Wonder Showzen - Season 1
Every episode of the delightfully subversive kids' show parody,Wonder Showzenbegins with a garish warning banner that reads in part, "If you allow a child to view this, you are a bad parent or guardian." They're not kidding. The sentiment is bolstered when the words to the theme song ends with the lyric, "change the channel for kids." That said, this may be the most bizarrely hilarious kids show an adult has ever watched. Patterned after the Sesame Street model of puppet characters interacting with real kids, it's rude, offensive, terribly distasteful, and savagely funny. MTV2 bravely aired this first season in 2005, and even ordered up more for at least one more season. The main puppet, Chauncey, has his hands full with the precocious children who berate and sometimes just plain beat him for the fun of it. Other crudely made (and crudely voiced) puppets include a recently out of re-hab Letter N, a disgusting worm, and a multi-eyed newscaster who frequently breaks in with shocking news bulletins. One episode features a Jewish J and Arabic 8, whose forbidden love is shown in all its pornographic puppet glory. The show is also interspersed with old archival footage, some of it funny, some of it repulsive, usually in a segment called "Funny, Not Funny" in which kids call out their personal judgment of images such as happy clowns juxtaposed with documentary footage from a '50s-era slaughterhouse. Another distressingly humorous segment is "Beat Kids!", in which real kids are sent out on the streets of New York to ask wildly age-inappropriate questions of passersby (one cute little girl on Wall Street coyly inquires, "Who did you exploit today?"). But remember, this show is not for kids, only adults who have a lot of childhood repression to exhume through tears of gross-out laughter.--Ted Fry