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The Decline and Fall of the After School Special

Mazarine

00:55 / 24.07.01

TV has changed a lot since the misty days of my youth. There have been many casualties: The finer Nickelodeon programing, such as You Can't Do That On Television. Liquid Television no longer graces the screen of MTV. Neither do videos of course, but that's beside the point.

My one true love has sugested that the after-school special met it's extinction because what they used to teach about drugs and sex on TV is now taught in health classes. My question is this: do you miss the after school special? Do you have fond recollections of any in particular? Was it a good effort, or a waste of valuable airtime?

The Return Of Rothkoid

08:17 / 24.07.01

It was a little later than directly after school, but ABC in Australia used to have an hour, just before the news, where they used to stack in (depending on what time of year it was) Battle of the Planets, Monkey!, Voltron or The Goodies. THOSE were the days. Earlier than that, I used to watch a so-called "magazine" type program called Simon Townsend's Wonder World, which featured a dorky little bloke introducing a series of info-shots about the sort of stuff that keeps kids enthused - robot dogs and the like. Excessively low-budget, with one or more reporters landing record contracts. Ugly. Still, they had a girl who answered advice problems who I used to think was pretty hot, so it wasn't all bad...

Now, I believe, after-school is just full of shithouse kids' gameshows. Like A*Mazing. Just dire.

I remember You Can't Do That On Television!, too. Those locker joke-telling scenes... gah!

invisible_al

08:17 / 24.07.01

Well I've always had a soft spot for Press Gang which used to be on ITV.
And those Austrailian kid's sci-fi shows that used to be on, Girl from Tommrrow and the like.
And what happened to those cool Kids drama shows like the Dark is Rising and the like. You'd of thought what with the popularity of Prattchett, JK Rowling and fantasy in general they'd be all over TV.

uncle retrospective

10:57 / 24.07.01

quote:Originally posted by invisible_al:

And those Austrailian kid's sci-fi shows that used to be on, Girl from Tommrrow and the like.

Childern of the Dogstar was the best/scariest thing ever. The book was even more terrifing.

The Mr E suprise

11:29 / 24.07.01

The Chocky series. (a blue alien force that helps you think? Shudder)

The Dark Season was good, even if it did star a young Kate Winslett. First time I'd ever heard the word Eldritch (the main bad guy was a white haired dude called Eldritch, the "baddest of all bad men", possibly the devil.)

The Return Of Rothkoid

11:55 / 24.07.01

If anyone can remember the really dodgy kids' adventure show about two children whose father was trapped in another dimension - he was a scientist, and invented some "time crystal" thing that could stop time if held to the sky; which the kids did often to stop some atrociously bad crims from catching them - then I'll be very, very happy. I wish, I wish I knew.

There was also a UK-produced show called Spooky that was, well, spooky. One story featured a kid faking being a ghost, and getting really sick, because of phosphorus poisoning. Eck.

Cherry Bomb

14:53 / 24.07.01

>>sigh<<

Teen Pregnancy.

Runaways.

Anorexics.

"The Wave" Nazi-scare movie.

Sarah T., Portrait of an Alcoholic.

Drug addicts.

HELL YES I MISS THOSE AFTERSCHOOL SPECIALS!! They were the fucking BOMB!!! And oddly, a precursor to movies on "Lifetime." Who knew?

Margin Walker

22:33 / 24.07.01

My one true love has sugested that the after-school special met it's extinction because what they used to teach about drugs and sex on TV is now taught in health classes.

Yeah, my fave educational film is the one where some kid's dog gets drunk at a wedding & the kid asks the teacher stupid questions like "Gee Mr. Randall, why was Patches weaving & vomiting?"

Our Lady of The Two Towers

08:03 / 25.07.01

Children's Film Foundation films, 'Timmys Super T-Shirt'... All required by law to feature Bernard Cribbins... all absolutely crap...

The Return Of Rothkoid

08:08 / 25.07.01

Hmm. Was I alone in hating Secret Valley, featuring Max Cullen as a shonky politician? Multiculturalism with a theme-song that ripped off "Waltzing Matilda". Now that takes some beating. Although Professor Poopsnagle's Flying Bus (?) could've taken it, any day...

Our Lady of The Two Towers

15:35 / 25.07.01

Is that the film with the title music of the kids all singing 'boom boom chugga chugga?' I think it was Australian and it was a series of about five films of which I saw three and it was ace.

