Out of Toon

When I was growing up in the Philippines, we didn't have a lot of television channels.  I think we had three.  In the afternoons, they would sometimes have cartoons, but the signal wasn't so good.  It was pretty frustrating.  Adjusting the antenna didn't do much.  Sometimes my cousins would be over and we would all try to figure out how to get it working.  Most of the time we just shrugged and went outside to play.

As far as I can remember, it always seemed to be the same show also.  I think it was the one were Daffy Duck was Robin Hood and Porky Pig was Friar Tuck or something.  But I could be misremembering.  I remember the next time it would pop up again, it was basically the same scenes.

Actually, now I realize it must not have been one of the regular three channels.  It was like coming from somewhere else.  From the next province or something.  I'm not sure if that was even possible with how far it would have been.  A lot of my memories of TV shows back then were inconsistent.  We definitely did not have appointment television.  We just kinda randomly thought about TV at some point and tuned in when we were bored.  We usually didn't keep shows in mind.  Nor did we have adults remind us.

Eventually though, around 1990, the Ninja Turtles became popular, and that was the one show we would regularly tune into.  The signal was still problematic sometimes, and we would still have to fiddle around with the rabbit ears, but overall we were able to watch the show.  

After my mom left to work in the USA, my dad would stay out every night, drinking and who knows what else.  So my cousins would come over and we would watch TV.  They were usually terrified of my dad but there was a sense of freedom and liberation in the house when he wasn't around.  One time though he came home drunk early to find us all gathered around and having fun and that pissed him off for some reason and he began cursing and he might have thrown and broken things, too.  After that, my cousins would be careful to sneak out once they heard his motorcycle approaching.

I think eventually they stopped coming because I can remember other nights when it was just me there watching.  My brother was with us sometimes, too, but he also liked to hang out with his friends some nights.  There were other shows I would watch, and that was around the time I started remembering what time shows came on and on which days.  Without my mom there to kind of check on our homework and make us go to bed, we just basically stayed up as late as we can.  I either went to sleep after the good shows were finished or when my dad came home.

This only went on for a few months, though, because eventually they enrolled me to a school in the next province.  My eldest brother was in college, and the university also had an elementary school.  I dormed with him there, and we didn't have television.  We did have the whole campus to wander around in.  There was a soccer field which we barely played on.  And in the back of the dormitory were a couple of basketball courts.  I remember playing there under the lights.  There was another kid in the dorm around my age.  I was in sixth grade and he was in seventh, if I remember correctly, and we would hang out together sometimes.