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Animation did not become the dominant form of children's television until the '60s.

I had no television when I was little, just a stack of old, beat-up comics from the 1950s and 1960s.

I grew up in the '50s, in New York City, where television was born. There were 90 live shows every week, and they used a lot of kids. There were schools just for these kids. There was a whole world that doesn't exist anymore.

I wasn't looking to get into TV. My family was in the movie business, so I was never interested in that world.

In the late '70s, maybe just before I started, there was still an attitude that if you did film you didn't do TV and vice versa, but that's gone now.

MTV didn't exist in 1980, but by 1982, it had gotten to be a force to be reckoned with.

In '77 there was no Internet, there was no Twitter or Facebook, and I think that, without being some old git who hates anything new, people's attention spans are too short. Back then you had 'Top Of The Pops' and 'Melody Maker,' and you had to make the effort to go to a show so that you absorbed the culture of music.

There's been periods of broadcasts in the past where you could see all ages of entertainers, ranging from George Burns to Shirley Temple. That's not the condition now.

I come from a time when pop music was the coin of the cultural realm and in a certain way was the only coin of the realm; movies didn't matter as much, and not TV - it was all about pop music. In the era when I started - which was the early '60s - it was all about singles leading to albums.

I started working in the mid-to-late Seventies, when television was not what it is now.