Part science class, part performance art. Much like Beakman's World, which bowed a year or so earlier, Bill Nye the Science Guy taught & entertained at the same time, with the entertainment in the form of song parodies and skits.
Comic Ross Shafer, who had the dubious task of hosting a poorly received 1990 revival of Match Game, created the series for his friend Nye, who's back in the news this week speaking out against Biblical Creationism. I will reserve commentary on that for another time, but let's look back at when Nye first achieved celebrity status.
Prior to landing his own show, Nye had contributed to the animated Back to the Future, appearing in skits with Christopher Lloyd. Bill Nye the Science Guy was an odd duck in that though the series was produced by Disney, it was airing primarily on PBS before going into general syndication and more direct competition, depending on the market, with the similarly themed Beakman.
Following is the intro:
Rating: A.
1 comment:
@Hobbyfan: I actually did not know(until now), that Ross Shafer created this series...
It makes sense though, as Ross hosted a local Seattle area version of Saturday Night Live on our NBC affiliate in the mid 1980s called Almost Live, and some of Bill Nye's earliest TV appearances came on said program.
Ross was also the late afternoon DJ on KJR AM locally, during it's last years of playing music; as far as Almost Live, they still run reruns of the show on KING TV(Seattle's NBC affiliate)'s streaming app... it's on weeknights at 8:00 PM Seattle time as I recall.
Brief trivia as well: for a time, Almost Live was on Saturday nights at 11:30, and as a result, pushed Saturday Night Live to Midnight(SNL might have been on at 12:35 AM in those days, but i'm not 100 percent on that); it later moved to Sundays, and post Ross Shafer, ended up getting in some hot water for an April Fools prank involving a report about the Space Needle falling down.
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