Wonder Showzen - Season 1

Description

Every episode of the delightfully subversive kids' show parody, Wonder Showzen begins with a garish warning banner that reads in part, "If you allow a child to view this, you are a bad parent or guardian." They're not kidding. The sentiment is bolstered when the words to the theme song ends with the lyric, "change the channel for kids." That said, this may be the most bizarrely hilarious kids show an adult has ever watched. Patterned after the Sesame Street model of puppet characters interacting with real kids, it's rude, offensive, terribly distasteful, and savagely funny. MTV2 bravely aired this first season in 2005, and even ordered up more for at least one more season. The main puppet, Chauncey, has his hands full with the precocious children who berate and sometimes just plain beat him for the fun of it. Other crudely made (and crudely voiced) puppets include a recently out of re-hab Letter N, a disgusting worm, and a multi-eyed newscaster who frequently breaks in with shocking news bulletins. One episode features a Jewish J and Arabic 8, whose forbidden love is shown in all its pornographic puppet glory. The show is also interspersed with old archival footage, some of it funny, some of it repulsive, usually in a segment called "Funny, Not Funny" in which kids call out their personal judgment of images such as happy clowns juxtaposed with documentary footage from a '50s-era slaughterhouse. Another distressingly humorous segment is "Beat Kids!", in which real kids are sent out on the streets of New York to ask wildly age-inappropriate questions of passersby (one cute little girl on Wall Street coyly inquires, "Who did you exploit today?"). But remember, this show is not for kids, only adults who have a lot of childhood repression to exhume through tears of gross-out laughter. --Ted Fry The complete first season of the TV series Wonder Showzen. Review: THE most subversive show on television - the genius of "Wonder Showzen" lies in the fact that not only is it not a children's show (although on the surface it plainly appears to be one), it is the exact OPPOSITE of a children's show. It's a frankly anarchistic and truly guerilla theater-style attempt to subject the American public to pure evil. Watching this show is like opening a Pandora's Box of all things repellent, nerve-touching, and hilarious. Many things make the claim but Wonder Showzen is a one-of-a-kind, true-blue, honest-to-goodness wolf in sheep's clothing. This isn't really even a show. It's more an avant garde work of art. It's an effing miracle this ever got aired. "Wonder Showzen" is such a well-fashioned parody of all those PBS children's shows we loved in the 70s (like "Sesame Street") where children interact with cute puppets and learn their ABCs and sing songs, etc, that it seems to have slipped right underneath the radar. There's a legitimate danger that this show is so brilliant, in fact, that it may slide right out of existance. Some things are just that far ahead of their time. Hopefully not. I can't see this going mainstream. In fact, I PRAY it does not. Some things should (!!!!!!!!!!) be left underground. And I don't mean that they don't deserve to go above-ground. I mean that success and mainstream acceptance ALWAYS dilutes a pure work. This is why I hope it stays below ground where it can continue to work its magic. Also, not since the Butthole Surfers ambushed the rock and roll underground in the mid-1980s with their "Locust Abortion Technician" album has a group of entertainers made such mind-bending and scary use of distortion, subliminal and hidden images/messages, speeded-up sound, and looped-tape. Watch this show enough and it feels like you are on drugs big time. Review: 1 WS is timeless and incredible but 2) please never bring it back - This is such a timeless classic. So many modern day shows and videos try desperately to pull off edge humor the way Wonder Showzen seamlessly did and fail miserably at it. I always mourned the cancellation of WS, you can find countless blog posts from 2006 of online kids griping about it, but sometimes brevity really does make cult classics more valuable. I hope MTV leaves it where it is and never tries to bring it back for cheap nostalgia profit because that almost always massacres a good thing.