Like most of us, I grew up watching a lot of T.V. I enjoy nostalgia as much as anyone, if not more, and watching old T.V. shows and movies that we grew up with takes us back to much simpler, easier times in our lives.

I love to write about obscure pop culture, and it’s great to know there’s an audience that enjoys reliving it, even if that audience is often small, but I often have a fear that my interests could grow so obscure that my focus could narrow to the head of a pin.

Still, when I scan sites that sell old movies and T.V. shows, like classics2dvd.com and http://videoaddicts.8m.com/tvsite.html (which will soon move to the address: http://spockvideo.com ), I’m always amazed to find how many shows and movies I’ve never even heard of.

For every show that’s a hit, there’s dozens occupying the pop culture landfill that didn’t take off. Some show and movie descriptions I’ve read in books and catalogs made me want to check them out right away, while the way other movies / shows are described, you cringe wondering how they ever got made in the first place, and often they’re just as painful to watch (Cop Rock anyone?).

Being a big Rod Serling fan, he’s a good place to start with shows I’d love to check out. I know about his little seen show, The Loner, a western, which is long lost today, but I didn’t know that Serling created a series called The New People, which many believe was the inspiration for Lost.

According to the listing for the series in The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, The New People is about forty people left stranded on a South Pacific island after a plane crash. The island used to be a test site for atomic weapons, so it has buildings and provisions, but was uninhabited until the plane crash, and the new people start to build their own society (People in isolated places is a Serling specialty, like his Twilight Zone pilot episode Where Is Everybody?).

Cruising through the websites, all of the sudden I was shocked to see a photo of Kurt Russell with blond hair. He co-starred in a western show with Tim Matheson (Otter from Animal House) called The Quest in 1976 (the show didn’t last because it got creamed in the ratings by Charlie’s Angels).

You may know the show Get Christie Love! because Harvey Keitel mentioned this short lived series in Reservoir Dogs. He also mentioned the female, African American undercover cop’s trademark line, “You’re under arrest, sugar.”

Get Christie Love! was also nominated in the book The Worst TV Shows of All Time along with Gilligan’s Island, and You’re In the Picture, a Jackie Gleason game show that only lasted two shows (the second episode was a half-hour apology from Gleason). It’s not that bad, Christe Love! that is. It’s kitschy retro ‘70’s fun, and has even been called a blaxploitation T.V. series.

Speaking of Tarantino, I had no idea David Carradine, Bill himself, played Shane in the T.V. spin-off of the movie of the same name. There were also T.V. spin offs of the films Walking Tall, Blue Thunder (with Dana Carvey), Star Man, Serpico, Casablanca (with David Soul?!), and Planet of the Apes, to name a few.

Here’s some more random searching through the T.V. show sites…Quark? Anyone see that show back in the ‘70’s? Richard Benjamin played a garbage collector in space. The Fifth Corner? Never even heard of it (I have heard of Quark though…). A guy wakes up next to a dead woman, he doesn’t remember who he is, or anything else, and there’s bad people after him (sounds a bit like Memento, no?).

I do remember The Master, the martial arts show starring Lee Van Cleef, because a junior high school friend of mine liked ninjas. That show didn’t last very long, and when I was a kid, I didn’t know what cancellations meant, and couldn’t understand why shows just all of the sudden disappeared.

Being a fan of monsters as a kid, there were several short-lived shows I watched in my youth including the pilot for Spectre, a Gene Roddenberry pilot that didn’t take off about an occult detective played by Robert Culp. I also liked Lucan, about a boy raised by wolves, and Cliffhangers, which was an attempt at modern day serials you’d see every week in the theater. One of the Cliffhanger episodes was The Curse of Dracula, a modern day take on the famous vampire, which was the only serial on the show to complete from beginning to end before it was cancelled.

Speaking of horror shows, I didn’t watch Kolchak the Nightstalker back then, I was too young, but in recent years I finally saw the wonderful cult show about the reporter who has a knack for uncovering the supernatural, and his long suffering editor who doesn’t believe his stories of vampires, werewolves and demons. Kolchak, which reportedly was the inspiration for The X-Files, still holds up well after all these years, and now you can get the complete series in a DVD box-set.

Now back to the ridiculous ideas that belong in the What Were They Thinking category. How about Claws, a sitcom where Dennis Miller was one of the voices for three talking cats? Or Poochinski, where Peter Boyle plays a cop who dies, and is reincarnated as a dog? I hadn’t heard of those shows, no one else has either, but for fans of bad T.V., there were a number of infamous network bombs that were the television equivalent of the Hindenburg.

How about Supertrain, the 1979 series which the Prime Time TV Show Directory called “one of the most expensive failures in the history of network television.” The Supertrain was a nuclear powered American bullet train of the future that speeds 200 miles an hour, and also has a swimming pool, gym, hair salon and disco. TV Guide wrote of the show, “Think The Love Boat was bad? Picture it clanking across the country. Or picture Fantasy Island on wheels.”

I finally saw an episode of Supertrain recently, and the rumors of its awfulness are not exaggerated, although it’s certainly entertaining in a Plan 9 From Outer Space kinda way. The same year, on the same network, NBC, there was also the Plan 9 of variety shows, Pink Lady and Jeff, hosted by an Asian singing duo and comedian Jeff Altman, that was mercifully killed after six months (Believe it or not, you can also get this complete series in a DVD box set).

I wonder if one day these shows, and many others, could make their own cable channel. The really bad shows would be perfect for a Mystery Science Theater scenario, with a bunch of comedians heckling them off the screen. Having not seen many of the shows I mentioned here, I’ll bet some of them will turn out to be great lost gems, and many of them will speak for themselves why they never made it.