Are there any T.V. shows or movies that you thought were great when you were a kid, or during an earlier time period, but now they do not hold up well?

Nearly none of them.

Wonder Years, Small Wonders, Alf, Who is the Boss, Cheers, everything.

It has all aged poorly.

I have a server with a archive section and that has even aged badly. I need to nuke Big Bang. Never liked that show and it takes it 100 GB.

https://i.imgur.com/hU0JNEk.jpg

I loved the flying nun. Sally Fields is awesome, but seeing the show now, YAWN.
Brady Bunch was ruined for me when I learned how much dating and sex was going on with the cast.
Get smart, I found myself anxious for the commercials.

A lot of stuff I watched as a kid are quite politically incorrect now. I just watched McClintock again a few days ago. Beat your woman with a shovel, she will behave, and love you forever.

I still love Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and The Muppets.

IMHO Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is better than anything Disney ever made, including Mary Poppins. But its not like there is any competition. It just seems like CCBB was never fully appreciated. And The Muppet Movie (1979) is very pensive and inspirational—a longing for something we are meant or destined to be. Very under-rated.

Ghostbusters one and two.

This is what happens to a lot of shows I watch when I was a child. A show has to be reaaaaaaaaaally good to hold up to my current self. Oh well, that’s just my taste evolving, and I consider that a good thing.

However, there is one show that seriously crosses the line. My perceptions of it as a child and now are just so different it’s like I just watched two different shows altogether.

Lucky Luke is a show about a wandering cowboy who shoots so fast not even his shadow can catch up with him. Each episode is about him going to a random town and helping people in need, mostly by dealing with a criminal. He’s basically a more down-to-earth Superman, so physically and morally perfect that no town can survive without him. As a child I enjoyed the “good guy/bad guy” fights between Luke and the criminals, cheering him on during each battle and awing over his supposedly superior wit (the show mostly based around Luke’s intelligence over the criminals rather than physical fights).

But as an adult, I realized that there are just so many questionable things in the show that I don’t even know where to begin.

The show actually has a very dark sense of humor, referring to death and violence countless times. Criminals get sentenced to hang and often this is the default punishment in the show, references to shootouts, an undertaker who is always present during violence to make money, scenes of people getting hanged… These are just a few examples of how violent the show actually is. I’m quite OK with dark humor, but my problem is that the show deals with those matters in a very immature way. Every reference to violence is just there for laugh and that’s it (the judge sentence a criminal to death. The criminal makes stupid face. Everyone laughs and move on…). I missed these reference as a kid, and now when I finally got them, they just left a bad taste in my mouth.

The show also plays down its side characters. Every single side character is so stupid they can’t even function when a crime happen. Everyone is horribly stupid except for Luke. In particular, there is a recurring joke about a prison that often gets blown up, and this acts as a job for Luke. If the wardens are that stupid, why are they even watching a prison in the first place? And Luke even figures out a trick from a criminal that not even an entire army knows! Knowing that everyone is stupid, the show suddenly became extremely boring to me. There is just no tension at all because you already know what will happen next.

Luke is also a rather questionable characters. The show tries to depict him as a good guy, but he sometimes does things that are less than honorable and still gets away with it. There is an episode where a bunch of criminals need to kill a bunch of people for a prize and Luke acts as a judge for their killing. This creates a very interesting drama in which Luke has to decide whether he should be an honest judge or protect the people. But the show blows this chance for a great conflict, and Luke just goes around warning people of the criminals then tricks the criminals into thinking they have killed the people. Sure, he protects the people in the end, but is he being honest here?

And finally, some of the episodes have no point. Because there is no conflict, some episodes are just people shooting each other and the one who is chosen to be the good guy wins. No one learns anything. No one changes or evolves. Luke is so lucky he doesn’t need to do anything to win.

When I was a kid, “COMBAT!” was my show. Now, I see tanks, trucks and other pieces of equipment that did not exist in WWII so it looks as though American and German soldiers have been teleported into another time to do their fighting.

I want to see All in the Family again.

