Chipped Messages, Nightly on the Tube

Let the chips fall where they may? Is that how the saying goes? I know I don’t want to write about corn-chips or how I now choose only the natural which during the eighties were considered junk: potatoes, grease and salt.

Then, I think perhaps this is another psychological excavation born of the way the TV entered our psyches as kids because CHiPs, for my age group, also means the California HighWays were patrolled by Poncherello and Jon Baker, white-teethed on their gunning happy cycles.

Even the Village People adopted a cop, placed him in their YMCA line-up, with a thick stache and a hairy chest--got to be, a macho, macho man!

But these weren’t guys drawing guns, or blowing things up, they were clean and gleaming, and happy to stop and help families with flats and little lost dogs. We tuned in once a week for our hour-adventure back in the day, when two shows in a row, seemed an excessive amount of time, to park ourselves, in one room.

Our longest consecutive viewing hours of two-full occurred on Saturday nights, with Captain Stubing aboard the Love Boat followed by Tattoo and the Boss, Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island. A white-suited man who in some twisted way reminded all to be careful what they wished for.

You see, big fantasies most often go wrong, though the Boss somehow wrapped up each show in the same way, one in which viewers whose thoughts were filled with similar ideas, were by the end of the hour, thanking their lucky stars for their own bland lives. The cliff hanger at last commercial break was then Godly-handled in the last five, a quick flashing of the guests’ ostentatious fantasy in devilish, Kodak-cubed, blinding-white to blackout, and this viewing through the tube a safer alternative to some wild-eyed, pie-in-the-sky, gambling move, in which you lose,

ALL of your chips.

“Smiles everyone, smiles!”

Photo Credit: George Coletrain/unsplash