Green Slime

Friday's music: the opening sequence (about 39 seconds long) from You Can't Do That On Television. It was an 80s' kids show from Canada and the opening music and animation were guided by Barry Blair--the man who inspired Terry Gilliam's comic-style art for Monty Python. His choice of a Dixieland jazz arrangement of Rossini's William Tell Overture is brilliant.

I loved the program. It featured ridiculous sketch-comedy style skits, all of which clustered loosely around a theme. Many of them were standards: a kid at a firing squad, Barth's disgusting diner with the boogerishly clotted fly paper hanging above the grill, an...well, I guess "all-Canadian" (rather than all-American) home in which a nagging, worrisome, moralizing, frazzled mother would eventually get the best of the children, etc.

Having, perhaps, a defective sense of humor, I always liked the joke moment in which kids would appear from lockers in a row, tell a few tiresome jokes, then disappear into their lockers. Occasionally they were hauled away by someone.

When a kid said "water," water from an unseen above was dumped upon them, even if this was a skit in a desert. Often, characters tried to trick one another into saying water.

Better yet, they tried to trick one another into saying "I don't know"...at which point green slime would fall onto their head.

This fan site has gobs of info on the show, including gobs of updated info. (There were a couple fan conferences in recent years.) Adults have even posted "slimed" photos at the "Wall of Shame" page.
-cK