volksmarschall: I know what you mean, volksmarschall. Whenever I go on YouTube, I watch the videos and the videos only. I dare not venture into the comments for the sake of my sanity.
H.Appleby: I have a confession to make: the Indonesian screenshot at the end of the Pearl Harbor update is a teaser. There's a few updates I have to get through first before I get to Indonesia.
Before I get America knee-deep into the Vietnam conflict, there’s a pop culture update I’ve been wanting to do for a while. You might recall that back in the late 1950s, I did an update about the rise of rock and roll music. This is something similar done for a similar reason: to cover a cultural aspect of the decade that I’m on.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[video=youtube;QtvTE3m5jpM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtvTE3m5jpM[/video]
Television in the Sixties
After World War Two ended with Japan's surrender in February 1947, the United States experienced what journalist David Halberstam called “the best years of our lives.”
Following an uneasy transition from war to peace marked by labor unrest, the United States experienced a postwar economic boom fueled by the rise of the middle-class. Veterans of the war came home and started families, creating a massive population surge known as the Baby Boom. These new families all needed homes in which to live; to build homes quickly and cheaply, open fields across America were transformed into sprawling mass-produced housing communities known as the suburbs. The need for furniture and appliances to fill up these new cookie-cutter homes meant a steady supply of jobs, which greatly shrank the unemployment rate. At the dawn of the 1950s, a new player emerged on the scene that would become a symbol of prosperous postwar America: television. Boxy TV sets started to appear in stores nationwide, giving people the chance to watch a show instead of simply hearing it on the radio. In an era in which people were eager to buy the latest thing whether they really needed it or not, television became THE thing that everyone had to have. By 1960, "the tube" as it was nicknamed sat in 90% of American living rooms. Just as people in the 1930s and 1940s literally planned their days around what time their favorite radio shows would come on, people in the 1950s and 1960s saw their individual universes being redirected around the visuals that the Big Three television networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – each had to offer.
One area that was affected greatly by the growth of television’s popularity was the news. In the 1930s, radio replaced newspapers as America’s favorite source for news. Three decades later, television knocked radio out of the number one spot. In recognition of that fact, the Big Three networks began to expand their televised coverage of the news. Since 1960 was an election year, the Presidential race became the first thing the networks put a greater emphasis on. Although televised coverage of Presidential elections began in 1948, it was in 1960 that the modern coverage of the fight for the White House was born. In addition to broadcasting the political conventions and presenting wall-to-wall coverage of the Election Night results, the networks in 1960 aired the first-ever presidential debates between the candidates of the two major political parties. Democratic Vice President Henry M. Jackson of Washington and Republican Governor William F. Knowland of California met in television studios to debate the issues of the day live before a national audience of millions. To present the two candidates on the TV screen at the same time, the networks used a technique called “split screen” for the first time. Following the 1960 election, all the networks put a greater emphasis on their presentation of the evening news. When Jackson took office in January 1961, the Big Three each had a fifteen minute-long daily evening news program. By the autumn of 1963, all three programs had been expanded to thirty minutes in length and had all been given the 6:30 PM time slot that they still occupy to this day. In April 1962, the “CBS Evening News” rolled out a new anchor: Walter Cronkite. A network veteran who had manned the anchor desk during the last three Presidential elections, Cronkite’s straightforward “that’s the way it is” style of delivery would make him a trusted and popular news anchor until his retirement in March 1981.
