how many of you actually watched carson's show?
 

I remember when I was a fairly young kid that sometimes I would stay up late at night and watch his show. I do remember a lot of it and it was truly a great show. I really wish some channel was showing the reruns of it so that I could check it out again like when I was checking out the old school Letterman episodes. Jay Leno is garbage.

They have Carson DVD's...
might be a good buy..

I saw it once when I was 10

i would get the dvd's but they only contain moments, not the whole actual shows which is what i want to see

that'd be a massive collection : )

the dvds are fun i've watched a few

i know, i'm not looking to buy a dvd collection of it, i just wish some channel like nick or tv land or something was rebroadcasting them on a nightly basis, that would be great to watch.

i could bet you that reruns of his tonight show would come close to beating out leno's current tonight show.

Yep... from the time my mom and dad would let me stay up and watch it. I was about 13 I guess which would have been 1976. I knew of him from the time i was very young though. I remember seeing Jerry Lee Lewis playing "Great Balls a Fire" on the Carson show and that had to be in about 1967. I remember start piano lessons based on that show where Jerry Lee Lewis performed. ( no joke ) I still play to this day and I guess I have the Tonight Show to thank for my initial inspiration.

I rarely missed a show until he retired in 1992 so I guess I spent 25 years of my life watching that show. Of course i missed it more when I was younger, but through my adult years.. I hardly ever missed a show. It was and still is a staple of my day. Leno is great, but he is no Carson.

Without question! The shows with Jackie Gleason alone would blow anything that Leno has done away.

Like Leno, but he's not in the same league.

I watched it frequently. I grew up in a time where there was no cable with 100's of channels...only the 3 major networks 1 independent station that pretty much showed what Nick at Night shows now..and PBS.
Anyway..this was a time when the host of the Tonight Show had actual power.
Carson was a star maker. Leno is still just a guest host.
If a comedican came on Carson he was not automatically invited to sit down...but if he was after his bit then that was as good as gold...that was like being crowned by the King and you were pretty much ensured that you would get calls from studios etc.
Over the last few years I have come to miss what he brought to that show.
I am tired of the smugness of Leno and honestly I was a fan of Leno long before he got the tonight show gig.
But one thing Carson had was class. Something some of these other cock smokers like Carson Daly could learn.
IF he took shots at anyone 99% of the time it was at himself. He never got laughs by making guests feel inferior.
Sure there will be someone to come along eventually that can really take his place...I think Conan is about as close as you can get...he's a decent interviewer, and has a sense of class when dealing with guests..shows them respect and has fun without making them feel like they're the butt of a joke.

you said it eros. i didn't have a lot of channel as a kid either and i remember my parents watched the tonight show when i was a kid. i hated it, but you know how it was in those days i got to watch what they watched just because i was lucky enough to be up that late. once i accepted that it was all i could watch then i started paying attention and ended up loving the show and watching it as much as i could. that show was just classic and nothing came close to what it was, and nothing ever will again now that we have a diluted set of late night shows and a billion channels. i truly loved getting to watch carson and then letterman and being up late as a kid.

I watched him all the time..i can *almost* remember when he replaced Jack Paar.


almost being the operative word.

RIP Mr.Carson

From the early 80s until he left, I watched it often. He had class and was extremely funny.

Watched it for years and years - always hoping that it would be one of the shows with either Carnac or Art Fern.
But the thing that really made his show different than all the shows that followed, is that his shows were *shows* and the guests were there to be part of the fun - it wasn't just a series of interviews with bored people plugging their latest movie, TV show or album. The closest anyone else (in the modern era) has come to that, at least at times, has been Arsenio Hall and Jimmy Kimmel - not in terms of talent, but in terms of atmosphere. It'll never be the same, though.

I stayed up till 12:30 when I was in 5th grade to watch his farewell show.

Aside from that I would usually watch the monologue and if I could stay up part of the interview till midnight or so.

kimmel's show is definitely catching on, of course it will never be what carsons show was, but it's the best of the current late night shows by a lot.