I'm from the future

BCC (Before Current Career), I watched TV at lunch. Sue me.

Now I'm down to one day, Monday, and only when everything falls in place.

My appointment viewing: The Rockford Files, only the best show ever.

(No, I am not entertaining debate on the matter.)

The Rockford Files is a time capsule, as is Adam-12, Emergency! and those contemporary dramas I saw as a kid in the 1970s when Life Couldn't Possibly Get Any Better.

Through them, I get to revisit my California past, when I solved crimes, arrested bad guys and saved the nice old guy and his dog from their burning cantaloupe truck in the steep canyon.

Local cable stations push the drug of nostalgia on susceptible people like me, with a back-to-back diet of these shows on their minor channels.

There were times, I must confess, that lunch extended past Rockford and before I knew it, the final credits were rolling on Pete Malloy and Jim Reed and John Gage and Roy DeSoto, their police car and paramedic truck safely parked until the next episode.

I look past the plots to see the world of the 1970s, the flair collars and plaid sports coats, the explosive sideburns like my dad used to wear, the bell bottoms, and TV's cartoon version of worlds it didn't quite understand, like the counter-culture and organized crime and high school.

I love seeing logos for businesses that no longer exist (Esso gas stations!) and a Southern California that looks laughably uncrowded.

And the phones! Do you realize that humans used to share public phones in order to talk to one another, and operated them by depositing coins in special slots? No, I am not joking! Watch the shows for proof. Sometimes you had to wait in line to use these payphones, and people got testy.

Being from the future, I get frustrated watching these shows, for a reason I hadn't anticipated. I want to hand Jim Rockford my phone.

When the henchman from the New Jersey syndicate decides to move the millionaire's kidnapped daughter to a new hiding place, Rockford has to find a payphone to alert his worried client and convince him finally to call the police. Luckily these tricky plot changes happen within walking distance of a payphone, but vital minutes pass. If only he had a smart phone!

Of course, the overwrought millionaire/bad guy is taking the call from his car phone. That was TV's universal symbol of arrogance and power and evil, a carphone, the boat-anchor receiver attached to a ridiculously long twisty cord. That guy (it was always a guy) might be comfortable amid his rich Corinthian leather seating in his amply appointed limo, but he would always meet his comeuppance before the final credits.

Officers Reed and Malloy had their police radio, of course, and Adam-12 introduced viewers to "authentic" police dispatch chatter — "One Adam Twelve, One Adam Twelve, a Two-Eleven in Progress … One Adam Twelve, meet One Oh Nine on Tack Two." (Maybe it was malarkey, but since Jack Webb produced the show and he loved, loved, loved! cops, I'm going to say it was realish malarkey.)

But away from their cars, out on the mean streets of TV's Los Angeles, the officers were helpless — phoneless!

In one episode of Adam-12, Reed and Malloy checked out suspicious activity inside a store at night. They decided to park their car far down the street — away from their radio! — so they wouldn't tip off the Bad Guy with the Flashlight, wandering around inside.

Reed stayed in the front, Malloy went around to the back, where of course the Bad Guy tried to get away. Malloy wrestled Bad Guy to the ground, but another Bad Guy appeared. Matters had gotten out of hand! Reed ran around to the back but the second Bad Guy had gotten away!

"Get to a phone, Reed!" Malloy shouted. "We need backup!"

Get to a phone?! Are you kidding me? Standard LAPD issue must have included a sidearm, billy club and two dimes for the payphone. So Reed's got to run around in the dark for a payphone, hope it doesn't have a line in front of it already, and call for help.

I wanted so desperately to reach through time and hand him a phone. I'd probably have to show him how to use it. This Bad Guy would remain on the loose, but the next Bad Guy in the next episode wouldn't be so lucky.

I wonder: Did the world travel only so fast as the prevailing communication technology would let it? Did the second Bad Guy amble along in the knowledge that the pay phone was the fastest the police could move to chase him?

Though hardly a fan of new phones, I realize through these shows how much we take for granted. We went hours — days! — without other people knowing where we were. People didn't expect to know where we were. We called when we reached our destination. If our car broke down, well … geez, I forget what we did.

In the lonely outposts of TV world, characters had to ask permission to use a phone from the suspicious farmer, the harried gas station attendant or the corrupt but wily county sheriff.

They often had to call collect. Ask your elders.

Now everyone knows where everyone else is all the time, even in the lonely outposts. On TV, everyone has a phone, which becomes the story transporter. Tired of the scene? Make the phone ring, and the story goes instantly to whoever's calling. Plot line lagging? Pull out the phone and find out the lab results are in, another body has been found by the river, same M.O. Let's go!

The world moves faster, accordingly.

It's all good, I guess.

We can't go back, anyway. Last week, when I wasn't necessarily looking, I found a payphone in its Plexiglas®™ and metal frame, sitting on its pole against a building. As with all payphones, its innards had been ripped out.

Poor Reed and Malloy. Poor Rockford.

No one you see is smarter than he!

This post is about nothing, which means it's about TV.

'60s TV in fact, so it's about less than nothing.

(You may also call this post, "I don't want to pay attention to the particularly awful real world at this moment." Should you feel likewise, escape with me for a bit.)

Admit it: If you're close to my age, you watched "Flipper," the "Lassie" of the seas.