(For nearly two decades, Walter Cronkite was the face of the evening news on CBS)
Of course, the news wasn’t the only reason people tuned in to watch television. Like radio before it, television was a medium that provided audiences with the same entertainment from coast-to-coast. Although television in the 1950s had provided memorable shows like “I Love Lucy” (CBS; 1951-1957) and “The Honeymooners” (CBS; 1955-1956), it was in the decade that followed that classic television was arguably born. Television shows which premiered in the first half of the 1960s would live on in syndicated reruns half a century later:
Across the Atlantic in England, one of television's most enduring shows got its' start. British television executives were faced with a dilemma: how do you fill a half-hour on Saturday evening? The BBC had a gap in the Saturday evening schedule between the sports show “Grandstand” (premiered in 1958) and the music panel show “Juke Box Jury” (premiered in 1959). Clearly something had to fill that time gap but what exactly? One possibility for the BBC emerged in March 1962: a science fiction series in which characters traveled through time and had adventures in different periods of history. In December 1962, a Canadian television producer who liked to shake things up became the BBC’s new Head of Drama. His name was Sydney Newman and being a big fan of science fiction, he enthusiastically made the call that this time travel idea would be adopted to fill the gap. The show would be about a mysterious doctor who traveled through time with his companions in a large machine that was somehow housed inside a small blue police box called TARDIS (short for “Time and Relative Dimension in Space”). The fact that the doctor had no name inspired the name for this show: “Doctor Who”. To produce “Doctor Who”, Newman appointed Verity Lambert – the first female drama producer in the history of the BBC. To play the Doctor, Lambert talked fifty-five-year-old character actor William Hartnell into taking on the role after two other actors had turned it down. If casting the title character was hard, shooting the pilot episode in the autumn of 1963 proved to be even harder. Titled “An Unearthly Child”, the pilot turned into a disaster due to a series of technical and performance problems. Unable to use this version for broadcasting, a second version of “An Unearthly Child” was subsequently shot and aired as the first episode of the series on November 23rd, 1963. Without a major news story to overshadow it, the premier of “Doctor Who” attracted a decent amount of viewers who were curious to see what this new time traveling science fiction show was like. Since enough people had seen it, there was no need to re-air the first episode a week later. When an extraterrestrial race of cyborgs called the Daleks were introduced a month later, the popularity of “Doctor Who” really took off...a popularity which would make the show a cult favorite for the next five decades.
(William Hartnell, the first of many actors to play the Doctor, is seen here standing next to a Dalek)
Although television expanded around the world throughout the 1960s, nowhere had that growth been more rapid than in the Republic of China. Unlike in America where it took off like a rocket, television got off to a slow start in China. Chiang Kai-shek allowed the new medium into his country in 1952 but insisted that television be used in a strictly non-commercial manner. He didn't view TV as something that should belong to the masses. Originally, TVs were used solely by the government to broadcast messages to government offices scattered across the mainland (just as the Internet started out as a way for the United States government to nationally coordinate her computers). It wasn’t until 1958 that Chiang recognized television's potential in cementing his vision for China's future. He lifted the ban on commercial television use and allowed the public to finally have access to something that the American people were taking for granted. In 1958, his authoritarian regime established the state-run TV Shanghai telecommunications network. With a mandate to expand television to the masses, TV Shanghai constructed a system to bring television signals to every city in the coastal region of China - where the majority of the mainland population lived. To increase service further, the government established two more state-run telecommunications networks. In late 1962, TV Taipei was formed to bring television coverage to the Chinese island of Formosa. TV Chongqing was formed a year later to begin the process of bringing service to the mountainous interior of China.
So what exactly did the Chinese watch in the 1960s? The answer: only what the government wanted them to watch. The Republic of China under Chiang’s rule was a one-party state in which political opposition was ruthlessly suppressed by the secret police – a hallmark of authoritarian regimes – and the media was tightly controlled. The reason for Chiang's reversal on allowing the public to own TV sets was his recognition of the fact that he could use the medium to control public opinion. Taking a page from Nazi Germany's playbook, Nanjing fully exploited the media to portray China as a country whose time had come to occupy her rightful place in the sun. Chinese culture was exulted as being the superior culture in Asia and the Chinese people had it drilled into them that they were the “master race” whose destiny it was to unite the countries of Asia into a sphere of influence led by them. You couldn't watch TV in China without being bombarded by pro-China propaganda. You also couldn't watch TV in China without being bombarded by propaganda about China’s enemies. Japan was an obvious target, given the ugly history between the two nations. The three state-run telecommunications networks regularly aired programs reminding the Chinese people of Japanese atrocities committed against them during the 1930s and 1940s. Whenever the government did put out current news about Japan, they always portrayed the former occupier in the worst possible light. This “hate Japan” message campaign was especially ramped up for emotional exploitation on the anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which had triggered the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and had since become a national day of remembrance just like Pearl Harbor Day in America. The Americans and the British were likewise portrayed by the Chinese media as evil Western imperialists who wanted to continue the subjugation and exploitation of the Asian people. China, it was proclaimed over and over, not only had to stand up for “the little guy” against these big American and British bullies but had to remove their presence from Asia altogether. Only then could the Chinese people lead the continent into a golden age of peace and prosperity. It was all government propaganda, carefully crafted to mold how the Chinese saw themselves and the world.
