I'm pretty sure there was a Christmas "child Jesus" on Adam 12, too. Trini Lopez as the priest. He also pulled duty as the priest trying to keep a cholo war from breaking out. For some reason I remember him being a parole officer on Dragnet.
70s television was rife with pop and country singers doing the acting thing. For example, Johnny Cash as the murderer on
Columbo, another awesome show and also on MeTV. I had my
Adam 12 phase, a good show but not the cultural touchstone of
Dragnet.
I was 4 in 1969, but I can't imagine how scared how your average working their ass off middle class person had to be watching their society fall to shit. You can almost taste the desperation and panic in a lot of the counterculture scripts.
Yeah, everyone remembers the 60s and 70s from kitschy pop culture perspective but many times fail to remember how scared the population at large was with all the heavy shit going on: Viet Nam, student unrest, the subsuming drug culture, etc. The Greatest Generation were nonplussed at what many of their children did and what society was mutating into.
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