Misfits of Science Update
A week or so ago I wrote about one season wonder TV show Misfits of Science, (see here). I was working off twenty-year old memories, and thought I’d never get to see the show again. Well, hearing my tale of woe, a friend used his internet wizardry and found copies of a couple of episodes, which I eagerly watched.
And…er…well… It’s not as good as I remember. In fact, it’s downright silly. Chasing cavemen in loincloths down Hollywood Boulevard silly. But I still wanted to note a couple of things:
The show has shades of Buckaroo Banzai, which is cool. Remember at the Yoyodyne labs, there were these experiments going on in the background, very bizarre, which we never learned anything about? I think one of them involved watermelons. The Misfits have the same thing going at their Humanadyne Labs. Imagine Dr. Hayes yelling, “No no no! If they’re both upside down it won’t work!” Lots of fun.
Both episodes — a fairly random sample — mentioned orbital delivery systems for nuclear weapons, i.e. Reagan’s “Star Wars” system. Any TV show (or book, or movie), even and maybe especially science fiction, becomes an artifact of its time — a snapshot of when it was made, preserving everything from the hairstyles (and let me say that 1985 was a banner year for Aquanet) to the music to the news of the day. This detail was a sobering reminder of what was occupying a lot of the country’s attention in 1985.