(One of the first Chinese television celebrities to emerge in the 1960s was Fu Pei-Mei, a woman who literally showed the country how to cook)
Chinese television in the 1960s was a hodgepodge of government-approved programming. There was a financial program to cover trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange (there were shares of thirty-six Chinese companies available for purchase and sale in 1962). There were programs covering art, sports, agriculture, and music. Dramas were popular, especially those about China’s vast ancient history. There were educational shows aimed at teaching children the basics such as how the Earth revolves around the Sun and how to do math in your head. Western programs, deemed to be inferior in quality by the government, were strictly banned. Also absent from the Chinese TV schedule was sitcoms. Popular in America, sitcoms were deemed by Nanjing to be too frivolous and lowly for Chinese audiences to watch. Thus you would never see Chinese equivalents of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” or “The Addams Family” in the 1960s. Ironically, the anti-sitcom Chinese did have an impact on one American sitcom. In 1963, a former radio writer named Sherwood Schwartz went to CBS executives and pitched an original idea for a sitcom. He wanted to do a show about seven people from different backgrounds that through a twist of fate get shipwrecked on an island somewhere in the vast Pacific. The television audience would each week follow the seven stranded castaways as they not only tried to get along with each other but try to somehow get rescued from their plight. Although the executives were skeptical about how long you could keep a show about seven people stuck on an island going, Schwartz was nonetheless given the green light to produce his show for the 1964-1965 television season. On September 26th, 1964, “Gilligan’s Island” premiered on CBS. According to the easy-to-remember sea shanty opening theme song which summed up the plot of the show each week, the first mate Gilligan (Bob Denver) and the skipper (Alan Hale, Jr.) of a charter boat had taken five passengers out on a three-hour tour of Honolulu waters when they got caught in a fierce storm. The storm washed their boat ashore a desolate island, leaving everyone stranded and with only a radio to connect them to the outside world. Although the show didn’t make much logical sense (for instance, why did the passengers bring a lot of clothes along with them for a three-hour tour?), “Gilligan’s Island” was nonetheless a surprise hit for a network that wasn't expecting much from it. It remained popular throughout its’ four seasons, ranking in the Top Twenty programs during the first two seasons.
(Not realizing that "Gilligan's Island" wasn't real, some viewers actually urged the United States Coast Guard to rescue these fictional castaways)
As “Gilligan’s Island” neared the end of its’ fourth and final season in the spring of 1968, Schwartz had to consider how the castaways would be rescued after everything they had been through. The show had dealt with current events, doing one episode about the British Invasion of the American music scene and doing a few episodes about space exploration. Schwartz therefore decided to use the Cold War standoff between the United States and China as the backdrop for the rescuing of Gilligan and company. In the show’s final few episodes, Schwartz introduced a plotline in which the United States Navy was in the process of building a series of observation posts across the Pacific to track the movement of any Chinese submarines that tried to approach either Hawaii or the West Coast. In the course of their construction project, the Navy came across Gilligan's Island. In the final episode of the series, the USN dispatched a team to the island to scope it out and determine if building an observation post there would be feasible. Upon their arrival, the team became surprised to find the beached hull of the charter boat which had gone missing a few years earlier and was presumed to be sunk with all lives lost. Moving inland to search for any survivors, the team literally ran into Gilligan who excitedly then led them to the rest of the castaways. Having been found alive after all this time, the castaways became delighted to learn that the Navy was going to rescue them from the island. While boarding a naval vessel for the ride to Pearl Harbor, millionaire Thurston Howell, III (Jim Backus) told his wife Lovey (Natalie Schafer) that the first thing he was going to do after they got back to New York City was to have Chinese food for dinner. Greatly surprised, Lovey quickly reminded her husband that he hated Chinese food. Howell acknowledged that was true but sheepishly defended his change of heart by saying that since they owed their rescue to the Chinese, “the least we can do is eat their food.”
H.Appleby: I have a confession to make: the Indonesian screenshot at the end of the Pearl Harbor update is a teaser. There's a few updates I have to get through first before I get to Indonesia.
