30 For 30: The Adventures Of Pete & Pete

I turned 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 15, we consider what weird means and why treating children like adults can make for a show that appeals to adults.

When we use the word 'weird' to describe something, it's usually because we can't think of a better descriptor. The first time I heard about Aqua Teen Hunger Force it was described to me as “a weird show”, which doesn't even begin to explain it. What's more, depending on the context, 'weird' can denote something that is good or bad, making it akin to 'interesting' in that regard. For example, I would call Animal Collective's Centipede Hz weird and interesting in bad ways, and I would call Werner Herzog's The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans weird and interesting in good ways.


Since 'weird' has no inherent positive or negative value, and it can be used in vague ways when you can't think of other better words to use instead, it becomes a little frustrating when I say that I tend to like weird things. What does it really mean to like weird things? After all, each person's idea of what constitutes weird is different, and things can be weird in different ways, too. So before this spirals further into philosophical musings on weirdness, I'd like to take a trip back to the early 90s, when I encountered the first weird thing I can remember loving, a live action TV show that led me to develop a lifelong passion for weird things. I figure if I can't precisely define my idea of weird and why I love weird things, I might as well start at the beginning.

I don't think I would be the person I am today if I hadn't been at just the right age to see The Adventures Of Pete & Pete. It influenced everything from my sense of humor to my skewed way of seeing the world to even my taste in music. I'm not sure that Pete & Pete was influential in terms of impact on other shows around that time or that came after, but it was inarguably influential to a generation who grew up during its brief run on TV. If you're unfamiliar with the show it may seem odd to apply the label “influential” to something aimed at kids, but that's the beauty of it. This was a show that was for children but treated the audience like adults. It didn't need to spell out its moral lessons or spend too much time explaining everything. Most importantly, it was weird, but never in a way that felt cheap or stupid. The characters play it straight, as if everything is normal and expected, which makes everything feel even more weird. A better description than 'weird' might be 'suburban surrealism.' Indeed, there's a very specific tone and feel to Pete & Pete that inevitably led to its short three season run and cult-beloved status. 

Is this a still from a Wes Anderson movie or a kids show? You decide!

Much like other cult TV shows, you either 'get' Pete & Pete or you don't. Cult shows tend to be that way simply because they're unique and can't easily be compared to other shows, and so most TV viewers are less willing to give them a chance. This problem is multiplied when it's a kids show because kids, even more than adults, just want the same familiar things over and over. Maybe this is a gross overgeneralization but hey, real talk: if you think there are too many movie sequels, go take a look at how many sequels there are to kids movies. But I digress. During its time on TV, Pete & Pete was never a show that I remember other kids talking about at school. Even on a kid's channel with some other weird shit like Ren & Stimpy, Pete & Pete was like no other show before or since, and trying to explain to my friends why it was awesome only got me looks of confusion or boredom. As weird as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was when you first heard about it, even little boys can understand its premise which boils down to a simple “cartoon about mutant turtles who fight stuff.” With Pete & Pete there's no simple summation to give. One episode is about surviving a family road trip to the Hoover Dam, another is about trying to break a world record by staying awake for 11 nights, and another is about faking sick to stay home from school and how it gives you a new perspective on everything.

Of all the kids shows from my youth, Pete & Pete has held up the best. Most of the stuff I was watching in the late 80s/early 90s is unwatchable dreck when you have the mind of an adult but if anything I think I enjoy Pete & Pete more now than I did when it was on TV. There were even some jokes I didn't get until I was an adult, like the inspired font jokes in the marching band episode and Iggy Pop calling someone a 'stooge' in another. It says a lot that I could see that kind of thing working on Arrested Development or other cult show for adults, and the episode about the telephone that won't stop ringing vaguely reminds me of the general feel and plot formulas of modern kids shows that appeal to adults like Regular Show and Adventure Time. And maybe even My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

However, none of those is cool enough to have this in their opening title sequence 

