A great thing about the Internet is that you find that other people out there have as much affection for something you thought few people would feel about in the same way. The Graves man was also part of some of my best times as a kid and a big part of that was because my best friend was as big a fan as I was. I lived near Baltimore and Sir Graves at first came on at night on Friday and then after some time they put him on in the afternoon as well. He was getting popular enough that there was a special program for Sir Graves' showing of "Dracula" early on Friday and an ad for it in the local tv guide. The first time I saw "Dracula". I found out later they had edited out a good chunk of the movie to make time for Sir Graves, but it was special and so what if he badly lip-synched to Spike Lee? I practiced his laugh and the eyebrow thing. Recorded his shows on my portable cassette player. It gave us something to look forward to on the weekend after a grueling school week. Impossible for kids nowadays to get it the way we did. Definitely a context of the time thing. My kids were amazed we had horizontal and vertical on our console tv. They'll have the same warm feelings about Pokemon. Which is another thing that strikes me about Sir Graves: there's something very American about it, not in a flag waving way, but it's the kind of entertainment that could only come out of America at a particular moment of history, we needed some innocent media fun - I remember people on the radio talking about riots in Baltimore in the same time. Yeah, we are lucky we were born when we were.
