Wait Till Your Father Gets Home: Season 1
Wait Till Your Father Gets Home: The Complete First Season (DVD)
The Age of Aquarius dawned. And Harry Boyle forgot to set his alarm. From the era of the live-action All in the Family comes the animated generation gap comedy Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. Tom Bosley provides the voice of Harry, an affable, forty something Everyman and suburban father of three whose daily routine is anything but, when he faces the burning questions of the “Make Love Not War” era. His eldest son Chet is a college dropout; his teenage daughter Alice finds female solidarity with Harry’s independent wife Irma; while their nine-year-old Jamie is a…Capitalist! Women’s Lib, Civil Rights, hippies, sexuality, communes, music and the Cold War are some of the hot-button petals in the series’ flower-powered laugh fest. They’re all part of Harry’s world, where a man’s home is his hassle. Mellow out and enjoy some peace, love and laughs!
]]>Like All In the Family, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home’s social commentary works because it appeals to every member in the household. Mocking nuclear family norms, this animated series is more radical than most Hanna-Barbera cartoons featuring dogs in hats, ghosts from space, and other zany characters. Wait Till Your Father Gets Home banks on stereotypes: the bread-winning, straight-laced, “crew cut” father, Harry Boyle (Tom Bosley of Happy Days), housewife, Irma, and their three revolutionary children. Alice, the conflicted feminist on a constant diet, Chet, proto-slacker perpetually meditating with long hair and bell bottoms, and the little businessman, scoffing idealism to emulate his father’s good sense. Each episode in The Complete First Season explains the generation gap between baby boomers and hippies, making a virtual history book of what kids disagreed with back in the early seventies. In “The Hippie,” Chet adopts a vagrant buddy to his parents chagrin. In “The New Car,” Harry laments a consumerist society based on sales scams rather than old-fashioned customer service. In “Mama’s Identity,” Irma takes Alice’s advice to reject her housewife lifestyle for an equally degrading secretarial position in a law office. And in each episode, The Boyle’s racist, pro-war neighbor, Ralph, offers a glimpse into the paranoid fantasies upheld by those who feared post-Cold War, Communist takeover. This is not to mention the radical animation approach taken by Hanna-Barbera, who hired a Playboy cartoonist, Marty Murphy, to design the characters. The intro sequence has a soundtrack reminiscent of Schoolhouse Rock, and the fact that people are rendered in full color against flat, line-drawn backgrounds only further emphasizes the social aspect of the series. These sophisticated, adult cartoons are fresher now than they were when us kids viewed them back in the day. —Trinie Dalton- Factory sealed DVD
