Forgotten TV Shows: Volume 1

Today I am going to begin what will become an ongoing series here on “Battling the Current”: reminiscing about the forgotten television shows of my youth. It’s going to be like VH1’s I Love the 90’s, except I won’t be feeling nostalgic for events that happened five years ago. So to start, I’d like to harken back to one of the most important shows of my youth…

3-2-1 Contact

Aw come on, I know everyone out there remembers this. It was the PBS show you watched when you grew too old for Sesame Street and they took The Electric Company and Zoom off the air (both of which deserve remembrance in their own right). Talk about a concept show. A couple of kids hanging around without any supervision doing science experiments. Again, this is kind of what I thought life would be like when I was nine years old, just hanging around with people learning stuff. Look, I never said I was a normal nine year old.

There was just something cool about a show that taught you about how the world worked. There certainly wasn’t anything fancy about it. I don’t remember any moments or topics off the top of my head, other than the ever present topics on space and astronauts, which were the equivalent of porn to a nine year old EC. It just made me think that science was really cool and that one of the things that you should do in life is understand what is really going on around you. See all of the wonder in the complexity of the world. Sure, it didn’t teach me calculus but it definitely taught me how to think. Of course, there are two things about the show that everyone remembers.

First is the trip to a KISS concert to show how they did all the lighting and pyrotechnics, which was seriously cutting edge for a kids show on PBS. I still remember learning how they put the different colored gels on the lights to create different effects and how they showed that by using them on the girl with the long dark hair on the show. It was like we’ll show the kids just how cool it is to be a rock star and how cool it is to just work on the show. It just legitimized the entire spectacle of rock and roll and made me believe that there was absolutely nothing wrong with being a rock music fan. I mean, if they’re showing KISS on educational television there must be absolutely nothing wrong with my listening to Men at Work albums.

(Ok, there was a thousand things wrong with my listening to Men at Work albums (other than gaining an appreciation of Australian culture). It’s not like you expect to have taste in music at that age.)

And who can forget The Bloodhound Gang? “Bloodhound Detective Agency, Mr. Bloodhound isn’t here.” Kids going around solving crimes for their unseen boss. It was like Charlie’s Angels except without the scantily clad women. Which is kind of a bummer now that I think about it. Anyway, how awesome was this. Cliffhangers, plot lines, the teaching of detective techniques. This is probably why I watch CSI and Law and Order, I’m just trying to regain that buzz from watching the Bloodhound Gang solve a crime by realizing that the identical twins would have different fingerprints and using that to catch the evil twin (I swear to God, I know that was one of the episodes). I’m sorry but there is no way any kid can see something that cool on television now a days, not even with 500 channels.

Next time, we’ll discuss how I obtained my sense of humor from You Can’t Do That On Television.