Wed, August 18, 2004

Damn that Arksie. No matter how hard I try, he always wins me over – usually by being right. From the time I heard about Boy Meets World (probably its third or fourth season) until the time I forgot about it (instantly), I dismissed it as more dopey ABC TGIF fluff. I saw no distinction between it and Saved by the Bell, a show I watched almost daily and detested. (It would be on when I got home from school because my sister had it on, and I'd be forced to watch it during my afternoon snack because the only alternative would be to go into another room with, like, a book.) But as he so often does, Arksie insisted that it was better than I thought, and I ended up giving it a second chance. (This has worked fabulously in the past, almost every time it's ever happened: Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist and The Amazing Race most notably.)

A number of weeks ago, the hard drive in my TiVo died, taking with it a number of my stored recordings. While it was sent away for repair, I put a new drive into the TiVo so I could continue to watch television; so far, I still haven't had a chance to try recovering some of the recordings, because the new drive still has shows I want to watch before deleting them and opening TiVo up again. Long story short, with most of my long-standing recordings gone and no TV season under way (save Fox's "revolutionary" – and revolutionarily awful – summer season), my TiVo currently has a lot of extra space on it, and so it's recording a huge amount of TiVo Suggestions (tm), shows I haven't asked it to record but it thinks I might like. Lots of Seinfeld and Simpsons, some King of the Hill, and an inordinate amount of Disney Channel programming. I'm not sure why. Most of it is stuff I'd never watch, but one of the shows is Boy Meets World which reruns a handful of times a day.

So, while I watched it a little in college and begrudgingly acknowledged that it wasn't half bad, I haven't seen Boy Meets World in some time. Now I have so much of it on TiVo that I ended up watching a little mini-marathon Sunday afternoon. (Damn Arksie!) I'm not too much a fan of the later years, when everyone's in college or whatever and Topanga gets a little chunky, but I really adore the early episodes. The earlier the better. Right now, Disney Channel is hovering around the middle, the ones with the obnoxious convertible-based opening sequence. The kids are still pretty young, so it's tolerable, but they've brought in extra teachers and sort of watered down the strength of the show.

In the truly early seasons, when Ben Savage was probably ten or twelve but appears to be six years old, the show is amazing. Not that it's spectacularly well written – its dialogue is good and the stories aren't too bad for fluffy kid stuff, a little too sugary-sweet and moralistic for the most part, but always good for a few solid laughs – it's really the performances. The show rests entirely on the shoulders of its child actors (although William "Kitt" Daniels is fantastic as Mr. Feeny), who at this time were very, very young. Hands-down, the most talented comic actors of that age group, right up until the three kids presently on Still Standing. It's what sets Boy Meets World apart – so many kids' shows with kid actors fall flat because of simple things like line readings and comic timing. Here, Boy Meets World excels.

On top of that, there really is usually a solid laugh or two. One of my favorites came in an early episode: Cory and Shawn are talking to Topanga and the other geeky kid who disappeared by the time the convertible showed up. For whatever reason, the topic of television comes up – I think Cory and Shawn are looking for tips on improving their intellect. The geeky kid (or maybe Topanga) starts rattling off some educational programming they could try: MacNeil/Leher, etc. Ben Savage delivers Cory's next line so perfectly, it still kills me just thinking about it. Interrupting: "–all right, all right. For the sake of argument, let's pretend those are all actual shows." You'd never expect a kid to endow an obvious laugh line with the appropriate "throwaway" that it needs to be truly effective, but he really nails it. If you ever catch that episode, you're in for a treat.

I'm not saying Boy Meets World can compete with your better grown-up sitcoms like Friends or Seinfeld that have actual plots and everything. It's still lit like a soap opera, overacted, and those morals! Pyew! But it's really good for killing a few hours on a Sunday with no regrets. Fully enjoyable time-wasting entertainment. You can do much, much worse.

Also, if your TiVo is overloaded with Disney Channel offerings, you might also enjoy Kim Possible, the title of which I had some vague notion of, but which I didn't really know about until some girl on a recent flight was watching it on DVD. It's an animated show about Kim Possible, a cheerleader in high school (most likely junior high), who also is a crimefighting superhero. Although with no special powers, just gadgets. (My favorite kind! cf. Batman) She's very cute and spends most of her time baring her sexy little midriff. I don't know why Disney thinks programming targeted at young children needs such a come-hither touch, but I wasn't complaining about it in The Little Mermaid and I'm not complaining about it now. Her crime fighting alter ego is apparently not a secret identity like Buffy or Alias, but it still requires a separate (sexy) outfit. Kim is voiced by the alluring Christy Romano of Disney Channel's entertaining Shia LaBeouf launcher Even Stevens (also, very briefly, of Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You). Her sidekick is voiced by Will Friedle. (Who played, yep, Cory's older brother on Boy Meets World.) The show also features such vocal talent heavyweights as Nancy "Bart Simpson" Cartwright (who voices the sidekick's sidekick – which, for some reason, is a naked mole rat), John "Bender" DiMaggio, and Patrick Warburton (Seinfeld's David Puddy, but also the voice of practically every great animated character of the past five years including many voices on Family Guy and the dad on UPN's Game Over). Plus, Gary Cole, which – all right, yeah. Gary Fucking Cole.

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