I'm back, baby! YouTube has finally decided to play nice and let me watch videos again! Hooray! I've never been happier to see that little red 'loading' line whiz past my screen. Sometimes life is kind -- remember that when you're in your own dark, YouTubeless place one day. And I know I promised Sesame Street, but the Ready or Not vids are already loaded, and I'm not going to chance having YouTube shut down on me again for the sake of my word. I'm dishonest; get used to it.
There are a whole lot of Ready or Not videos available for viewing on the 'Tube, but none of them are embeddable, so I'll just have to give you the links like I did with Bananas in Pyjamas. No big whoop. They really are worth watching, though, just because they're so awesome.
Ready or Not was pretty much the Degrassi in between the original Degrassi and The Next Generation. It ran from 1993-1997 and followed the lives of Amanda Zimm and Elizabeth 'Busy' Ramone -- two pre-teen girls with your everyday pre-teen problems. Kind of like Lizzie McGuire, but chock-a-block full of angst and drama. (And no Hilary Duff. Don't cry too hard now.) ABC Kids used to put their "teen issues" warning on before this show, and I'd have to turn the volume down so my mother wouldn't hear it and make me turn it off. I'm crafty like that. It's how I watched Degrassi as well -- covertly. Even back then, I was stealth.
To be honest, I wasn't an avid Ready or Not viewer like I was with Captain Planet. For one, I don't think I really got it, because I was way too young for it. Since that alone wasn't going to stop me, I did have to fight my mother on it when she caught me watching it. I'm pretty sure it was on the list of 'banned' TV shows, but since Child Lorelai was as disrespectful to authority as Adult Lorelai is now, it wasn't exactly going to deter me from watching it when I had the chance.
At the start of the series, Busy and Amanda were two twelve-year-old best friends dying to grow up. Ain't it always the way? They spent four years doing so, right before our very eyes. They got bras, periods, boyfriends, kissed, bullied -- pretty much everything that you hated about being a teenager, and if you were like me and watched this show as a child, everything you sure as hell weren't looking forward to. I mean, how could this be? High school was supposed to be so cool and fun! You weren't supposed to have problems!
Since I never quite worked out how the Canadian school system worked, I did a little Wikipedia-ing...and still have no idea how the Canadian school system works. It seems every province has its own idea about how its kids should be educated. I assumed that RoN was set in Toronto, but Wiki says that they don't even have junior high, so I don't know how that works. All I know is that in the first season (where the episode I'm recapping is from), Busy and Amanda look up to Chrissy, who's a seventh-grader. I'm just not even going to try and work this shit out anymore. It took me many years and multiple Sweet Valley High books to learn how the American school system worked, but goddamn Canada has to be different, doesn't it? Sigh.
So sit back, relax and go back in time with me as Busy and Amanda hang out with the older kids for a night in Episode 1.05 -- 'The Big Gulp'.
No comments:
Post a Comment