The best part of Netflix and Hulu is not that they provide vast riches of content, but how they serve as media time-capsules. Digging through their collective libraries is a bizarre and wonderful way to pour over cultural touchstones of your youth: the good, the bad, the incredibly bizarre . . . all there together.
They have POLE POSITION! Yeah, you forgot about that, didn't you? They took a video game where you drove a car on a race track and somehow extrapolated a story about kids solving crimes with their artificially intelligent cars.
The 80's really had a thing for human/machine stories like that. I know you're going "Knight Rider" right now, but I'm not going to let you. I'm gonna make you think about Airwolf, and realize that it actually wasn't awesome. No. It was garbage, and you loved it as much as I did.
And speaking of disappointing: Inspector Gadget. Remember what a great show that was? Yeah, only it wasn't. That animation must have cost them tens of dollars to produce.
I think we need to cleanse the palate here, so your head doesn't swim too much from all these let-downs. While you can't find much of the series, there is an Animaniacs movie on Netflix, and it holds up quite well. Fun, light-hearted comedy that's surprisingly sophisticated for a kids show. Just amazing. I'm adding the DVD's to my wishlist right now.
Jim Henson's the Storyteller? Oh yeah, we've got all that. The weird thing is that I've remembered the pilot episode, in detail, ever since I saw the original broadcast. It's about a guy who gives away his last biscuit and gets a magic sack that he uses to get a bunch of demons out of a castle and then later trap death . . . who's this little white bald thing, for some reason? I don't know what to tell you, but please watch it, I need it to be bouncing around someone else's head too, so I don't feel (as) crazy.*
*I'm honestly just glad I have evidence that this episode is real, and aired on television. I stopped talking about it because most people thought I'd dreamed it.
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