Not the movie starring Chuck Connors and said cetacean, but the TV show the movie spawned.

This is the plot of the series' entire three-year run: "Dad, do you think Flipper senses Bud's in trouble? He's done that before!" (Actual quote from Sandy, Bud's older brother.)

Every show counted on Flipper the dolphin knowing more than his* owners — and saving one or various of their butts.

The movie, by contrast, was more about a boy and his dog dolphin — animated and seeming to laugh, but merely a dolphin.

(*Trivia: Stories vary about the gender and number of bottlenose dolphins that played Flipper. One says he was played by several female dolphins, thought to be less aggressive than males. Each dolphin was good at something different — though a male appears to have been used for the famous tail walk — so the Flipper we saw on TV was an edited amalgam of several animals.

(More trivia: Ric O'Barry trained those dolphins, inspired to the profession by a visit to a Sea World®™-type marine park as a sailor. Now he campaigns against the zoo captivity of marine mammals — and the industry he advanced — particularly the annual Japanese mass slaughter of dolphins at Taiji, chronicled in the documentary "The Cove."

(Maybe this isn't the antidote to real life that I thought.)

When I watch TV — not as much now that baseball's over — it's often the low-rent cable networks designed to indulge people my age — the same people who on facebook®™ "like" a picture of a rotary-dial phone or a 45-rpm record adapter and ask you to share if you're geezer enough to know what it is.

(Which I don't understand: Is it supposed to be some kind of putdown of younger people, or huffy resignation that facebook®© has been abandoned to old people?).

"Flipper" is a staple of the channel I watch.

Facets of "Flipper" that I noticed vaguely as a kid have now come clear. For example:

• Though its creators purportedly helped pioneer underwater ocean cinematography, "Flipper" looks like most of it was shot on the cheap over a week or maybe a long weekend.
  
  One day, it looks like, the creators shot footage of a dolphin skimming over a shallow sunlit reef, crystalline blue. Maybe the same day they shot a lot of footage of dolphins swimming back and forth through shapeless blue water, like an marine park pool — right, left, coming, going, surfacing, diving.
  
  Next day, the producers showed dolphins jumping out of an actual ocean somewhere, and the day after that shot dolphins doing closeup work — nodding, laughing, squeaking, tail walking —in water as opaque and green as new motor oil, the studio lagoon where the Ricks family home and dock sat.
  
  These shots were then repeated dozens of times and spliced together to create story sequences involving Flipper saving its owners' butts. The stories varied, the human actors did their different bits each week, but the action scenes were largely the same.
  
  The result, time and again, is that Flipper would come to the rescue, swimming speedily over the reefs, then race, and race some more, then appear to rise to the surface, all in clear blue water — only to appear on the surface, nodding and laughing, in suddenly dark green weed-strewn murk.
  
  Then Flipper would dive again to lead his stupid humans to the umpteenth rescue, but the water would turn crystal clear and sunny again.
  
  Or Flipper would approach his hapless owners in a long shot approaching a sandy beach, and in closeup the humans would be standing in murky water in a clump of shrubbery that suddenly showed up.
  
  Continuity — making sure one shot flowed seamlessly to the next to maintain the illusion of story — was not the show's strong suit.
  
  A friend my age said maybe we as viewers didn't care as much for the details. Maybe he's right — we were so enthralled with the daily miracle of TV we didn't care that much what was on.
• In the TV show, wildlife preserve ranger Porter Ricks is widowed with two sons. (In the movie, Porter is a married fisherman with one son, and he doesn't particularly like competing with Flipper for fish). Older son Sandy is played by Luke Halpin, just as in the movie. Younger son Bud is played by Tommy Norden.
  
  Both boy actors were born in New York City. In Tommy's case, you may be able to take the boy of the city, but you can't take the city out of the boy. Tommy always sounded like he was hailing a cab in the heart of Manhattan.
  
  "FlippUH! FlippUH! Wheah are ya, boy?" Bud would shout from the underwater cave in which he found himself trapped.
  
  "Gee, Sandy," Bud might say afterward, "Bein' stuck down deah in dat rusted hull of a frigate — until FlippUH rescued me, uv cahs — shuah gave me da shivuhs!"
  
  I'm surprised he didn't say, "youse guys."
  
  Had Bud maybe been adopted by the Ricks family? No such storyline, no such luck.
• Porter Ricks' unrequited love interest was marine biologist Ulla Norstrand, played by actress Ulla Strömstedt (so she wouldn't forget her character's name?), who tootled around Flipper's part of the ocean in a yellow submarine.
  
  Her primary role was to give the show plenty of opportunities to pad a thin story by showing a wild menagerie of sea life, all existing together in the TV ocean if they didn't in real life. We know, after all, Flipper lives in a world full of wonder! 
  
  Her secondary role was to get in trouble so Flipper could rescue her.
  
  In the evolving cultural zeitgeist, Ulla would get her sub stuck or lose it to a bad guy (including a young Burt Reynolds!) and wait helplessly for Porter to rescue her, who waited for Flipper to rescue them all.

A friend my age said maybe we as viewers didn't care as much for the details back then. Maybe he's right — we were so enthralled with the daily miracle of TV, with the few times the images weren't scrolling wildly up and down or side to side, we didn't really care what we were watching.

Pass me the popcorn.