Wonder Showzen Season One
MTV Home Entertainment
The Verdict: This taboo-filled children’s program, which isn’t for children, brings some of the most hilarity-ensuing material to the MTV crowd since Beavis and Butthead.
3 of 4 stars
“Wonder Showzen” is MTV2’s twisted answer to the “Children’s Television Workshop;” “Sesame Street” on some form of hard narcotic.
It’s a kid’s show re-imagined for cynical adults. “Wonder Showzen” is sponsored by Mexico and White People. Episodes have harmless titles like “Health,” “Space” and “Diversity,” but they contain everything from homosexual lust between a number and a letter to animated Vietnam veterans robbing a liquor store.
Kids now say the darnedest things about drunken fathers and genocide. Puppets, like self-appointed emcee Chauncey, a mean orange furball with a tiny black top hat and tie, now engage in every form of anti-social behavior from racism to a shower strike.
In one astoundingly sacrilegious cartoon, a walking-talking Bible gets drunk, shoots up, has sex with the Quran and convinces Jesus to step off the cross for some beer and break dancing. No golden cow is too sacred for this show to tip.
Not that the creators of “Wonder Showzen” didn’t warn you. A disclaimer introduces each episode cautioning viewers that the offensive, “despicable” content of the program may prove “soul crushing to the weak of spirit.” Funny, too.
Several side-splitting storylines find the letter N emerging from rehab, Mother Nature selling her powers for the cash she needs to get a sex change and Chauncey playing “Rock, Paper, Scissors” with God for the fate of the earth. Fractured lessons are learned, too, about the danger of imagination and that pretending something hard enough, even religious devotion, can lead to surreptitious belief.
There are several great recurring bits like “Beat Kids,” which features roving kid reporters asking tough questions to people on the street. One boy dresses up as Hitler and wonders, “What’s wrong with the youth of today?” A girl asks random pedestrians on Wall Street, “Who have you exploited today?”
Perhaps best of all are the similar segments starring Clarence, a blue hand puppet with a lot of questions and very bad manners. Clarence turns annoyance into an art form, violating interviewees’ personal space, asking Harlem residents what riles them up before doing so himself and bellowing at joggers in Central Park, “What are you running from?!” Over the course of the season, Clarence is slapped, punched, thrown on the ground, has his arm broken and gets threatened with police action, all for the sake of some big rude laughs.
The show also squeezes dark humor from political targets like American imperialism and overblown news coverage. The lack of televised controversy following the murder of a beetle causes huge controversy over why there was no controversy. One cartoon features a pair of globe-trotting California plastic surgeons who make over the starving poor of Third World countries and “put a pretty face on global disaster.” And when the puppets discover a “chalice of pure liquid imagination,” Chauncey says, “You know how much the corrupt U.S. Army would pay for something like this?”
At times, “Wonder Showzen” revels too long in the disgusting and disturbing. If you’ve seen one exploding sheep’s brain, you’ve basically seen them all. Also, the season ender “Patience” is an idea funnier on paper than in execution. The episode plays straightforwardly until the midpoint then simply plays in reverse for the remainder of the running time. You respect the makers of the show for their conviction, but the end product is still more irritating than funny.
The new two-disc DVD set of “Wonder Showzen” contains all eight episodes from season one, as well as four audio commentaries of varying irrelevance.
One has comedian Dick Gregory ranting about everything but the show, from race relations to nutrition to horse manure. Another has Stephen Hawking (an impersonated voice, one hopes) performing an awful stand-up routine and another is just 20 minutes of queasy, psychedelic rock.
Extras include additional footage from the “Beat Kids” and Clarence, a preview cartoon from season two, promos, outtakes, audition tapes from the kids and a music video perhaps best enjoyed under the influence of a controlled substance.
The packaging reinforces the guilty fun, with deceptively bright, upbeat color palettes, a full-sized parody of the famous “Hang in There” poster, and box cover art with a real tuft of fuzzy black hair that sets up one sublimely dirty joke.
“Wonder Showzen” isn’t for everyone, but it’s a subversive joy for kids of the original PBS generation who are grown up and take their humor coal black.