Earlier I said the show was influential on me, and that's been true throughout my life. During its initial run on TV, Pete & Pete presented such a different take on the world that its point of view and sense of humor began to rub off on me. It features surreal and absurdist ideas but they're never done in a cloying way or overemphasized to the point of insult. In fact the show has no self-awareness about any of its eccentricities, to the point that children's baseball teams called The Bacon Barn or Prosthetics can slip by you if you aren't paying attention. I think somehow this casual-ness about being weird helped me stop being so self conscious about how odd I was as a kid (and continue to be today). Pete & Pete tells the viewer “just be yourself” without needing a character to literally state this out loud. By not explaining any of its strange elements—Why did parents name both their sons Pete? What is the story with Artie? How did Little Pete get a tattoo when he's only a kid?—the show is implicitly telling you that you don't need to explain yourself, either.

The other way the show has influenced me is more of a subtle, longterm effect. See, one of the best things about Pete & Pete was that the creators were huge music fans. Various musicians appeared as guest stars—whether it was Michael Stipe as an ice cream seller or Iggy Pop as a recurring character—but more crucially the show always used music from various indie rock bands. The main soundtrack was provided by the band Miracle Legion (performing under the name Polaris) and was released as a CD, but there were many other bands who contributed a track or two in various episodes. Being exposed to this kind of music as a kid must've planted a seed that sprouted when I got older. Maybe I would've eventually gone beyond the obvious mainstream pop music even without Pete & Pete, but I think it would've taken longer without hearing 'Tidal Wave' by The Apples In Stereo and 'Satellite' by Luscious Jackson when I was young.

Speaking of music...If I can say with certainty that Radiohead's OK Computer was the key formative discovery of my life that led me to become who I am today, then I can also say that Pete & Pete helped to prepare me for liking weird things. Which, in a way, led me to OK Computer. For that, I'll be forever thankful.

Until next time, my little vikings...

30 For 30: Mystery Science Theater 3000

I turn 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 5, I mean, "in the not too distant future..."

 It seems with any TV show that comes to an end, people will spend years afterward arguing for one of two things: either that it ended too soon, or that it should've been cancelled several seasons ago. What's more, a show needn't be over for this debate to happen. Anyone who brings up The Simpsons on the Internet will quickly this find out. The edge cases are those TV shows which were on the air for a fair number of years and never really had a chance to decline in quality. I'm sure there are thousands of people who would watch more Breaking Bad or The Sopranos if given the chance, but after five and six seasons of each, respectively, it's hard to argue that they ended before their time, and certainly no one feels they should've ended sooner. With TV shows that lean more toward the dramatic/plot focused side of things, though, it becomes very difficult to continually come up with new stories and things for the characters to do without a series chasing its own tail or falling down the slope of quality.


With TV shows that lean more toward the comedic/entertainment focused side of things, they can go on perpetually as long as they give the audience what it wants at the same level of quality. More than The Simpsons did during its prime, I think South Park has become the standard bearer of this ideal. Certainly there are always some forgettable or thrown-together episodes each year, but after 17 seasons I still don't see many people complaining that it should've stopped years ago, like I do with Family Guy or The Simpsons. Don't even get me started on debating the merits of bringing back shows like Family Guy and Futurama from cancellation, or we'll be here all day. But seriously, Simpsons should've ended like a decade ago.

Post-Season 10 Simpsons: it stinks.

Which brings me to Mystery Science Theater 3000, a show that never came back from a cancellation but did nearly end at one point before returning for three more seasons. It's an odd case because, while I think the cast and crew were talented enough to have done another few years, I also think it had the perfect amount of seasons. Since each episode is as long as a movie (literally), it's hard to get greedy about wishing there was more MST3k because there is already so much of it, from a standpoint of sheer time alone. With close to 200 episodes, each one (roughly) an hour and a half long, you've got (roughly) 300 hours of viewing to get through if you want to experience the whole series. To put this in perspective, there have been (roughly) 540 episodes of The Simpsons, which is 2.7 times as many as MST3k. At an average of 24 minutes per episode, though, it's only got (roughly) 216 hours of viewing to experience.