Before I get America knee-deep into the Vietnam conflict, there’s a pop culture update I’ve been wanting to do for a while. You might recall that back in the late 1950s, I did an update about the rise of rock and roll music. This is something similar done for a similar reason: to cover a cultural aspect of the decade that I’m on.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[video=youtube;QtvTE3m5jpM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtvTE3m5jpM[/video]
Television in the Sixties
After World War Two ended with Japan's surrender in February 1947, the United States experienced what journalist David Halberstam called “the best years of our lives.”
Following an uneasy transition from war to peace marked by labor unrest, the United States experienced a postwar economic boom fueled by the rise of the middle-class. Veterans of the war came home and started families, creating a massive population surge known as the Baby Boom. These new families all needed homes in which to live; to build homes quickly and cheaply, open fields across America were transformed into sprawling mass-produced housing communities known as the suburbs. The need for furniture and appliances to fill up these new cookie-cutter homes meant a steady supply of jobs, which greatly shrank the unemployment rate. At the dawn of the 1950s, a new player emerged on the scene that would become a symbol of prosperous postwar America: television. Boxy TV sets started to appear in stores nationwide, giving people the chance to watch a show instead of simply hearing it on the radio. In an era in which people were eager to buy the latest thing whether they really needed it or not, television became THE thing that everyone had to have. By 1960, "the tube" as it was nicknamed sat in 90% of American living rooms. Just as people in the 1930s and 1940s literally planned their days around what time their favorite radio shows would come on, people in the 1950s and 1960s saw their individual universes being redirected around the visuals that the Big Three television networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – each had to offer.
One area that was affected greatly by the growth of television’s popularity was the news. In the 1930s, radio replaced newspapers as America’s favorite source for news. Three decades later, television knocked radio out of the number one spot. In recognition of that fact, the Big Three networks began to expand their televised coverage of the news. Since 1960 was an election year, the Presidential race became the first thing the networks put a greater emphasis on. Although televised coverage of Presidential elections began in 1948, it was in 1960 that the modern coverage of the fight for the White House was born. In addition to broadcasting the political conventions and presenting wall-to-wall coverage of the Election Night results, the networks in 1960 aired the first-ever presidential debates between the candidates of the two major political parties. Democratic Vice President Henry M. Jackson of Washington and Republican Governor William F. Knowland of California met in television studios to debate the issues of the day live before a national audience of millions. To present the two candidates on the TV screen at the same time, the networks used a technique called “split screen” for the first time. Following the 1960 election, all the networks put a greater emphasis on their presentation of the evening news. When Jackson took office in January 1961, the Big Three each had a fifteen minute-long daily evening news program. By the autumn of 1963, all three programs had been expanded to thirty minutes in length and had all been given the 6:30 PM time slot that they still occupy to this day. In April 1962, the “CBS Evening News” rolled out a new anchor: Walter Cronkite. A network veteran who had manned the anchor desk during the last three Presidential elections, Cronkite’s straightforward “that’s the way it is” style of delivery would make him a trusted and popular news anchor until his retirement in March 1981.
(For nearly two decades, Walter Cronkite was the face of the evening news on CBS)
Of course, the news wasn’t the only reason people tuned in to watch television. Like radio before it, television was a medium that provided audiences with the same entertainment from coast-to-coast. Although television in the 1950s had provided memorable shows like “I Love Lucy” (CBS; 1951-1957) and “The Honeymooners” (CBS; 1955-1956), it was in the decade that followed that classic television was arguably born. Television shows which premiered in the first half of the 1960s would live on in syndicated reruns half a century later:
- The Flintstones (ABC; premiered in 1960)
- The Andy Griffith Show (CBS; premiered in 1960)
- The Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS; premiered in 1961)
- The Jetsons (ABC; premiered in 1962)
- The Beverly Hillbillies (CBS; premiered in 1962)
- Bewitched (ABC; premiered in 1964)
- The Addams Family (ABC; premiered in 1964)
- The Munsters (CBS; premiered in 1964)
- Gilligan’s Island (CBS; premiered in 1964)
- Petticoat Junction (another Henning-created sitcom which premiered in 1963)
- Green Acres (premiered in 1965)
- The Jerry Van Dyke Show (a sequel to "The Andy Griffith Show" which premiered in 1968)
