Va-a-a-alerie (Or was it "Ma-a-a-allory"?)

[prog]

Recently Jon Stewart made a subtle but smiling mid-sentence reference to the wonderful 1980s Canadian-exported kids show "You Can't Do That on Television" as a lead-in to a byte about Nickelodeon and the Spongebob-is-gay thing. A few people in the audience caught it, and made a surprised noise. I would have done so too. That was all, but it was a tiny nice thing to hear.

YCDTOT was Nickelodeon's flagship show, back when I was in the channel's main demographic. (And back when cable TV came to Hingham, MA for the first time. Exciting times for all!) Sometime more recently I watched a little bit of a Nick show that seemed to aim at being an updated version of YCDT. It missed the point entirely, relying on the old, bad kid-show formula that makes all the young characters invincible smartasses and the adult characters all bumbling clowns whom the kids keep under heel. YCDT's adults, while also clownish, were more of a caricature of the roles that grown-ups play in kids' lives. Most often, they were authoritarian ogres who made bizarre decisions for arbitrary reasons, with the kids usually getting the short end of it. Which sounds bleak and horrible, except that they managed to actually make it really funny. The whole mix was actually quite brilliant.

I liked watching it with my dad because he thought the sloppy-dad character was a hoot.

Comments

[greenlily.livejournal.com]

I liked YCDTOT too. It got kind of annoying when they used the same jokes over and over and over, but still funny.

[doctor-atomic.livejournal.com]

Somehow, as a kid, I never got sick of the "I don't know" *SLIME* "Water" *SPLASH* gags... it was like I was in on something that regularly happened... as an insider. You Can't Do That On Television was classic kids entertainment for so many reasons. The lockers, the janitor, the bizarre 1950's-with-an-80's-update parents, and sketch comedy! And in the end, everyone was kind of a buffoon. Sometimes it was the kids, sometimes the adults. I still think of this one sketch they did every time I shave my legs: the mother walks in on her teenage daughter shaving, and warns her that if she shaves her legs, the hair will grow back even thicker and faster every time she does it. The girl looks down and sees her freshly-shaved legs have turned into a hair forest, and starts screaming. End of scene. It was about a 20 second sketch, but somehow, it stuck with me all these years.