Before VHS

 "Time is like a river." ~ Marcus Aurelius

I'd like to take a moment and revisit why logistically the Roots mini-series experience in early 1977 was unlike anything that could occur today.  To understand that time, for those who didn't live it, one needs to understand that we lived in a much different way.  There was no widespread way to "tape something on TV" (yet) - I remember when I first heard about Betamax, and I suppose it was kind of around that time, but I really don't remember the notion of regularly being able to tape something until around 1980 or so.  Nobody had these devices yet, not most people, anyway.

Certainly in early 1977, if you wanted to watch something on television, the vast majority of us watched it live.  That's why Roots, when it first aired, was even more powerful, entirely a shared experience, night after night after night - and most of those were school nights.  I didn't miss an episode, but at that particular age, I usually didn't have something scheduled at night - if I had a piano lesson, for example, or a spelling bee (which I was involved in at that time), it would usually be in the afternoon.  No, we didn't miss a night, and no way would we miss it.  It was an unprecedented phenomenon at the time, and the first mini-series I recall that went night to night like that.  

We were having this shared experience, together.  And it was powerful.  I also feel it's important to note that we FELT every bit of it, everyone I knew who was having this experience.  We felt it very deeply.  We would talk about it at school the next day.  It was not something anyone who truly experienced it would ever forget.

 

 

Stream photo by Susan Larison Danz.