Across the Atlantic in England, one of television's most enduring shows got its' start. British television executives were faced with a dilemma: how do you fill a half-hour on Saturday evening? The BBC had a gap in the Saturday evening schedule between the sports show “Grandstand” (premiered in 1958) and the music panel show “Juke Box Jury” (premiered in 1959). Clearly something had to fill that time gap but what exactly? One possibility for the BBC emerged in March 1962: a science fiction series in which characters traveled through time and had adventures in different periods of history. In December 1962, a Canadian television producer who liked to shake things up became the BBC’s new Head of Drama. His name was Sydney Newman and being a big fan of science fiction, he enthusiastically made the call that this time travel idea would be adopted to fill the gap. The show would be about a mysterious doctor who traveled through time with his companions in a large machine that was somehow housed inside a small blue police box called TARDIS (short for “Time and Relative Dimension in Space”). The fact that the doctor had no name inspired the name for this show: “Doctor Who”. To produce “Doctor Who”, Newman appointed Verity Lambert – the first female drama producer in the history of the BBC. To play the Doctor, Lambert talked fifty-five-year-old character actor William Hartnell into taking on the role after two other actors had turned it down. If casting the title character was hard, shooting the pilot episode in the autumn of 1963 proved to be even harder. Titled “An Unearthly Child”, the pilot turned into a disaster due to a series of technical and performance problems. Unable to use this version for broadcasting, a second version of “An Unearthly Child” was subsequently shot and aired as the first episode of the series on November 23rd, 1963. Without a major news story to overshadow it, the premier of “Doctor Who” attracted a decent amount of viewers who were curious to see what this new time traveling science fiction show was like. Since enough people had seen it, there was no need to re-air the first episode a week later. When an extraterrestrial race of cyborgs called the Daleks were introduced a month later, the popularity of “Doctor Who” really took off...a popularity which would make the show a cult favorite for the next five decades.
(William Hartnell, the first of many actors to play the Doctor, is seen here standing next to a Dalek)
Although television expanded around the world throughout the 1960s, nowhere had that growth been more rapid than in the Republic of China. Unlike in America where it took off like a rocket, television got off to a slow start in China. Chiang Kai-shek allowed the new medium into his country in 1952 but insisted that television be used in a strictly non-commercial manner. He didn't view TV as something that should belong to the masses. Originally, TVs were used solely by the government to broadcast messages to government offices scattered across the mainland (just as the Internet started out as a way for the United States government to nationally coordinate her computers). It wasn’t until 1958 that Chiang recognized television's potential in cementing his vision for China's future. He lifted the ban on commercial television use and allowed the public to finally have access to something that the American people were taking for granted. In 1958, his authoritarian regime established the state-run TV Shanghai telecommunications network. With a mandate to expand television to the masses, TV Shanghai constructed a system to bring television signals to every city in the coastal region of China - where the majority of the mainland population lived. To increase service further, the government established two more state-run telecommunications networks. In late 1962, TV Taipei was formed to bring television coverage to the Chinese island of Formosa. TV Chongqing was formed a year later to begin the process of bringing service to the mountainous interior of China.
So what exactly did the Chinese watch in the 1960s? The answer: only what the government wanted them to watch. The Republic of China under Chiang’s rule was a one-party state in which political opposition was ruthlessly suppressed by the secret police – a hallmark of authoritarian regimes – and the media was tightly controlled. The reason for Chiang's reversal on allowing the public to own TV sets was his recognition of the fact that he could use the medium to control public opinion. Taking a page from Nazi Germany's playbook, Nanjing fully exploited the media to portray China as a country whose time had come to occupy her rightful place in the sun. Chinese culture was exulted as being the superior culture in Asia and the Chinese people had it drilled into them that they were the “master race” whose destiny it was to unite the countries of Asia into a sphere of influence led by them. You couldn't watch TV in China without being bombarded by pro-China propaganda. You also couldn't watch TV in China without being bombarded by propaganda about China’s enemies. Japan was an obvious target, given the ugly history between the two nations. The three state-run telecommunications networks regularly aired programs reminding the Chinese people of Japanese atrocities committed against them during the 1930s and 1940s. Whenever the government did put out current news about Japan, they always portrayed the former occupier in the worst possible light. This “hate Japan” message campaign was especially ramped up for emotional exploitation on the anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which had triggered the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and had since become a national day of remembrance just like Pearl Harbor Day in America. The Americans and the British were likewise portrayed by the Chinese media as evil Western imperialists who wanted to continue the subjugation and exploitation of the Asian people. China, it was proclaimed over and over, not only had to stand up for “the little guy” against these big American and British bullies but had to remove their presence from Asia altogether. Only then could the Chinese people lead the continent into a golden age of peace and prosperity. It was all government propaganda, carefully crafted to mold how the Chinese saw themselves and the world.
