Oh Hey Thar

Why hello thar, my myriad electronic benefactors! In order to order up a steaming plate of order to your ordernary lives, I just wanted to update this literary mecca and give you all some peace of mind. First, as a few of you should already know, I am alive and well; I merely enacted a voluntary vocabulary hiatus until the next list of "Get a Clue" words was opened for public use. And so again we take a journey into the life of young Maximillian, an august existence absolutely saturated with bantering wit, dry British humour, and copious doses of unnecessary alliteration. But, unfortunately, many of you may choose to hold a personal vendetta against me at the exact moment I explain my...restriction for this coming marking period. In the coming four or five posts, it is my solemn duty to comment on and discuss certain short story selections. While this might not seem like anything of remarkable malevolence, I will explain why this may not necessarily be beneficial to my natural flow of writing. As I have undoubtably explained to a few of you, writing these blogs takes a heavy toll on my mind and body; I only have a fixed quantity of time to write in this internet web log and entertain my loyal viewers. Therefore, my usual scribed bunkum will be greatly diminished in quantity for the next while. I warn you: it may even get downright boring here on "Taking it to the 'Max'". That isn't to say that my life and times aren't vaguely blase anyway; it'll just be more so from here on out. But, having said that, I'm completely confident that I'll be able to keep my literary analyses humorous in some way; I wouldn't want to leave you all high and dry and bereft with a lack of my normal flamboyance. Now luckily for all of you fine ladies and gentemen in the audience, I've been too busy watching reruns of one of my favorite shows to actually read through these short selections this weekend. Because of this, I might as well discuss these and other said forms of audiovisual entertainment and end my career with a bang.

In order to truly appreciate what I am about to say, you must take a trip back in time. This trip will take you back to the 1990s, in fact. Ah, the good 'ole nineties, a time of flashy and poorly-written and acted commercials, toys such as (pop goes) Connection and Don't Wake Daddy, and the critically-acclaimed Backstreet Boys and/or N*Sync. Conveniently, the nineties were also the years in which most of us were but mere ingenuous children and had not so much as an inkling as to the horrors of the teenage and also adult worlds. The main reason I bring up this no-doubt nostalgic decade is for one reason and one reason alone: it had spectacular television shows. If you'll all take a trip down memory lane with me for a moment, I'm perfectly confident that you can remember the glory days of television. Dexter's Laboratory. Doug. The Rugrats. Courage the Cowardly Dog. Rocket Power. Rocko's Modern Life. Scooby Doo. CatDog. Samurai Pizza Cats....The list goes on and on. Television was wholly better than it is today; shows like the recent seasons of SpongeBob SquarePants and also things like Heroes, Gray's Anatomy, and Lost can't even compare. But of all of the nostalgic childhood television-based memories I can salvage from the depths of my mind, one show in particular stands out to me.

In my opinion, Are You Afraid of the Dark? is the clear-cut winner of my "Best Show of the Nineties and Possibly Ever" award. Now, I'm typically a person with an unusually large reserve of jocularity, but I kid you not when I say that "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" is virtually flawless in every respect. That show, henceforth referred to as AYAOTD, can only be described as a psuedo-horror-based Twilight Zone directed at children. In each episode, the teenaged protagonist or protagonists is/are faced with some sort of supernatural dilemma. By overcoming the dilemma in each episode, they grow and develop in ways normal children can only dream of; unfortunately for them (and for us), the manner in which each episode unfolds is excessively fear inducing. As a kid, I can remember being transfixed to my television screen in sheer terror as one child descended a well haunted by a malevolent being or as another tried to save his friend by venturing inside an alien spacecraft. After watching one episode in which a pool was haunted by some sort of ethereal being, I can even recall avoiding all bodies of water for at least a few days; considering the fact that I am an avid swimmer/general hydrophile, that really attests to the show's greatness.

As I recently relived some of the glory days of my childhood, the earlier sensations of horror have since faded. In fact, most of the special effects seem downright cheesy by today's standards. But in spite of exponential advances in technology, I think that AYAOTD was truly great for three other reasons. First, young audiences at the time could feel a certain kindred with the protagonists of the stories; as fellow youths, they (we) followed the drama and the horror with almost vicarious interest. Second, each episode possessed some sort of unforseeable twist that gave audiences something to think about at the conclusion of the show. I think the prime example of this sort of plot element can be found in the episode "The Tale of the Dream Girl;" hopefully not spoiling too much, the ending of that episode was the main inspiration for M. Night Shyamalan's blockbuster The Sixth Sense. And finally, AYAOTD was (and is) unparalleled in the entertainment world for its incorporation of morals and ethical values into the plot of each episode. Entertainment today isn't as deep as it was way back then, and in my opinion these new generations of youths are missing out.

Truthfully, I don't know if I could suggest AYAOTD to my current blog audiences. In my opinion, it was a show whose glory lay chiefly in the nineties; watching it in today's era of advanced special effects may dilute some of its greatness. It may also be a tad too juvenile for us mature high school types, now that I think about it. But if you were able to catch it in the last decade, I'm sure you can relate to my point of view. And to all that weren't, it's a real shame...