Author: theveryspecialblog

Theme Songs Performed by Actors

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I was getting ready to draft a post about another 21 Jump Street episode when I was like “hold up, someone needs to give a major shout out to Holly Robinson Peete for not only starring as the incomparable Officer Judy Hoffs, but also for singing this bitchin’ theme song.” Then I proceeded to stop what I was doing and rock out to that awesome theme song, featuring Peter Deluise and Johnny Depp on backup vocals. I didn’t draft that post and instead I’m writing this post about people who starred in and sang their show’s theme song. I’ve excluded the obvious like The Brady Bunch, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, etc.

21 Jump Street performed by Holly Robinson Peete (Office Judy Hoffs)

The Facts of Life, Season 1 performed by Charlotte Rae (Mrs. Garett) 

Fraiser performed by Kelsey Grammer

Green Acres by Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor

Baywatch, closing credits, performed by David Haselhoff (that lead lifeguard, right? did they have characters?)

The Cosby Show: The Shower

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shower2The Cosby’s are busy preparing for a wedding shower that Denise is throwing for her friend Veronica. Theo is super bummed because he spent all day decorating the house only to find out that the party is strictly women-only. There’s some talk about gender roles (Bud wants Rudy to get him juice because she’s a female and she’s all no way, Bud.) Then Theo and Cliff spend forever hanging shelves because Clair wants to keep them away from the party. Theo tries to read instructions in French. Denise is like yay hanging out with the bride to be! BORING!

shower1Where’s the very special part? Let me skip ahead. We find out seventeen minutes into the show that Veronica is only getting married because she is pregnant. This must be one of the slowest very special reveals ever in the history of very special episodes. And it turns out she did it on PURPOSE! This was a planned pregnancy. She and her boyfriend decided that the only way to get her father’s permission to marry while still in college was to get pregnant.

Wait. Huh? You need your dad’s permission to do stuff in college? Her fiancee had to drop of out school to get full time work but is unemployed! And they have no money! This is how you squander a booming 80’s economy, people. This really stupid master plan. Also, who thought that having a kid would be less expensive than eloping and paying for college? Or maybe getting married and not telling her dad.

shower3Anyway, she’s not a Cosby kid so we don’t have that much to talk about with her. Denise is freaked out by what Veronica told her, so she confides in Clair. Denise is all worried like what if I did something like that? Maybe I can understand it! And Clair is like you would never do that because that is something a crazy, selfish person does.

And you know what, yeah, that is something a crazy, selfish person does. But it’s also something a person who does not know math does. How did these people get into college?

Very Special Lesson: College is expensive, but nothing is more expensive than having a kid.

Boy Meets World: Turkey Day (A Very Special Failure)

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This was a really offensive episode. That’s why I’m writing 2 Boy Meets World posts in a row. I couldn’t even be funny about this. I’m confused as to why this episode exists in the world in this manner. 

Cory and Shawn bring in the most cans for the food drive at school, so they win a turkey and stuffing. They cannot decide who will take which (they both want stuffing) so they decide to combine family dinners. The Matthews are very snobby when they get to the trailer park. They mistake the “Unters” trailer for the “Hunters” because Alan assumes that the H has fallen off. This alerts the Trailer Park Home Owners Association to the fact that yuppies are on their turf, so they call an emergency meeting. They are snobby in their own way, you see, and they tell Chet to get rid of them. 

(Mr. Feeney started this episode off with a lecture about the Burundian Civil War between the Hutu and Tutsi, which preceded/devolved into the Rwandan Genocide of 1994…because that’s so comparable to snobby suburbans right? Ugh. I can’t even. This show. Come on.)

(Okay, well I guess it’s sort of the banality of evil or how prejudice and hate should be tolerated at any level. But still. Omg. Are you serious, Boy Meets World?)