I'm not great at math so I should end this digression and move on.

When I wrote about Jackie Brown two years ago, I referred to it as a great 'hang out' movie. I defined it as such: “'Hang out' movies are, to me anyway, the sort of films where the the overall plot is subservient to getting interesting characters together to do and say interesting things.” I think this is why MST3k works so well, because it's a 'hang out' TV show. Since every episode is so long compared to the average TV show, you end up spending a lot of time with the characters. At a certain point it becomes like watching movies with friends, albeit really smart and funny friends you can't interact with to, say, go get you another beer as long as they're already up and getting one for themselves. Of course there were always groups of friends watching movies and making fun of them together before MST3k existed, and there are people who do it now without any awareness of the show. Yet there's a world of difference between the rapid fire, crafted jokes of MST3k and your drunk friends improvising lewd comments or saying “this sucks” over and over. Sure, the latter is still fun, but it's like comparing a bar fight to a boxing match.


Speaking of fights: where do you fall on Joel vs. Mike as host? When I discovered the show it was late in its life, so as far as I knew Mike was the only host. I always tended to lean toward him because I'm more familiar with his era but over the past two or three years, thanks to torrents, Netflix, and Hulu, I'm now right in the middle, leaning toward neither Joel nor Mike. To me it's just great that we got to have two hosts who were equally good and brought their own feel to the series. If the show had become as successful as The Simpsons and persisted for ten more seasons, it would probably have had another host at some point that everyone ended up hating. The only upside would be that Mike and Joel fans would have stopped arguing with each other and joined forces to hate this theoretical third host together.

Dividing fans quicker than Kirk Vs. Picard since 1993

With Joel Vs. Mike, keep in mind that you don't have to choose. As I said, I don't, and it depends on my mood and many other factors anyway. It's like asking me to choose between pizza and burgers; I need more context to make a choice: what time of day is it, am I sober, am I in a good or bad mood, am I at home or somewhere else? I suppose if I'm in a good mood, I go for Joel episodes. His era tends to be free-wheeling and goofy; he and the bots might really hate a movie but they're usually not mean spirited about it and try to amuse themselves along the way. Mike's era is more cynical and sarcastic; it's what I go for when I need to see a crappy movie get flayed alive because I'm in a bad mood and I need help to bring me out of it. Still, it's true that both of these styles existed to some extent in both eras—after all, Mike was the head writer for a time before he took over hosting duties when Joel left.

MST3k has been a longtime love of mine and I had no idea that it was as important to other people until I got on the Internet. It wasn't like with EarthBound, where I didn't think anyone else but me loved it and was obsessed with it. After all, MST3k was on TV, and had been so for years. But thanks to the Internet, I realized how crucial it had been to shaping the comedic sensibilities of a generation-and-a-half of people. It isn't like The Simpsons where it's ubiquitous and people regularly reference episodes or quote lines they've memorized to make people laugh; MST3k is more about the way it makes you look at movies, and I would argue, the world around you, too. I think I'm often so quick with sarcastic remarks and one-liners because I was trained by the masters. Training is better than memorizing. While I often quote or reference specific Simpsons jokes, I've never learned jokes from MST3k and used them verbatim in real life. Rather, I learned how they saw the world and how their sense of humor functioned, and I subconsciously began to imitate it.
 

 I'm probably the only person who likes the Godzilla episodes more

The strangest thing about my longtime love for MST3k is that when I was younger I only understood about half of the jokes. I'm almost embarrassed to admit that for a period of years I thought of the show as being akin to New Yorker cartoons, in that back then I assumed any humor I didn't understand was too high brow for my adolescent brain. If I didn't get a joke from MST3k or a cartoon from New Yorker, I assumed they were too smart for me, when really it was a product of being too young and immature to understand them. There is also the obscurity factor. If you don't have a thorough knowledge of pop culture from the 1960s onward, you could be the smartest person in the world—someone who understands every New Yorker cartoon, even—and many MST3k jokes will go right over your head. I still don't know some of the reference points they're pulling from, but thanks to the fansite The Annotated MST3k, you can now look up anything from (practically) any episode of the series.


