Musicals

For most of my childhood, we didn't have a television. When we did get a television, we were so far from the television stations that only one channel came in reliably, and at most three.

As kids, the only time we got to choose what we watched on television - or if we watched - was on Friday nights. Fridays were the only night when our one reliable station broadcast all night; otherwise, it went off the air at eleven. My parents would let us stay up all night watching television on Fridays although, in reality, we usually fell asleep on the floor not too long after midnight.

If neither of our parents was home, we might turn the television on, and we wouldn't get in any trouble over it, but when they came home it almost always had to go off, whether or not we were in the middle of a show.

Usually, dad chose what we watched. Bringing this on-topic, musicals were big then, and I can remember countless times when we (my brothers and I) would line up in front of the television because a movie was coming on, and the disappointment we all felt when someone would start singing. "No! No! Please, not singing!"

This even happened with Westerns. They would take what might have otherwise been a perfectly good movie and then ruin it with singing. Once someone started singing, we would all drift off in search of something else to do. Friday nights were good though. There were never any musicals on Friday nights.

Although I have since come across a few musicals that I actually liked, I don't feel much different about musicals now as I did then.

 

I remember that the Rodger & Hammerstein’s musicals were all the big thing back when I was a kid, and I truly hated that , too. I couldn’t figure out why they ruined what might have been a passingly decent movie by standing around and singing all of the time.
I guess there might be a couple of exceptions.
Since I really liked Yul Brynner, I was okay with the singing in the movie, “The King and I” ; but even then, i would have preferred the movie without it.
The other exception might not even count as one, since I am not sure it qualified as an actual musical, and that would have been the singing Westerns, starring people like Roy Rogers or Gene Autry.
They always managed to get a song or two into the movie somewhere, but it was not a focal point of the movies in the westerns.

Then, of course, after Elvis started making movies , we had movies that had lots of songs in them, but since I loved listening to Elvis sing, I had a whole different attitude about those movies.
Really, the movie was just kind of a background for Elvis singing, and probably not what we can call a musical either.

 

A song or two in a Western, while sitting around a campfire or something, was okay, but a waste of my viewing time. I never watched a whole Elvis movie.

 

The Wizard of Oz was good, as was Jesus Christ Superstar, which I rewatched only a week or so ago. I liked Chicago, and the Beatles movies would have been better without the poor excuse for a move they were built around. Overall though, a movie is one thing and a concert is another. I like both, but would rather not mix them. But then, I didn't much care for music videos either.