1968: The year in entertainment

I was 9 years old. My father was at war.

Remember the fable about frogs in a pot of water, oblivious to the temperature slowly changing from tepid to boiling until it’s too late?

In the newly released comedy “Godard Mon Amour,” Michel Hazanavicius’ playful flashback to France in the fateful year of 1968, a young Jean-Luc Godard (played by Louis Garrel) marches with an enormous crowd in Paris.

The year 1968, as I remember it, had the quality of lasting longer than other years, of being in no hurry to be through with you, like a predator playing with its prey before swallowing it whole.

“One black, one white, one blonde” was the tagline for a new kind of cop show that premiered in 1968 on the heels of Vietnam’s bloody Tet Offensive, the Rev.

Most of them probably didn’t know it when they took the stage at their biggest concerts, but Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, the Who, Paul McCartney, Kansas, Queen, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, U2 and others among rock music’s most celebrated acts owe a debt of gratitude for their lucrative paydays to the National Basketball Assn. and the National Hockey League.

“Beggars Banquet.” “Electric Ladyland.” “Wheels of Fire.”

The Doors reveled in their role as rock’s new bad boys when they burst onto the pop music scene in 1966, and two years later, when they helped usher in the nascent era of arena rock with the opening of the Forum in Inglewood.