Lemme tell you about this dream I had.
In my dream I was watching poetv, and someone had posted the intro to a Perfect Strangers cartoon. My brain clearly based this on the real, terrible Fonz and the Happy Days Gang cartoon, where Fonzie had a time machine and a talking dog named Mr. Cool and was followed around by a bunch of kids. Balkai and Cousin Larry were part of the cartoon, but it centered primarily on these three kids who were stated to be based on really minor characters from the actual Perfect Strangers show. Each kid had a straightforward hook: there was a little blonde girl who really liked sports, a little red-haired boy who was some kind of computer whiz, and a sad-faced boy who had terminal cancer. That last one apparently came from a "very special" episode of Perfect Strangers.
Sometimes in dreams something will happen that's completely bizarre, but that you just accept as part of the dream. This was not that kind of dream. At no point did any of this not seem insane.
So in the dream, I went to tell my wife about this insane cartoon. This got us to talking about Perfect Strangers, which we had both watched as kids, and I quickly realized that we were talking about two very different shows. She had started watching around the time that I had stopped, and the show had changed over time. So while I remembered it as a very silly comedy, she remembered it as the unrelentingly bleak and gritty crime drama it had become. We looked up some later episodes on the internet so I could see what she meant. Cousin Larry had gone back to the police force and was hunting down drug kingpins and prostitution rings; Balkai, who had had special forces training on Mepos, was an icy killer whose inhuman tactics Larry tolerated only for the greater good. There were still jokes, but they just made the whole thing seem even more creepy and dark. Nancy had always thought it was really out of place on TGIF, but hadn't thought about it in years.
That's all I remember. I don't remember much about the actual Perfect Strangers, but I assume it was less interesting than this.
Sometimes in dreams something will happen that's completely bizarre, but that you just accept as part of the dream. This was not that kind of dream. At no point did any of this not seem insane.
So in the dream, I went to tell my wife about this insane cartoon. This got us to talking about Perfect Strangers, which we had both watched as kids, and I quickly realized that we were talking about two very different shows. She had started watching around the time that I had stopped, and the show had changed over time. So while I remembered it as a very silly comedy, she remembered it as the unrelentingly bleak and gritty crime drama it had become. We looked up some later episodes on the internet so I could see what she meant. Cousin Larry had gone back to the police force and was hunting down drug kingpins and prostitution rings; Balkai, who had had special forces training on Mepos, was an icy killer whose inhuman tactics Larry tolerated only for the greater good. There were still jokes, but they just made the whole thing seem even more creepy and dark. Nancy had always thought it was really out of place on TGIF, but hadn't thought about it in years.
That's all I remember. I don't remember much about the actual Perfect Strangers, but I assume it was less interesting than this.