Chet and Verna (Shawn’s parents) are embarrassed that their forks don’t match so they make everyone eat with plasticware. We find this out because Alan was a total jerk and whined about using a plastic fork. Instead of just being like we don’t care that your forks don’t match, Amy made some condescending comment about how their forks didn’t match when they were “just starting out.” Finally, the kids have their own Thanksgiving dinner with tough-guy from school Frankie and it’s only when their parents stumble upon the meal that they realize how terrible they’ve been to each other.

At the end of the episode, Feeney makes Shawn read his paper to the class. It starts off like this: “This past week I spent Thanksgiving with the Hutus and the Tutsis, which was a real surprise to me because I live in Philadelphia and I thought that kind of prejudice only happened in undeveloped countries.” Not only is the comparison (for obvious reasons) insanely awful, but also I particularly hate how the characterization of Burundi as an “undeveloped” country. They could have said developing, under developed, whatever you want to do to mark the dissonance between what we as Americans think of “civilized” countries to be…but ultimately I think they did this because it’s scary to think of genocide as happening among modern countries. Of course we know that isn’t true, and that genocide can and does happen in developed (albeit desperate, perhaps) countries.

I was originally going to post this closer to Thanksgiving, but it’s just too depressing for the holidays. Then I was going to not post this at all, but then I decided that I wanted to go ahead with it. Why is that?  Well, it’s pissing me off and I want to get on a soapbox and I want to do that because:

  1. This was recent. This was only 20 years ago. Yet I don’t think people are all that informed about it and this show didn’t help any.
  2. This was a current affair at the time this episode aired. I get that it’s a “kid friendly” attempt to approach the subject matter, but all it did was make a specific and devastating genocide trite. And I hate trite.
  3. I love this show, and I like to make fun of things I love. But this is not something to make fun of and yet I still want to post about it. I don’t like that western popular media attempting to teach western children an important lesson about an African genocide and succeeding only in making it condescending and petty. And maybe that’s because western media didn’t want to portray this any more gravely than it did not only because it’s disturbing, but also because the international community did surprisingly little.
  4. In my opinion, if you’re not going to cover something accurately then don’t cover it at all. Boy Meets World could have taught us this life lesson without this. We could have skipped the entire Feeney lecture thing. He could have given them the turkey and we could have still seen the class struggle between The Matthews and The Hunters and we still could have learned from it. We could even have heard a lecture on how important it is to respect people at every level of interaction because things can go so horribly wrong if we forget that as people and as a society. But no, I don’t think these didactic false syllogisms are at all appropriate. Unfortunately, every human has the ability to be oppressive on any scale, but The Matthews/Hunters were never in danger of contributing to a genocide over Thanksgiving dinner. Honestly, we don’t all have to get along that much, and I don’t think that their snobby behavior did anything to warrant a comparison to unabashedly annihilate another race. This is so beyond an epic fail that I’m totally shocked that someone was paid to write this episode.

Very Special Lesson: Comparing socioeconomic disparity amongst best friends’ families in a sitcom to genocide will undermine the validity of your argument every time.

I didn’t proof this and I don’t plan on it. I don’t want to reread it and I want to go back to loving Boy Meets World as much as possible.

Boy Meets World: Uncle Daddy

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97.9%* of Boy Meets World episodes are about Corey, so I wanted to review a very special episode about Eric. Eric was definitely the funniest character, and Will Friedle is pretty funny in real life too. I don’t have twitter but that doesn’t keep me from reading his. You see, sometimes very special episodes are about not birthing a child before you’re ready. Other times, they are about not adopting someone else’s before you are ready.

bmw1In “Uncle Daddy” Eric is dating an older woman. When he asks her out three times in a row, she reveals that she has a son. She introduces them and tells him that he has to have a relationship with her son if he wants to have a relationship with her. Like what? Three dates in a row and suddenly it’s time to join the family? This poor kid! His mom is totally going to tug on his heart strings because we already know the Eric is the best big brother…and erm maybe father figure? Also, I’m pretty sure this kid is the kid from Liar, Liar.