(One of the first Chinese television celebrities to emerge in the 1960s was Fu Pei-Mei, a woman who literally showed the country how to cook)
Chinese television in the 1960s was a hodgepodge of government-approved programming. There was a financial program to cover trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange (there were shares of thirty-six Chinese companies available for purchase and sale in 1962). There were programs covering art, sports, agriculture, and music. Dramas were popular, especially those about China’s vast ancient history. There were educational shows aimed at teaching children the basics such as how the Earth revolves around the Sun and how to do math in your head. Western programs, deemed to be inferior in quality by the government, were strictly banned. Also absent from the Chinese TV schedule was sitcoms. Popular in America, sitcoms were deemed by Nanjing to be too frivolous and lowly for Chinese audiences to watch. Thus you would never see Chinese equivalents of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” or “The Addams Family” in the 1960s. Ironically, the anti-sitcom Chinese did have an impact on one American sitcom. In 1963, a former radio writer named Sherwood Schwartz went to CBS executives and pitched an original idea for a sitcom. He wanted to do a show about seven people from different backgrounds that through a twist of fate get shipwrecked on an island somewhere in the vast Pacific. The television audience would each week follow the seven stranded castaways as they not only tried to get along with each other but try to somehow get rescued from their plight. Although the executives were skeptical about how long you could keep a show about seven people stuck on an island going, Schwartz was nonetheless given the green light to produce his show for the 1964-1965 television season. On September 26th, 1964, “Gilligan’s Island” premiered on CBS. According to the easy-to-remember sea shanty opening theme song which summed up the plot of the show each week, the first mate Gilligan (Bob Denver) and the skipper (Alan Hale, Jr.) of a charter boat had taken five passengers out on a three-hour tour of Honolulu waters when they got caught in a fierce storm. The storm washed their boat ashore a desolate island, leaving everyone stranded and with only a radio to connect them to the outside world. Although the show didn’t make much logical sense (for instance, why did the passengers bring a lot of clothes along with them for a three-hour tour?), “Gilligan’s Island” was nonetheless a surprise hit for a network that wasn't expecting much from it. It remained popular throughout its’ four seasons, ranking in the Top Twenty programs during the first two seasons.
(Not realizing that "Gilligan's Island" wasn't real, some viewers actually urged the United States Coast Guard to rescue these fictional castaways)
As “Gilligan’s Island” neared the end of its’ fourth and final season in the spring of 1968, Schwartz had to consider how the castaways would be rescued after everything they had been through. The show had dealt with current events, doing one episode about the British Invasion of the American music scene and doing a few episodes about space exploration. Schwartz therefore decided to use the Cold War standoff between the United States and China as the backdrop for the rescuing of Gilligan and company. In the show’s final few episodes, Schwartz introduced a plotline in which the United States Navy was in the process of building a series of observation posts across the Pacific to track the movement of any Chinese submarines that tried to approach either Hawaii or the West Coast. In the course of their construction project, the Navy came across Gilligan's Island. In the final episode of the series, the USN dispatched a team to the island to scope it out and determine if building an observation post there would be feasible. Upon their arrival, the team became surprised to find the beached hull of the charter boat which had gone missing a few years earlier and was presumed to be sunk with all lives lost. Moving inland to search for any survivors, the team literally ran into Gilligan who excitedly then led them to the rest of the castaways. Having been found alive after all this time, the castaways became delighted to learn that the Navy was going to rescue them from the island. While boarding a naval vessel for the ride to Pearl Harbor, millionaire Thurston Howell, III (Jim Backus) told his wife Lovey (Natalie Schafer) that the first thing he was going to do after they got back to New York City was to have Chinese food for dinner. Greatly surprised, Lovey quickly reminded her husband that he hated Chinese food. Howell acknowledged that was true but sheepishly defended his change of heart by saying that since they owed their rescue to the Chinese, “the least we can do is eat their food.”
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