What have I been watching? Well, last night I was scrolling through my favorite streaming app, Snerk, and stumbled on a great old show from the late sixties that I had never heard of before called The Dan Plingo Show. When you watch old shows like that, you’re immediately struck by the number of things they could never get away with doing today, mostly because I have no idea what they’re supposed to mean and can only assume they made sense when they first came out.
It certainly was a different time. And maybe dimension too.
Dan Plingo is the main character, and I’m not sure why they named the show after him, because I don’t think he was famous. I googled him, and his only credits are this show, and he guest-hosted The Tonight Show forty-seven times.
He played a train conductor, but for some reason, he went into an office every day and mostly did paperwork. I wasn’t sure if this was something that train conductors used to do in the sixties. To tell you the truth, I’m not really sure what the day-to-day is for train conductors now. Maybe it is mainly filling out forms and lying to your boss about why there’s a horse in your office.
Yeah, the opening ten minutes was him hiding a horse in his office. No, they don’t explain why it was there or why he would get in trouble for having one, but the laugh track was working overtime as he stuffed it behind his desk. They would never do something like that on TV today. Probably because the audience would be bored and confused.
The plot was about him taking the train into the city on his day off so he could pick up his weekly paycheck from the office, but when his boss paid him, it was all in giant coins with President McKinley on them. No, that one didn’t seem to be a gag, because they didn’t play the laugh track at all. Not the way they did every time he opened a newspaper and the headline was KHRUSHCHEV WINS BOWLING TOURNAMENT.
Yeah, I thought it was just supposed to be weird, but they went back to it like five or six times, and each time the laugh track went wilder than before. I wasn’t sure if it was a reference to something. But, yeah, definitely not the kind of gag they’d pull today. Because everyone would be on their phone, googling it to see what it meant.
His girlfriend was a schoolteacher or something, but she was really upset because her best student broke his leg during an accident with the school’s Blimp Team. Yeah, I thought that might be a gag, too, but they treated it completely seriously. I’m not sure if lots of schools had blimp teams back then, because when I looked it up, all that came up were links trying to sell me blimps.
Oh, and his neighbor was a werewolf. Everyone treated it like it was really normal, though, and no one was afraid of him. He was probably my favorite character. The only joke I got the whole episode was when someone told him it was a full moon, and he said, “But I just got a haircut!” They might do a joke like that today, honestly, if there were a show about a werewolf.
Overall, I thought it was really fun, and I’ll probably watch the second episode tonight. It was only on for one season of fifty-seven episodes. But truly, the whole time I just kept thinking about how they would never make something like this today. Audiences these days are too sensitive about having to understand modern social norms and cultural references.