Eric is awesome with the kid. No surprise there. This is during his My Date with the President’s Daughter phase (a.k.a. his perfect phase) which quickly degrades into his “Plays with Squirrels” phase. (Actually, now that I have reached that age, I’m pretty sure he was just having a quarter-life crisis.) He’s so great that he decides to read the kid aa bedtime story instead of going to see a Jim Carrey (omg from Liar, Liar!) movie with Cory and Shawn. But he totally falls apart when he can’t turn down a game of foosball and leaves the kid sitting at a table alone. Then he bemoans the fat that he has not hung out with grown ups all day, which the kid overhears. So he asks Eric for money for ice cream and the kid runs away (presumably to wait for the bus). When Eric notices he’s lost him, he realizes that he can’t be a dad just yet. bmw2

He explains everything to the MILF and she’s like super cool about it. She’s not at all mad at him for leaving her kid unattended and she’s totally understanding of the fact that he’s not ready to be a dad. So she breaks up with him. Because it is the fair thing to do. Because she is the coolest woman ever. Like wtf. He should marry this woman.

Eric gets home from his breakup and finds Cory mouthing off to his parents about taking the car when he wasn’t supposed to. Eric tells him to chill out and give his dad a break. (He’s maturing!) And then he decides to study and retake the SAT’s (more maturing!)

Very Special Lesson: You will meet the perfect woman. She will have a perfect kid. But you’ll be a manchild and it won’t work out. Sorry. Them’s the breaks.

*based upon a study in which I was not entirely paying attention run over the course of the past fifteen years.

Beauty School Drop Out

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I spent most of elementary school obsessed with Grease. I failed to understand like 75% of the dialogue, but I stilled loved it. In fact, I’m probably stilled obsessed but now I avoid Grease. Why do I avoid something I so clearly love? Because I. CANNOT. HANDLE. IT. I want to be in that movie so badly that like I get overly excited/jealous/sing-a-long crazy to the point that I am running around like a Jack Russell Terrier puppy and I just don’t have it in my hear to put myself through that again. I hear it’s streaming on Netflix, but I haven’t worked up the courage to press play. On another note, I love that pastel temporary hair colors are in style. Frenchie totally did that first. Beauty School Drop Out

Moschino jacket
shopbop.com

Circle skirt
$60 – lavishalice.com

Tights
discountdance.com

Baldinini zip boots
rinastore.com

Blush
toofaced.com

Moisturizing lipstick
$6.31 – newlook.com

Haircare
modcloth.com

Home Improvement: What a Drag

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Home Improvement was not a show known for high drama or life lessons. It was pretty much a ridiculous (ridiculously hilarious) show about an incompetent handyman and his witty family. But (as you well know) it’s not an 80’s/90’s sitcom without a very special episode.

Can you guess what this episode is about based on the title?

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, this episode is about weed! During an on-location shoot for Tool Time (the show with in a show) Tim scales a tree in his backyard to demonstrate the hazards a blizzard can take on suburban homes. Turns out blizzards also damage trees, and Tim (the incompetent handyman) falls into the rough of his gazebo/all of the wooden lawn furniture.

As Tim and his sidekick, Al, are sifting through the wreckage, Al finds a baggie of “oregano” that he assumes Jill (Tim’s wife) keeps outside in the cold to maintain optimum freshness. Tim tells Al that what he’s holding is a bag of weed, and Al freaks out because his “prints are on the bag.” Naturally, at this point the only thing to do is to stage a stakeout behind next door neighbor Wilson’s fence. Wilson expresses his shock that drugs were found in his very own neighborhood because he has only ever heard about “kids and drugs in the newspaper.” Clearly, Jill and Tim are the only adults in this show who are edgy enough to have any experience with illegal substances. After a Friday night spent in ten degree weather, Jill and Tim finally see their eldest son Brad go into the gazebo to retrieve the pot.

