Five-Star Disability

A quick blog:

(But my blogs are never quick!)

I do love my TV!

I grew up watching a lot of TV, hours spent watching TV was quality time for me.

Saturday Mornings cartoons, after school TV, Primetime, daytime, any time! I watched Gilligan’s Island, Superfriends, Three’s Company, He-Man, Card Sharks, The Price is Right (back when Bob Barker had black hair) Looney Tunes, Night Court, Cheers, The (Original) Muppet Show, Dukes of Hazzard, Hill Street Blues, and a whole lot of other stuff!

And then I got my first caption decoder device!

Captioning is similar to subtitles in a foreign language film. But in the 1990’s you needed to buy a device, and not all shows were captioned, and hardly any commercials.

I got my first device in 1989, and, on the way to the car, I dropped the darn box! My mother was a little annoyed!

Later that night, I hooked it up to the TV and was happy to report that it did work! I was watching The A-Team that night! BA really does have a Bad Attitude!

Now, why am I writing about this? Well, I just found out that Netflix recently added all episodes of He-Man (1983) to its on-demand list! Awesome! As I said, I grew up watching those shows. I wanted my two sons to watch them with me! So, all three MacLean Men sat down to watch episode 1. We all followed it very closely!

Now, did you know that He-Man’s real name is Adam?

And get this, Adam’s dad is the King! Obviously the Queen is Adam’s mom!

He-Man’s sidekick, the guy with the mustache, has a weird name of “Man-at-Arms”. What’s wrong with Larry?

Skellator, the bad guy, has one ambition, to take over Castle Greyskull. Why? The first episode, nor the second, explained that in any detail.

That aside, his team included a witch. She was second in command, and her name is: Evil-Lyn!

He-Man/Adam had a green tiger as a pet. And, get this, the Tiger is actually called Cringer!

The floating guy with the Zero on his (or her?) chest was Orka! Wild! What is he (or she) for that matter?

I watched this in 1983 or 84, syndication was big thing! And, yet I never learned the names of any these characters.  I always thought that He-Man has actually called He-Man, that Man-at-Arms was Man. I disremember any of the verbal details, probably because my brain was not encoding auditory information correctly or at all. Interesting right?

When I did start using captions, I focus my attention on the captioning, usually in the lower quadrant of the screen, and ignore everything else. I sat close to the TV!

I still do this, because my vision had deteriorated quite a bit since 1983.

Nowadays, all TVs must have captioning devices inside. Many sets allow the viewer to adjust size, colour, and background of captioning! Which is cool! Yet, I prefer the white text with black background, classic! Netflix must provide captioning! Yet there is a lot, and I mean a LOT, of varitations! Some shows have huge white text, others small yellow, some have black text on white background. I was displeased with one movie on Netflix that had White background with white embossed text! Ugh!

Any show without captioning is not viewable for me!

So, this “Quick Blog” took three days! I sign off with two questions: What was so special about Castle Greyskull? Why was Skellator so inclined to have it?… Anyone know?

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