... and probably the last days of an age of innocence that enshrouded American Bandstand, a show hosted by the seemingly ageless Dick Clark in which popular bands would lip sync their tunes to the weekly show.
I saw this show on January 6, 1996 on VH1 Flashbacks as a retro presentation of American Bandstand, and it is indicative of what you cannot find on cable/Dish/etc. today -some golden nugget from the past. What you can see today is some nobody in the middle of the night with the set dressed up to look like it is CNN to give "credibility" to their sales pitch hawking magic crystals that cure cancer. But I digress.
It was great seeing the Village People in their prime as they performed "YMCA", "Macho Man", and "San Francisco". They are remembered even today although their time in the limelight was short. What was funny was that neither Dick Clark nor the extremely hetero audience got what was going on or what they were parodying - gay stereotypes. I haven't seen anything funnier on TV since the early 1970s when Lawrence Welk thought that "One Toke Over the Line" was a gospel song and had it performed it that way. Wunnerful. Wunnerful.