@Mimishu1995, unfortunately, much of what you dislike about the show was not far from truth. Hangings were the go to death sentence in the wild west days of the US.
There were those who were deeply opposed to hangings, or at least glorifying them. There were others who celebrated them as suitable payback to bad guys.
The country was huge, with massive areas where no humans could be found. Towns were isolated and saw no people come through for months at a time.
There were masses of people who wanted to own land, and were willing to do whatever was needed to make that land prosperous for them, and their future generations. Unfortunately, many also came to get rich without a lot of hard work.
Some of the people who gathered at hangings, and celebrated were victims of greedy, ruthless, evil opportunists.
Laws were young, and sometimes got interpreted badly by men who wanted to have power.
There were immigrants from many countries. Each came here with their own beliefs and attitudes. Nobody was prepared for what the mix would be like. There should have been panels of people set up to share information about their backgrounds, compare information about what would be expected for various immigrants.
People were welcomed to the country with open arms. It was mayhem without the structure needed to protect the innocent and cull out troublemakers.
Mostly, the colonists were English. They apparently expected everyone who came here would be the same as them. People with differences ended up being considered inferior. Native Americans were considered somewhat less than fully developed humans. The same was true in the case of slaves.
There were some with very noble intentions. Others were drunk with power, and vast property ownership. Imagine being born poor, having your whole family living in property. Suddenly, you have more wealth and freedom than the king you defied.
To other countries, the mayhem must have looked like mass insanity. Mass confusion it was for sure. People with no education made themselves vulnerable by taking chances in a land nobody understood like they thought they could.

My points are that your discomfort is understandable. Some of what the show portrayed is accurate. Some is what perceptions of the truth did to facts. For instance, whatever hell people had lived which might cause them to celebrate deaths.
Finally, sometimes the intention behind dark portrayals is so the viewer will look inside themselves, ask questions, wonder what could provoke similar behaviors in themselves.

Aside from all that, I love the scenario of Luke being so fast, his shadow couldn’t keep up with him.

I still like original Star Trek, the original Addams Family, Space: 1999, and original Batman. They’re campy but that’s fine because they have some qualities I like and appreciate (though there are a few parts of Trek I find silly). I’d rather watch those than most new stuff. Maybe I just have higher standards and less appetite for entertainment media now, but it seems like so much modern media is extremely lazy and dumb in new ways. I guess maybe it’s new styles of lazy and dumb.

There is stuff I liked when I was a kid that I stopped liking when I was a slightly older kid: The Flintstones, The Munsters (hey, we agree on something), Get Smart, The Monkeys.

Oh, and I really like and liked many older films such as the Sean Connery Bond films, and some Alfred Hitchcock films which I still like but am startled to see how sexist they were to degrees I didn’t notice before – not that they were worse than the culture at the time, but wow!

@Dutchess_lll Archie Bunker became a more likable character late in the series. But I remember, as a teenager, my mother and I discussing that if you had a neighbor like Archie Bunker, he’d be scary and easy to evoke to violence. Not a nice person to have in the neighborhood, even if one is conservative politically.

@Zaku Yes, I am especially noticing that The Addams Family and the Munsters, and their comic interactions and clashes with the ‘normal’ word, well, sometimes make a funny T.V. show but could not possibly exist in reality in an actual neighborhood.

Likewise, Star Trek—any of them but especially the original series, would be so unlike actual space exploration and encountering alien life—which could actually only be found in microscopic quantities centuries apart—yet every episode Kirk and Spock would always encounter some space nut eccentric alien individual or great gazoo.

The very notion of combat in space is impossible, due to weightlessness and perishability of the starships themselves.

Speaking of the Great Gazoo, how the Flintstones are not even a parody of stone-age life, as they are so unrealistic and impossible.

And those Super Heroes and their nemises. not at all like actual crime fighting Hysterically impossible. Even more recent movies that make them darker and grittier still make them pretty ridiculous when thrust into actual crime-fighting scenarios. And we all prefer the colourful, flamboyant, campy comic renditions anyhow..

I barely remember Space 1999, I remember in 1976 the networks stopped showing the Star Trek reruns my sister and I loved. I watched Space 1999, but my sister who had a crush on William Shatner insisted on watching a series called Barbary Coast—or something—starring William Shatner, but the Space 1999 premise of the moon aimlessly drifting to all those planets with life is such an impossible premise.

That was the point. Archie was redeemable.

As a child, I loved The Amazing Colossal Man. Now, it’s embarrassing to watch.