Today’s lesson: Weird Al should stick to what he does best — song parodies, music videos, and DVD commentaries — and avoid trying to come up with original stories in other mediums. “Weird Al” Yankovic’s song parodies are often ingenious, his music videos are frequently brilliant, but his feature film, UHF, was disappointing, and his children’s TV show, The Weird Al Show, is just an utter mess.
For The Weird Al Show, Al played a dimwitted version of himself, living in a wacky, subterranean playhouse 20 miles below the surface of the Earth. His sole roommate was a character familiar to many of his fans: Harvey the Wonder Hamster, an absolutely ordinary hamster whose only distinguishing characteristic is that he has his own theme song.
Recurring characters on the show included Al’s next-door neighbor, the Hooded Avenger (Brian Haley), Bobby the Inquisitive Boy (Gary LeRoi Gray), Madame Judy the Psychic (Judy Tenuta), “Val Brentwood, Gal Spy” (Paula Jai Parker) and the very easy-on-the-eyes Cousin Corky (Danielle Weeks), who fortunately gets lots of extra screen time in later episodes. The short-lived Weird Al Show lasted just 13 episodes on CBS’s Saturday morning lineup in 1997 and ’98.
First off, what initially bugs me about this endeavor is that it’s a show geared specifically for little kids. To me, Weird Al is at his best when he sprinkles his offerings with a bit of a bite, stuff that probably will go over the heads of most kids but that he still couldn’t get away with putting in a kids’ show. Take for example some of my favorite lyrics from his song “One More Minute”:
...I’m stranded all alone
at the gas station of love
and I have to use
the self-service pump.
See what I mean? Genius, but it’d never fly on a kids show. Instead of ideally getting a weekly version of Al’s infrequent Al TV specials that run on MTV (and which would be great to get someday on DVD), The Weird Al Show is more like a Pee Wee’s Playhouse for the intellectually inept.
The other thing that bugs me about the show is that it really, really, really dumbs down its content - to the point where each episode begins with a title card that reads “Today’s lesson is...” and an announcer reads it aloud. This “educational lesson” is nearly always some kind of obvious behavioral advice such as, “you should try to understand people who are different from you,” or “it’s important to acknowledge your mistakes, learn from them, and try to do better next time,” which then gets beaten into the viewer over and over with all the subtlety of repeated punches to the groin.
Article comments
1 - Helen
"...positively salivate at the thought of buying anything associated with him"... yup, that would be me.
Rabid Weird Al fans have known for years that The Weird Al Show suffered from a bad case of too-many-cooks syndrome, and your review isn't a surprise, considering that Al himself called the show "craptastic" on his MySpace page, but hey, we wanted it on DVD anyway, and I'll be picking it up later today. Anything Al does will have its moments of brilliance, in spite of all the freight the show was expected to carry.
Thanks for mentioning Straight Outta Lynwood... that's gonna have SIX animated videos! Woo hoo! [/excited fan moment]