Growing up my sister and I used to fight like cats and dogs over our one and only 13″” black and white TV that got shitty reception.  Especially on Saturdays.  It was me and my Thundarr, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and Tarzan and the Super 7 vs. her Soul Train and American Bandstand.  Much blood was spilled and many feelings hurt, but I’m happy to say that we pulled through the experience and are all the closer for it.  But as a result of those times, I never really got into Soul Train growing up as my musical tastes hadn’t quite evolved to my love for Soul and R&B that it is today.

But in the last decade or so, I’d started watching with some regularity as the R&B Locomotive made its way down the tracks and onto my screen – 27″ color at the time, 42″ Plasma now – which shows how far I’ve come since the good ole days.  Needless to say I was surprised last year when Soul Train started airing reruns from the ’70s and ’80s because they had suspended – perhaps permanently – production of new episodes.  I was surprised by how much I was really into seeing those old episodes, since I’d never really watched them when they were originally on. 

And since my musical tastes tend to lean – okay, fall right over – for the music of that era, I was rather enjoying getting my back in the day fix once a week on Saturdays.  Hell I was even DVRing the damn things and racking up my own library.  Blue Magic, Sugarhill Gang, Stevie Wonder, Al Green, Brick, Con Funk Shun, Billy Preston, Peabo Bryson, The Moments, A Taste of Honey, hell even Captain and Tennille and Gino frickin’ Vanelli.  Bell bottoms, afros, Members Only jackets, spandez, leg warmers, the Soul Train Line.  I was diggin’ it all, man.

Now one would figure that since there’s roughly a thousand or so back episodes of Soul Train spanning some 35 years, that they could run an episode a week for ostensibly another 35 years.  And I’d be there for the foreseeable future enjoying seeing the music I grew up loving when it was fresh and new. 

The key word being ostensibly.

See, they completed the entire last season of rerunning these old episodes, 50 or so of them.  But for this most recent season, some fucking lazy retard asshole has made the decision to simply rerun the reruns that they reran last year.

Couple of questions here.

1. Obviously WGN and the local Tribune affiliate KTLA need programming. And perhaps there’s still a contract with Don Cornelius Productions to be satisfied, which is why 30-year-old Soul Train reruns are being aired in the first place.  What’s so hard about grabbing an old episode off a rack in a vault somewhere, queuing it up and letting it rip.  There’s a thousand of the damn things to choose from.  Why rehash the same shit from just last year?

2.  Soul Train used to run generally around 2 or 3 PM here in LA.  Now they’re graveyarding it at 2 or 3 AM.  I got a DVR, so it’s not a big deal.  But I’m wondering, why are they even bothering when they could just run another Proactiv infomercial or something?

3. Why is the retard(s) who made both of the aforementioned decisions – rerunning last year’s reruns and running them when the last few people who still care to watch the program – me being one of them – would almost certainly never be awake to do so, at least not for that reason – walking around unsodomized?

Wishing you all love, peace, and soooooul…