After lecturing Brad on how pot could ruin his whole life, they send him up to his room while they figure out how to deal with them. But Jill is left reeling because Brad accused them of being hypocrites since they probably smoked too when they were his age. Tim is all like no way all I did was drink beer! but Jill is all like omg I smoked so much pot. I should have helped my son learn from my errors. Then Jonathan Taylor Thomas (as middle child Randy) accidentally stumbles onto his parents freaking out. At which point his dad accuses him of smoking too, and JTT is all like “what no way!” and he really means it because JTT is a golden boy and above the influence and funny and the greatest 90’s heartthrob ever.

So then JTT goes upstairs to talk to Brad because he’s shocked that Brad smoked and he didn’t even know it. The Brad is all shocked that JTT has not smoked and JTT is like clearly too intellectual to get high and then have pseudo-intellectual conversations. Then you hardly see JTT anymore for the rest of the episode because you can tell by this point in the show’s run that he’s pretty much over acting and ready to enroll in Harvard.

Finally, Jill and Tim agree that the best way to handle Brad is to come clean about their own experiences (and ground him for months). As it turns out, Jill was a huge pothead in high school. One time she went to a Led Zeppelin concert, smoked some pot laced with something weird, and ended up in the ER thinking that her name was Charlene Fogelman. Personally, I think that sounds horrifying and like a terrible waste of a Led Zeppelin concert. I’m also glad that this stuff is slowly getting legalized, so that people in real life will be able to purchase from reliable (legal) sources that don’t mix PCP into their product. But I digress. After this, Jill ends up in jail and Tim has to bail her out because her parents won’t even speak to her. How lucky is Jill that she was still a minor, right? I don’t even think we could have Home Improvement if Jill had been a mom with a criminal record! It would have been like Orange is the New Improvement. Ultimately, Brad decides that smoking pot is not worth the risk of his soccer scholarship. Well, like no shit it isn’t.

Very Special Lesson: Don’t do anything that will make you think you are Charlene Fogelman. I hear she’s a convicted felon.

Cradle of Conspiracy

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Cradle_of_Conspiracy_posterYouTube does not have the first part of this movie, but let me briefly summarize the first ten minutes of every Lifetime drama. There is a girl (Danica McKellar/Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years) who comes from a nice family but is bored with her home life. Aside from her strict parents, life is great. Then she dates some boy that they do not approve of. This “boy” looks (may actual be) twenty-five and her mom notes that he seems too old (probably because he is a creepy baby snatcher). This is a movie about a creepy baby snatcher.

Danica plays a really naïve girl. She dates a creepy dude who is all like I totally understand you and nothing bad will every happen with me, which of course means he is manipulating her and all of the bad things will happen. Danica seems to be a student of the fingertip-method. She’s constantly rubbing the creepers back and right now she seems to be playing with his chest hair, which I do not appreciate.

She gets pregnant almost immediately, which you should have expected because this movie is about cradles. And conspiracies. Kenny (that’s the baby snatcher’s name) tells her from the comfort of his trailer that he does not want her to have an abortion because he is personally opposed to it (so glad he has an opinion) and that he will take care of everything. (He kind of does if “taking care” means baby stealing).

On Danica’s seventeenth birthday her parents give her a prized family heirloom (one year ahead of schedule) and tell her that she’s the perfect child. This loving home environment creates an intense amount of pressure, and she runs away instead of confiding them. She brings a stuffed animal with her because she is still a child herself!kenny

Kenny convinces her to give the baby up for adoption because the two of them are not ready to be parents. He then takes her to a very sketchy motel in Louisiana full of pregnant ladies just waiting to give their babies away. She even meets one lady who has no other place to go, so she stays at the motel and keeps having babies for the adoption agency via artificial insemination (which creepily reminds me of The Giver).

Danica’s parents eventually find out from her best friend that she has answered an ad in the newspaper. They manage to find the ad and contact the local authorities, who inform them that the adoption agency is fake and that they are really selling babies. They arrange a phone rendezvous, but Danica’s dad ruins the whole thing by telling her that Kenny is going to jail because he got some other girl pregnant and tried to steal her baby. Things get really weird when the baby snatchers straight up murder a girl who accused them of stealing her babies. Then Kenny tells Danica that they have to run away because she’s a runway and runaways go to jail for running away. She’s more naïve than I thought because she believes him completely. Luckily, the cops show up right as they flee the building.

