54 Years Ago In Time

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Parents who are worried that their children are too immersed in pop culture might take comfort in knowing that their forebears had similar fears in 1950, when kids couldn't get enough of TV cowboy HOPALONG CASSIDY.

Last week countless hordes of U.S. children not only went to the movies once a week, listened to their radio favorites among 27 children's network programs (often reading comic books and blowing bubble gum at the same time), but spent millions of kiddie-hours squinting hypnotically at the 35 shows offered them on flickering television screens. The kiddies exhibited a leaping enthusiasm for the new and massive doses of entertainment offered by video. Overnight, almost every little boy and girl in the nation had become a cowboy; in those carefully metered periods which they spent outdoors between programs, they saw cattle rustlers around every corner. They were not the first U.S. children to indulge in make-believe about the Old West. But they were the first to catch the fever simultaneously from coast to coast and to demand such splendid arms and accouterments. --TIME, November 27, 1950