A World Away

And a lifetime ago.

Twice.

Posting this today as it’s been 20 years since the return of Beakman’s World (in reruns not new episodes) was announced (or reported, rather) in the New York Times. And that was 14 years after the show originally aired.

Why was it back?

The answer is in the title of the September 30, 2006 Times article. The need for quality television.

Earlier that week (on September 26, 2006) the FCC updated some of the rules in the Children’s Television Act. That act, passed by congress in 1990, called to “increase the amount of educational and informational programming for youth on broadcast stations” and led directly to the creation of Beakman’s World. These updates came in as stations were making the move to digital and were channeling their programs into different streaming “channels” for the lack of a better word. And what’s fascinating is that Beakman arrived–unchanged–to lead the cause just as it had done in 1992.

I’ve written about Beakman’s World before (TEN?! years ago, good lord) but while researching more on science outreach I came across the article above as well as some of the original press coverage for this new type of science show. The Washington Post called him a “Madcap Scientist” and ended the review stating “Make no mistake, this not to be missed.”

Thankfully Sony had to the rights to the reruns and the show and it came back to updated televisions and more importantly to DVRs. It ran on Netflix for a bit in the early 2010s, but mosts of the extant copies you can find are from fans uploading and sharing things saved on old digital recording equipment. A word of warning though: some people are starting to run them through Ai upscaling programs for youtube and the outcomes are “4K” atrocities and everyone doing this should have their fingernails pulled off.

What I want to point out here is the timelessness of the program. It still is totally enjoyable today, I love it as much now as I did when I was 10, perhaps even moreso–and definitely on more layers than I did as a kid. Working with AV editing for exhibits I absolutely understand why it won emmies for “outstanding achievement[s] in Live and Tape Sound Mixing and Sound Effects”.

My children love it, too. My son’s asked for periodically since he was 2 and he still requests favorite episodes six years later. His sister has gotten in on the act now and asks to watch it at least once every weekend. This show holds up, and not only for the fans of the original, it’s proven (with a N=2) that it still attracts and interests new audiences. It should be available everywhere, all the time. But, then, so should any (well, most) of the educational programming that came out in the 1990s. Beakman was even interviewed for Boy’s Life Magazine in February 1994.

This is not to say that there isn’t quality material out there today, there are a few, like The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That, but even they are getting a little older. That is worth watching with the kids just for the joy you can hear from Martin Short voicing the cat. It’s got some fun bits and is overall a good series–the books it’s based on are fantastic–but it still suffers from the blight of modernity that is shortened attention spans. Each episode has not only two parts (separate in most cases with a few being full length “specials”), but some interstitials and beginning in the second season repeated short-shorts with snap-o-ramic cameras and 30 secondish interviews with animals dubbed Hat Chat and a song here or there.

Cat though is aimed at the pre-schoolers (say age 3 to 6 being generous) and ye olde Magic School Bus was the for the whole elementary. Two that I would absolutely recommend to anyone and as something to watch with your children (always try to watch stuff with your children instead of just handing them off to the screen nanny, it could do you some good to) is Chico Bon Bon Monkey with a Tool Belt and Creature Cases both of these have shorter episodes but not only have good science concepts have great writing. We do skip the washing pig episode on Chico Bon Bon, but that’s only due to the intolerable country/hick accent they give the pigs. There is a similarly voiced salamander in a Creature Cases episode too. We never watched Octonauts so I can’t give any authoritative hangups there. Though they were all developed by the same team(s) so it’s probably okay.

All of that to say this, while we have and do rewatch these newer bits they often lose in a head to head decision if Beakman’s World comes on offer. Which, to be fair, the same thing happened to Beakman’s contemporary Bill Nye. I’d say the breakdown there being whether you had access to the PBS affiliate the ran Bill or were stuck with broadcast channels like I was when Beakman cam on Saturday morning on CBS (my channel 6). I even did the balancing forks setup one time in a restaurant. There is a photo somewhere that my friend’s mom took of us after we finished it.

Bill Nye has some great science outreach, but we only rewatch parts of episodes. The Weird Al parody of Cheers song called ferns about living fossils “where everything stays the same” for example. Having Cliff (John Ratzenberger) come in talking about dinosaurs after was brilliant, but bits like that were few and far between. Six (Jenna Van Oy) from Blossom was in the second episode so it got points from the tv crush standpoint. But even doesn’t bring the scores up even remotely close.

Another issue with Nye’s program was it had kids in it. It’s always been fascinating to me that execs will say “oh, let’s put kids in this program and make it more appealing to kids” which seems to have the exact opposite effect (looking at you Jr. Ghostbusters) and Bill Nye’s extra kids made the show more annoying to me. Not as annoying as trying to stay hip and trendy with the song stylings, but not in an ironic way. It also dates Bill’s show far more than Beakman’s. It’s also funny to hear my son complain about the kids in Billy Nye’s show too (completely without my prompting by the way).

It’s been 20 years since Beakman’s World came back into our orbit and over a decade since it was available streaming. (and 34 years since it debuted with its own Big Bang!) It’s needed now more than ever, but in it’s same true form, no updates, to handoffs, no modernization. Magic School Bus Rides Again had potential but fell short of recreating that original, well, magic which wasn’t just about the bus shrinking. Though I am sure it will move up a notch in the bus barn when they make the live action version that no one asked for and for which pitchers and approvers should probably all be horsewhipped. By the way that show debuted 9 years ago.

Mark Ritts, who portrayed Lester, passed away in 2009. After the shows resurgence, but before it hit the big streamers. It would have been great to have heard his thoughts on its re-success. I include this to say that the show was not without its faults and suffered from the same dilution that most things do. Before the show came to Netflix I had never seen the season(s) that aired on cable. For example, I didn’t even know there was a third assistant after Liza. The last season and even the later episodes of season 3 started leaning too heavily on making fun of Lester and having the assistants more involved in the parts (Those disgusting animals and the noise segments). But, when you mine out the inside of a planet it does tend to collapse.

But Beakman remains big in Latin American countries as evident by videos and interviews and tours. Maybe it’ll trickle back more broadly than the current run as Beakman’s Hemisphere. One of the ways that could happen would be if Sony got off their blessed assurance and put it somewhere. If a program is unavailable anywhere to watch you shouldn’t have the authority to block it on copyright grounds as long as whomever is hosting it isn’t make a profit. But that’s another rant.

He’s still big at our house, too. With not only the show in rotation, but some of the other media ephemera, too. We have bookmarks, and a door hanger (though we just moved and haven’t found the box that was put in)

There’s also a collected You Can with Beakman, from the strip that started it all, though it was marketed as You Can with Beakman and like the show it plugged didn’t contain Beakman’s sister Jax.. Here, though, we have the added benefit of actually seeing a photo of creator Jok Church on the back! Church’s single panel Q&A ran from 1991 until 2016. Church passed away in April 2016 and his last strip published in July.

Perhaps one day Soaper Man can fly back in and clean up television. Again. Again.

I’ll close repeating what I’ve said before about the Smoky Door of History and the history of science bits they did, I first learned about Maria Mitchell from Beakman’s World in 1994 and it was 21 years later before I ever heard anything about her again.