Despite this 50/50 ignorance of MST3k's references, the show served as a respite for my younger self. After being forced to go to church with my family week after week, I used to come home and watch the rest of whatever episode was on SciFi Channel that morning. It unknowingly became a ritual that I felt counter-acted the religion I was increasingly moving away from. MST3k isn't anti-religious but I think you know what I mean. In other times of my life I had an author or a band or a favorite cocktail or a girlfriend to be there for me, to help me endure the things I didn't want to have to endure, but had to for whatever reason. In that period of my life (1997ish through 2000ish), MST3k was there for me. Even though going to church meant missing the first half of each episode, the limited viewings were like a window into another world I wished I inhabited, where there were people who talked and thought like I did, only way more funny and articulate.


It occurred to me at some point last year that MST3k is my favorite TV show of all time. I wasn't even actively thinking about what my favorite show was, it simply popped into my head as a fact the way one's wandering mind might arrive at “you know, strawberry Starburst is my favorite flavor” while waiting in line at the DMV. My reasoning may be suspect because it's not like I'm a superfan who watches it every day; I'm by no stretch an expert on the show. I wish I could at least give my own list of top episodes but I can't because I couldn't possibly decide. Not because I have too many favorites, but because—past the rough first season or two of the show—I think of every episode as my favorite, as essential. I laugh more at some episodes, I think some of them have movies that are better or worse as fodder for jokes, but I have never seen anything close to a mediocre or outright bad episode. Even other TV shows that would make a list of my favorites have a handful of episodes that I find to be subpar or not worth watching again. When it comes to MST3k, though, I am down to watch any episode, any time, even if I have already seen it multiple times. So I figure, it's by default my favorite show.


Now...which one do you want to watch?

This one is great, but you knew that

11 Stray Thoughts

1) The new album by Beach House, Bloom, is pretty good even though it feels more like a slightly different sequel to Teen Dream than the next step in the band's evolution. Don't get me wrong, it's almost as good as Teen Dream. Perhaps the best parallel is Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac; both are great, but the former came first and felt newer/fresher even if many prefer the latter.

2) After spending most of their career using as little instrumentation as possible, and falling more often than not on the dour side of things, The Walkmen have recruited producer Phil Elk and guest Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes to help them expand their sound. The result is arguably the band's best record yet, Heaven.

3) The titles of the new Beach House and The Walkmen albums should be switched. Heaven should be a place of relative stagnation but enjoyment (more like how Beach House's new one feels), whereas Bloom is more fitting for the by turns majestic and uplifting Walkmen record.

4) You should immediately go listen to all the Felt that you can. Such an underrated, under-known band.

5) I've slowly become addicted to Beach Fossils. Their new single, Shallow/Lessons, is fantastic, and I'm definitely anticipating their forthcoming sophomore record with increasing impatience.

6) The Horrors and The Drones are also underrated and under-known bands. The Horrors's Primary Colours sounds like a combination of Liars and My Bloody Valentine. The Drones recorded Gala Mill at the titular mill in an isolated area of Australia, and the atmosphere of that environment permeates these songs. The Drones sound most to me like the rock guitar side of Sun Kil Moon and the impassioned side of Nick Cave combined with bare bones, distorted Spiderland guitars as engineered by Steve Albini.

7) Bardo Pond's 'Back Porch' and 'Tommy Gun Angel' kick incredible amounts of ass.

8) The Days Of Wine & Roses by The Dream Syndicate is a perfect amalgamation of Velvet Underground and The Feelies-esque jangle-pop.

9) Sufjan Steven's Age Of Adz gets better with time.

10) How I Met Your Mother is my new favorite sitcom. Imagine a modern version of Seinfeld, with all the wit, neurotic characters, made up words and terms, and odd misadventures that implies, but actually much better than that comparison makes it sound.

11) Predator 2, as with Ghostbusters 2, is an unfairly maligned sequel to a classic film.