The Big Heist

I wrote a post at the beginning of last month in which I mused about the limited pop cultural footprint of Dungeons & Dragons as a game during the heyday of its original faddishness. My point was not that pop culture during the late '70s through the mid-1980s was entirely devoid of nods to the existence of D&D (or roleplaying games more generally), but rather that exceedingly few of those nods showed how D&D was actually played – or indeed made even a weak attempt to show it as a game at all. After the appearance of that post and the one on Labyrinth, I received quite a few emails from readers who directed me toward other movies or TV shows in which Dungeons & Dragons – or D&D products – appeared. I'm grateful for those pointers, since there are undoubtedly many examples of this phenomenon of which I was unaware.

A good case in point is the fifth episode of the fourth season of Diff'rent Strokes, which aired on November 26, 1981. The episode, entitled "The Big Heist," doesn't really involve D&D in any way, but it does feature a number of D&D and AD&D products in plain sight.

On the display rack to the right, you can clearly see the covers of the three AD&D ruleboks, the Players Handbook, the Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual. Located between the PHB and the DMG is what appears to be a D&D Expert Set. What's on the bottom shelf is unclear, at least to my aged eyes. Here's another still that much more clearly shows the middle shelves of the rack.

I doubt I ever saw this episode when it was aired. If I did, I certainly had forgotten about it until readers alerted me to its existence. Looking at it now, I find it striking just how clearly these products are all displayed. Of course, I can't help but wonder how identifiable they'd have been to anyone who was casually watching the show. Perhaps some children might have recognized them, but would anyone else have known what they are? I'm skeptical.

It's a very strange thing. TSR was doing terrific sales on Dungeons & Dragons throughout this period. The game was a huge fad – and yet it had only the tiniest toehold in the wider popular culture. I've theorized that this is due to the fact that pop culture is generally made not by people close to the age of those who consume its products but by people a generation or more older than them. That's why, for example, the Marvel comics of the 1960s, while ostensibly written for the children and teenagers of that time, were in fact much more reflective of the world in which its creators grew up, which is to say, the 1930s and '40s. Consequently, it would take until the '90s at the earliest before the people who actually played RPGs during their heyday would become pop cultural tastemakers, which is precisely when we start to see more examples of roleplaying games in movies and TV shows.

At least, that's my theory. Perhaps you have alternative explanations.