My Beakman/Bill Nye story
I posted about this on Cohost, but figured I'd get a longer version of the story down here on the blog. This story deserves all the links and background information I can supply it.
We were a Beakman family; we did not watch any Bill Nye. He was too sincere for me. Beakman was real shit. He had a guy in a rat suit. There were 30 sound effects per second. I loved it so, so much.
If you were too young (or too sound-sensitive) to watch Beakman as a child, there are episodes on the Internet Archive. It was a science-edutainment show similar to Bill Nye, but it had a zany, bizarre quality that nearly overwhelmed a lot of the science. The titular host, played by Paul Zaloom, wore a bright green lab coat and bounced off the walls with childlike energy. The props used to demonstrate scientific principles were gigantic, silly machines, often larger than Beakman himself. There was basically one shrill and ridiculous soundboard sound effect playing per second. It was overstimulation: the show, and my parents are heroes for watching it with me when I was a small child.
The opening credits imagine Beakman's World as a show that two penguins are watching on a television at the South Pole:
Beakman's main sidekick was Lester, a middle-aged, salt-salt-and-pepper-bearded man wearing a decrepit, matted rat suit and a stained white t-shirt.
I remember that when I tried to explain Beakman to other children, I almost always led with the rat. He has a guy, like an old man, in a RAT SUIT! It's so CRAZY!
The cast always looked like they were having so much fun. The show's costume and prop design was also overwhelmingly 90s in the best possible way. Beakman had a rotating cast of young women sidekicks, and they always dressed in the most extreme-90s outfits imaginable. I adore the early-2000s aesthetic my husband and I call "Maya 1.0" - the neon, physical-props-mixed-with-digital-effects look present in Spy Kids, Mystery Men, Speed Racer, and Josie and the Pussycats. I think I like this aesthetic so much because Beakman embraced the physical-prop side of it so enthusiastically.
Which is all to say--Beakman was a huge influence on me growing up. The show really helped to establish the kinds of comedy I was interested in, and I feel that it was a valuable, creatively fertile thing for me to be watching.
But the dominant science-edutainment show of the decade was Bill Nye. The two shows premiered one year apart: Beakman in 1992, and Nye in 1993. They were both trying to do the same thing, and Beakman was trying to do it in a dumber, more colorful, and more purely obnoxious way, dense to the brim with gags and texture. I am so glad that I have the energy in me to enjoy art which operates on that level. Genuinely: enjoying shit that is dumb makes working in videogames a lot easier.
Paul Zaloom turned out to be interesting to me as an adult, too. His Wikipedia page is fascinating and links out to a bunch of wild stuff. He is a gay puppet artist and had a whole artistic career in that space as well. I've never seen a Paul Zaloom show but it sounds like a trip. This horribly formatted interview from 2002 is pretty funny and worth a read - it offers a vision into the stress and suffering involved in being a traveling puppeteer!
When I was 7 or 8 or so, my family was invited to a reunion for my paternal grandmother's family. It was massive, in a huge banquet hall and conference space somewhere in rural Montana, and everyone there had the surname McKenna. There were something like 300 people there--so many people that the reunion was heavily scheduled and even involved a talent show for the children. We were at the real fringe edge of the family circle here, and we knew absolutely nobody... but we got an invite, and my parents wanted to take us to see Yellowstone, so we went.
At the reunion, I met a bunch of kids wearing Bill Nye shirts. The shirts were oversized, like white circus tents on their little bodies. It was a very odd sight--and the kids were odd, too. They kept asking me if I liked Bill Nye, what my favorite episode of Bill Nye was, and so on.
It transpired that their father is one of the producers on the Bill Nye show, and they are actively going around this family reunion trying to boost Bill Nye to the other children.
I was completely brainless, and I felt extremely threatened by a whole crowd of children who were much closer to the in-group than I was going around socially pressuring me to talk about a TV show I hated. So I just kept telling them "I actually like Beakman instead" at every opportunity.
This was a pretty bad choice. It got weirdly heated! I remember trying to explain to them that Beakman has, get this, an old man, in a RAT SUIT! The kids were not interested.
The reunion was long and weird and fairly alienating. I have a surprising number of memories from it, which is strange for something that happened to me so long ago, when I was so young. It was the first time I realized that simply being related to someone doesn't really mean anything for your relationship to them. I knew my parents' siblings and their kids, and I really did have a lot in common with those people. But all these McKennas were complete strangers. They were nothing like me. None of the McKenna kids seemed to like shit that was dumb. A tragedy.
At the end of the family reunion, I remember that the Bill Nye kids all pulled out a home laser tag kit, very expensive, and made us play laser tag with them. Some were much older than me. The game went a bit weird, and I remember getting ganged up on by a bunch of Bill Nye superfans defending their father's honor all wielding honest to god laser guns and shooting me repeatedly. I believe they killed me. I don't know if this memory is edited by time and distance but I seem to remember that they were shooting and killing me while wearing those godawful oversized Bill Nye t-shirts.
As far as I can tell, their father was this guy,, and he has won many daytime Emmys for his work on Nye. I imagine the show was transformative for his life and for his children. I spent some time last year looking up interviews with him, trying to understand what he was saying through the lens that he had outfitted his children with Bill Nye shirts and fostered in them an energy to shoot and kill me with laser guns. It's like trying to see someone through the wrong end of a telescope. I've never met any of these people again and I doubt I ever will.
Who else can say they have died (digitally) for their favorite early 90s science-edutainment variety show? I am proud to have done. What can I say? It had more man sized rats in it. Perhaps we can say that I simply spoke truth to power.