One of the groovy things about having one of those new-fangled HDTVs is that I now get more channels than I used to, and I didn’t even have to sign up for cable or The Dish. The secret is the digital transmissions that piggyback onto the plain ordinary old signal that merely mortal TVs pick up. Where I used to get only channel 5, for example, I now have 5.2 (a high-definition version of the same programming carried on analog 5) and 5.3 (a local weather channel and news headline ticker). It’s pretty cool. And something that’s really cool is channel 16.1, part of the ION television network. (My old TV didn’t pick anything up at all on channel 16, so I don’t know if this station has an analog equivalent or not. It’s a completely new thing for me.)

And what, you may be asking, is so cool about this channel 16.1? Only a nice assortment of the classic programs that I grew up loving. How does The Wonder Years every night at 9 pm sound to you? Or Kung Fu, Charlie’s Angels, and the original Mission: Impossible?

Or how about the fact that I was channel-surfing last night and ran across my beloved original version of Battlestar Galactica, airing at 6 pm on Sunday night just the way it did back in ’78? It was even a good episode, “The Living Legend,” with Lloyd Bridges as Commander Cain in command of the Galactica‘s long-lost sister ship, the battlestar Pegasus.
I have the series on DVD, of course, but there was a certain small thrill that came from just running across it somewhere on television, instead of deliberately choosing to put the disc on. The only thing that would’ve made it better would’ve been if I’d laying belly-down on the floor in front of a roaring fire, resting my chin in my hands and feeling the ends of my shoelaces dangling across the backs of my legs, the way I remember doing it when I was eight.

Of course, a roaring fire last night would’ve been a little uncomfortable; it is drifting into summer, after all. But you get the idea.