Then Danica’s mom tries to make her keep the baby. (She’s overbearing in case you forgot). She even brings the kid that Danica wanted to put up for adoption into the hospital room to hang out for a while. I guess she wants her to think about her decision, but it kind of seems like she’s not respecting her decision. So it turns out that the reason her mom has been freaking out about keeping the baby is that she was also a teen mom and her parents made her give up the kid. She tells Danica that this horrible experience was what made it so important to her to give Danica a choice. But really it seems like she decided that she wanted a baby and kept being like hey let’s keep my grandchild, hey let’s bring my grandchild home, hey let me tell you this heart-wrenching story from my youth while I’m bottle feeding the baby you didn’t want to have.

hqdefault (1)The next day, Danica is okay with being a mom because she has to comfort her crying baby when no one else is at home to do so. Then Kenny shows up at the house and literally snatches the baby from her arms. And by literally snatches, I mean she hands the baby over to him because he is the dad. Ugh, look I get it at first, but this is ridiculous. You are such an idiot, Danica! The cops pull Kenny over for speeding and recover the baby. Then she gives him a mushy speech about family that obviously means nothing to him. She buys him off with a ring and he gives up custody.

Very Special Lesson: I think there are a few lessons we can all learn from this. Number one, don’t become impregnated by a sociopath and (if you do) do not follow said sociopath across state lines. Secondly, do not put undue expectations on your teenagers, though it’s probably a bit of an extreme reaction for them to become impregnated by sociopaths and cross state lines. Finally, do not live vicariously through your pregnant teen daughter to fill the void of the baby you lost, even though she seemed cool with keeping the kid after you already made her take it home.

Full House: Aftershocks

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Do you think this is MK or Ashley?
Do you think this is MK or Ashley?

Aside from the opening credits and the fact that Danny Tanner is the host of “Wake up, San Francisco” you could pretty much forget that Full House took place anywhere other than a studio lot. But this episode really incorporates the Northern California setting because there has been an (off camera) earthquake.

Screen Shot 2014-11-02 at 8.12.32 PMStephanie is totally traumatized from the aforementioned (off camera) earthquake and refuses to leave her dad’s side. Danny’s too flattered by all of the attention to realize that she has turned into a total nutcase. He only realizes that she has a (very mild) case of PTSD when she freaks out and won’t let him go to a business dinner. During a (very detailed) game of (product placement) Barrel of Monkeys, Danny pulls Stephanie aside to discuss her separation anxiety. She insists that nothing is wrong, and Danny feels like he’s the worst dad ever because he does not know how to help her.

In the last five minutes of the show, he decides to take her to a therapist. The therapist has her draw a picture of her family, and Screen Shot 2014-11-02 at 8.22.23 PMStephanie also includes a gigantic crack in the middle of their house (from the earthquake). She also drew Danny outside of the house because he was late getting home on the day of the earthquake. Then, with a series of leading questions, the therapist determines that Stephanie has been anxious since the earthquake because she does not know where her dad is when he runs late getting home from work. She decides they should make a list of all of the things that Stephanie and Danny can do, so that she will not worry when he is away. She proceeds to tell them both exactly how to behave, while Stephanie eagerly writes down everything she says.

Obviously, everything is fine now because Stephanie had a really great conversation with a mental health professional for all of five minutes. And no. This has nothing to do with the fact that her mom died suddenly at the beginning of this show. We don’t talk about that (unless John Stamos wants to talk about that).

Screen Shot 2014-11-02 at 8.07.23 PMAlso, in this episode: DJ gets her first zit and decides that the best coping mechanism is to dress like Cousin It.

Very Special Lesson: You can solve all of your big problems by drawing one picture. Hurry, go buy the 64 pack of Crayolas (with sharpener). It’s the secret to life!