I cut my pop culture teeth on silly television. Now, in my dotage, my television diet consists of re-runs, reality shows, competitions and TCM.

I was a child of the 1960s, and when I first discovered that Agnes Morehead — who played Endora on “Bewitched” — had also played Mary Kane in “Citizen Kane,” Fanny in “The Magnificent Ambersons” and Madge Rapf opposite Humphrey Bogart in “Dark Passage,” my mind was blown.

Morehead’s migration from Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre and the silver screen in the 1940s to the small screen in the 1960s got me to thinking about all sorts of other popular culture transitions and transformations. Her journey from is not the only one that has caused me to do a double-take.

In my youth, Fred MacMurray’s Steve Douglas in “My Three Sons” was the quintessential firm-but-gentle, salt-of-the-earth middle-American father figure. That role, however, was a far cry from MacMurray’s most famous work as Walter Neff in “Double Indemnity,” as Tom Keefer in “The Caine Mutiny” and as Jeff Sheldrake in “The Apartment.”

Ernest Borgnine is another sit-com actor who had a Hollywood career with roles that bore little resemblance to the role that introduced him to me: Lt. Commander Quinton McHale in “McHale’s Navy.” Before Borgnine played the good-natured McHale on television, he played a couple of real heavies on film: Coley Trimble in “Bad Day at Black Rock” and Fatso Judson in “From Here to Eternity.” And he won an Oscar for his starring role in “Marty,” a different kind of far cry from McHale.

Given my interest in Hollywood actors I first met on the tube, you can only imagine the look on my face when I first watched “Rebel Without a Cause,” which featured both Jim Backus (Thurston Howell III from “Gilligan’s Island”) and Edward Platt (Chief from “Get Smart”). Platt, of course, also appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.” And the list goes on.

But the flow of actors has gone the other way, too. By the early 1970s, Clint Eastwood was about as big a movie star as Hollywood had. It was not until long after I became a big Eastwood fan that I learned he had starred on television as Rowdy Yates on “Rawhide.”

Many actors followed a similar path. Before Bruce Willis became an action star in Hollywood, he played David Addison in “Moonlighting.” Perhaps the biggest leap from the small screen to the big screen I can recall is the one executed by Tom Hanks, from “Bosom Buddies” on television to Oscars for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump.” But then there’s two-time Oscar winner Sally Field, who was “The Flying Nun” on television. And, in addition, it seems that from the 1970s on, the whole purpose of “Saturday Night Live” was to spawn next week’s Hollywood comedy stars.

So far, I’ve made it sound like American popular culture is a two-way street linking Hollywood and TV Land, but it is more than that. At the very least, it is a triangle that connects Hollywood, TV Land and Broadway, with the flow from one corner of the triangle to another changing directions over time. 

It seems that from the 1930s through, perhaps, the 1960s, Broadway was the great incubator of both actors and properties. So many great American film actors from back in those days got their starts on the stage. Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando spring to mind, and there were many, many more. I may be wrong, but I’m not so sure that Broadway is creating movie stars the way it once did.

Changes in the flow of popular culture are even more pronounced when we look at properties. Just think how many classic Hollywood films started out on the stage: “The Philadelphia Story,” “Casablanca,” “Mr. Roberts,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and “The Lion in Winter.” Then there are the musicals: “Oklahoma,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music,” and “The Music Man.”

But today, the flow of popular culture has taken an interesting turn. Before it was a Broadway hit, “Spamalot” was “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Before “Beetlejuice” hit Broadway in a play, he was in a Hollywood movie. So, too, with “The Lion King,” and any number of other Broadway blockbusters.

If nothing else, this ever-changing flow of actors and properties and ideas from one medium or venue to another is a tribute to the power of the artistic spirit and the suppleness of the creative mind. Those are rewarding things to contemplate as I walk around Contoocook with a dog on a leash or rest up for my next dogwalking adventure in front of my television.

Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.