the very Stone Ages of newspaper comics.