Abstract
This article examines a quintessential genre of early socialist television entertainment: the historical adventure series. It draws on two popular series, the Polish Janosik (1974) and the Hungarian Captain of the Tenkes (1964) to foreground two formative tensions within early socialist television: that between the state's paternalistic, top-down imperative to educate a supposedly docile and homogeneous national audience and television's position as a home-based medium of family entertainment on the one hand, and between the national and cross-national dimensions in the development, distribution, and reception of these programs on the other. The author argues that the shows conjure up a historical regional culture arching over the singular national histories. This cross-border relevance, evident in the programs' striking aesthetic similarities, their international distribution, and their international cast of actors, points to television as a crucial research area for revising scholarship on East European nationalisms and national identities.
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