Ria

16:36 / 25.07.01

on the good kids' show theme Children of the Stones. incomphrehensible... perhaps because I only saw one or two episodes... but scary and godlike. (think I saw the same episode twice.) also I like the name. very evocative.

as far as the more afterschool genre, my step-mother sat me down to watch an American tv movie drama (from the '70's?) about a teen who takes too many drugs or just goes mad. confronts his mother in the basement, raving away, then to protect herself she pull out a gun and shoots him dead. end of tv movie.

I don't know what she meant to convey by that.

Ria

16:38 / 25.07.01

WTF? I just read one of the previous posts... they made The Dark Is Rising
into a tv program? maybe I don't want to know about that.

Mazarine

18:33 / 25.07.01

quote:Originally posted by Cherry Bomb:
>>sigh<<

Teen Pregnancy.

Runaways.

Anorexics.

"The Wave" Nazi-scare movie.

Sarah T., Portrait of an Alcoholic.

Drug addicts.

HELL YES I MISS THOSE AFTERSCHOOL SPECIALS!! They were the fucking BOMB!!! And oddly, a precursor to movies on "Lifetime." Who knew?

Ah, I remember most of these and more. Particularly "The Wave." I think those whacky movies were more effective than dry lectures about the dangers of unsafe sex and drug use. I was thinking the same thing about Lifetime- I've seen a few of the ones I saw in health class there. It's like kids have ceased to be the group in need of cautionary tales, so they just started making them for women. Ah the memories.

Warewullf

07:58 / 26.07.01

quote:Originally posted by uncle retrospective:

Childern of the Dogstar was the best/scariest thing ever. The book was even more terrifing.

I adored that series.

Press Gang, too.

Girl From Tomorrow (the first one) was excellent.

Also, does anyone remember a drama (Aussie, I think) about a girl and some Emerald-heist stuff? I think it was called , surprisingly, EMERALDS. Anyway, it had THE best theme music.

The Return Of Rothkoid

08:12 / 26.07.01

quote:Originally posted by The Ungodly Lozt and Found Office:
Is that the film with the title music of the kids all singing 'boom boom chugga chugga?' I think it was Australian and it was a series of about five films of which I saw three and it was ace.

"Poop-poop chugga-chugga, poop-poop chugga-chugga, poop-poop chugga-chugga-chug - Poop poop!", I think you'll find. The very last scene showed them flying past a Qantas jet, in fact with the captain waving and grinning, instead of mouthing "what the fuck is that?" as you'd normally expect.

Benny the Ball

17:23 / 12.01.05

Bump.

Chocky was the best. That damned little tetrahedron spinning about and chatting in binary.

Fantastic.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

05:14 / 13.01.05

And they are putting out a DVD set of the old ABC Afterschool specials.

I miss the good old days when the networks had to run "educational" programming of lose their license. And don't even get me started on the long-gone rebuttal to a local stations editorial. That was when you saw just how crazy the people who lived in your city were.

Tryphena Absent

07:21 / 13.01.05

I miss, in order of most missed first, Century Falls, Dark Season, Tom's Midnight Garden, Moondial, The Girl from Tomorrow.

Jack_Rackem

15:23 / 13.01.05

Fred Savage as a psychotic murderous boyfriend. Now those were the days.

A Bigger Boat

20:58 / 13.01.05

How's about:

The Red Hand Gang
DeGrassi Junior High
Benji, Zax and the Alien Prince
Dogtanian and the Three Muskerhounds

and the holiest of holies...

The. Box. Of. Delights.

Smoothly

21:44 / 13.01.05

My sister watches The Box Of Delights every Christmas, and made me watch some of it with her this time round. And, you know, I really enjoyed it. Patrick Troughton and Robert Stephens - you can't argue with that. It's a lot darker and more sophisticated than kids' dramas these days.
She's the most sentimental person I know though, and also gets misty eyed at the mere mention of The Children Of Green Knowe.

What about those *in* school dramas? UKNova is currently offering 'Dark Towers', one of those Look and Read dramas I watched in junior school. There was another one in the same series about peregrine falcons (that I remember liking in particular), and another one about a boy from space. Anyone else remember those?

Chocky is now available on DVD by the way, Benny. And the sequals - Chocky's Children and Chocky's Challenge.

Catjerome

23:58 / 13.01.05

Chocky! Those creeped me out.

For a while when I was a kid, it seemed like Nickelodeon would run *The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn* every single Saturday afternoon. It got old in a hurry, but at least it started me reading John Bellairs books.

gridley

01:29 / 14.01.05

Sally, just in case you didn't know. A lot of those great After School Specials just got released on DVD. There's four volumes of them (each with four episodes, I believe). They're pretty reasonably priced too.

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