Growing up mainly in the '80s and '90s with the family car being the most inexpensive yet reliable compact vehicle we could afford, my little sister and I did not have the luxury of seat-back DVD players and separate headset plugs. Instead, we had to make our own entertainment on long road trips. If we were lucky, a few of the hours in the car would coincide with the local public radio station's broadcast of some of our favorite shows.
Car Talk was by far one of the more amusing weekend programs distributed to NPR stations around the country. Hosted by two brothers who often spent more time laughing at each other's lame jokes than diagnosing caller's car problems, the show was guaranteed to make the road trip more bearable. I still listen to the show as often as I can.
Recently, Tom ("Click") and Ray ("Clack") Magliozzi took an unexpected left turn into television programming with the animated series Click & Clack: As the Wrench Turns. Aired on PBS stations this year, the first season ran for ten episodes, and is now available on DVD. I had not watched it when it was on the air, but I jumped at the opportunity to view and review the DVD set. Unfortunately, the animated series is not nearly as entertaining or interesting as the radio call-in show.
Click & Clack is set mainly in the brothers' automotive garage shop, with the studio where they record their show located somewhere on an upper floor. In addition to the titular duo, the garage staff includes Fidel (an impeccably dressed ladies man who can smell what is wrong with a vehicle), Crusty (a Harvard professor who believes he is on a sabbatical and is using his engineering talents to help out at the garage), Stash (a Russian immigrant who can build anything out of scrap), and Marge (secretary and bookie). The other main character of note is the radio show producer, a young woman named Beth Totenbag. I found the secondary characters to be much more interesting than Click and Clack themselves, who remain predictably two-dimensional throughout the season.
Article comments