Day 13 - Favorite childhood show
I didn't watch a lot of TV as a child, mostly because I preferred to read. Although yes, I learned to read and speak English from Sesame Street and The Electric Company. And I watched Channel 9's Saturday morning bloc of Popeye, Superfriends and The Great Space Coaster (Get on board!). But there were two shows I flat-out held the TV hostage for: Faerie Tale Theatre on Channel 4, and, when I got older, The Storyteller (the second half of The Jim Henson Hour) on Channel 13.
FTT was awesome, and snarky, and apparently full of A-listers in a way that little baby me could not even appreciate. I just liked the jokes. But look: The Princess and the Pea with LIZA! MINNELLI! Rapunzel with so goshdarn badass it hurts Gena Rowlands and Jeff Bridges! (The hair, like, just really pulled the room together.) The Little Mermaid with Helen Mirren (and Mindy from Mork and Mindy and the dad from Everwood)! Susan Sarandon and Anjelica Huston (and crazy ol' Klaus Kinki, for some reason) in Beauty and the Beast! Christopher Frickin' Reeve and Bernadette Frickin' Peters and her frickin' abs in Sleeping Beauty. I remember my dad laughing his ass off at The Nightingale - I did not get how hilarious Mick Jagger in Japanese makeup was until many years later. Apparently Francis Ford Coppola and Tim Burton directed episodes, as well, as per Wikipedia.
Not much by way of internationally-known stars in The Storyteller, but man, it was great. When martea_scryer brought her DVDs to a thon, we spent more than an hour talking about the fact that we all remembered the show, and all thought it was astounding when we were kids. Reason #5,981 why the Slayas are cool.
FTT was awesome, and snarky, and apparently full of A-listers in a way that little baby me could not even appreciate. I just liked the jokes. But look: The Princess and the Pea with LIZA! MINNELLI! Rapunzel with so goshdarn badass it hurts Gena Rowlands and Jeff Bridges! (The hair, like, just really pulled the room together.) The Little Mermaid with Helen Mirren (and Mindy from Mork and Mindy and the dad from Everwood)! Susan Sarandon and Anjelica Huston (and crazy ol' Klaus Kinki, for some reason) in Beauty and the Beast! Christopher Frickin' Reeve and Bernadette Frickin' Peters and her frickin' abs in Sleeping Beauty. I remember my dad laughing his ass off at The Nightingale - I did not get how hilarious Mick Jagger in Japanese makeup was until many years later. Apparently Francis Ford Coppola and Tim Burton directed episodes, as well, as per Wikipedia.
Not much by way of internationally-known stars in The Storyteller, but man, it was great. When martea_scryer brought her DVDs to a thon, we spent more than an hour talking about the fact that we all remembered the show, and all thought it was astounding when we were kids. Reason #5,981 why the Slayas are cool.
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