"Wonder Showzen" Patience (TV Episode 2005) Poster

(TV Series)

(2005)

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10/10
10 I mean 1 I mean 10
injury-6544725 June 2020
10 I mean 1. Rewind. I mean 10. Rewind. I mean 1. Rewind. I mean 10!
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10/10
Test whether you want to keep your friends by making them watch this episode with you
rottentowers-630279 March 2023
Warning: Spoilers
Wonder Showzen is a great exercise in exposing the hypocrisy of children's television as it existed in the 2000s and today. The host puppet characters that would normally be hocked on shelves at Toys R Us score a Jake Busey on the Gary Busey Scale Of Ugliness. The children speak like real children. The animations look like a twelve year old with no patience drew each frame. The few sets that exist look like they were thrown together that morning with whatever the crew could scrounge from the studio basement.

So we have an episode covering one of the most overemphasised topics in the education of the children of the 1980s. Patience. When a Baby Boomer said that you had to be patient, what they really meant was that they wanted you to wait your life away, grow old, and end up with no options. I guess they got wanted they wanted in a lot of cases, but Wonder Showzen was not so much educational as an exploration of how disturbing children's television can be to a child with intelligence and imagination.

It fits that this episode is, with one exception, the one with the most Clarence in it. I am not sure whether his dialogue was deliberately designed to show less intelligence than flat-out stupidity, but his constant interruptions and mid-sentence directions to his interview victims is in full swing here. One of his victims, I still wonder if the man had those horrible stains on his teeth to begin with or if the crew paid him to let them paint that colour onto them. Neither would surprise me on this show.

Of course, all we children of the 1980s are acquainted with the nonsense about hidden Satanic messages on music recordings. You just have to play them backwards, of course. By the time this episode was broadcast, anyone with sufficient technical knowledge could pull the music off their favourite CD and play it in reverse on their computer. And at any speed, at that. If you ever wondered what a recording with actual messages you only hear when played backwards sounds like, well, here is your chance to learn.

If nothing else, Wonder Showzen shows how overrated innocence is.

My favourite moments in Wonder Showzen tend to involve the children. You have that infamous deleted Storytime With Flavor Flav. You have the other Storytimes. You have Q&A segments. I am sure there are limits to what Wonder Showzen will ask children, but pay attention to the Asian girl's eyes during the Q&A concerning where babies come from. It is subtle details like that that make Wonder Showzen so rewatchable. I guess if I could make a Wonder Showzen for the present day, the Q&A segment I would put first is, simply, What Is It?. If you know, you know.

Anyway, as the heading implies, this episode is best watched with friends. Sit together on the lounge, crack open a beer, and listen to their responses. If they give up and plead to do anything else, well, you need a new friend. If they declare that they want to see more Wonder Showzen, you have excellent friends.
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