DD Days - 2 : Johnny sokko and his flying robot

Saturday evening around 4:30 I think there used to be a scramble to watch the nearby TV wherever it was available. Not all houses had TV those days, and most were mere black & white ones. However this program called "Johnny sokko and his flying robot" was quite a popular one.

This program was one that showed larger than life pictures on television. It I guess introduced the concept of robots to many a common man and children. One can still remember Johnny soko controlling his robot from outside a perimeter kind of place (more like a boxing ring) and fighting other alien kind of things which as far as I remember had tentacles and all.

The Giant robot would follow instructions of Johnny and kill the enemy alien. Well the story was more or less the same every episode and Robot and Johnny would win all the time. There was a team behind Johnny helping him and the robot.

The people were mongoloid looking (Japanese) but they used to talk in Dubbed English but as I said the story did not matter the sheer larger than life and an entry in to an imaginative world was good enough to get us hooked for half an hour and wanting more.

Now I see Wiki Entry it has lot of information and also there is an online shop for the episodes (cannot vouch for the same).

Those days it did not matter much one was happy to have a window to something unique and refreshing, even if it lasted all but half an hour for 6 months. It has stayed for long in the heart.

DD Days : A journey back to DoorDarshan

It was quite amazing feeling to be able to talk about a particular program on TV the next day at school knowing exactly that every other person in the class would have watched it. It was not the over hyped IPL match or the recent block buster movie but the daily soap operas and weekly movies on the TV. Yes I am talking on those days where Chitrahaar and Rangoli were the only hindi song programs and Oliyum Oliyum was the only tamil song program for an entire week. Imagine hardly 1.5 hours of filmi music for a whole week!

It might be hard to believe for kids and teens of today but those were the days of doordarshan. The music of Pandit Ravi Shankar on Band-1 Channel-4, Band-3 Channel-7 were like a grand opening to our evenings. One channel one program, all viewers were the mantra those days and the emptiness on the streets were proof of the fact that everyone watched it whether they like it or not. There were no fights for remotes, in fact I hardly remember a remote :)

There were no malls to hangout and no pepsi/coke products to drink and most televisions were black and white. Life was simple too and TV watching did not complicate it. There were only a very few peeks available to the world outside one's own. There was the DiDi's comedy show and the World This Week which showed glimpses of Western world. Disney cartoons were shown for an hour every week.

This is a series, rather a nostalgic trip to those programs that marked our days in Black and White .