Remember that one day when you could wake up without an alarm? When you would get your favorite bowl of cereal and sit between the hours of 8 and 12? This is a blog dedicated to the greatest time of our childhood: Saturday mornings. The television programs you watched, the memories attached to them, and maybe introducing you to something you didn't realize existed. Updated every weekend.
Jok Church once had a job
answering George Lucas’ fan
mail at Lucasfilm. While there, he
became enamored with the way children bravely asked anything at all in their
letters. This inspired him to develop an idea for a comic strip and educational
television series called “Here’s How”, starring C-3PO teaching a foreign
language and R2-D2
explaining the physical world. He eventually abandoned the idea, but soon
returned to it with an original character and in the comic strip You Can with
Beakman.
U Can With Beakman and Jax comic strip by Jok Church.
The strip featured
the character Beakman Place (named after the street in New York City), who had
spiky blue hair, a pocket full of tools, and a strong desire to learn. Like
Church, he wasn’t a scientist but was intrigued by the world at large and
wanted to know more about it. From the multitude of letters he would eventually
be sent (mostly from women and not all from children exclusively), Church would
select one that dealt with a topic that he himself would want to learn about.
From there, he would craft a text-heavy one panel strip on a Mac (and later in Adobe Illustrator,
making it the first computer-rendered comic strip) indirectly answering the
question through a simple experiment his readers could also perform.
Eventually, Beakman would be joined by his sister, Jax, and the strip became You
Can with Beakman and Jax for the remainder of its run.
Beakman’s World was presented like a live-action cartoon; both
so that children could have fun learning and to bridge the gap between them and
their parents. Unlike the strip, Beakman (Paul Zaloom) was an eccentric
scientist with tall hair and a green lab coat that lived in a cluttered, zany
lab full of the materials he’d need to conduct the experiments and
demonstrations to answer any of the thousands of letters the production would
receive from viewers. Left out of the show, much to Church’s regret, was
Beakman’s sister Jax in order to simplify the show with a single host; however,
one episode did feature his mother, Beakmom (Jean Stapleton), and brother,
Meekman (Zaloom).
The lab assistants: Alanna Ubach, Eliza Schneider and Senta Moses.
Instead, Beakman had
two constant assistants that would help in his experiments as well as act as
the audience surrogates to ask further questions on their behalf. The first was
a female lab assistant, who would usually read off the viewer letters to
Beakman. There were three during the show’s run. The first was Josie, played by
Alanna Ubach until she left to pursue her movie career. The second was Liza,
played by Eliza Schneider for two seasons. She would leave to perform the
one-woman show USA 911, then beginning a voice over career. The third
was Phoebe, played by Senta Moses. Each assistant had a colorful wardrobe and
an equally colorful personality.
Mark Ritts as Lester the rat.
The second, begrudgingly, was Lester (Mark Ritts), a slovenly man in a
giant rat suit. His dimwitted nature often made him the perfect target to segue
into a demonstration; most often the “Beakman Challenge”, where Beakman would
try to get him to perform a deceptively simple feat using science. There were
two running jokes about Lester: he was either an actor whose lousy agent got
him a bad gig, or being in a rat suit was a lifestyle choice. In the pilot
episode, Lester was portrayed by a puppet.
Beakman behind the Boguscope as an image materializes on it.
Incidentally, there was technically a third assistant. The unseen
cameraman known only as “Ray” would often hand Beakman various items from
off-camera. This was played by prop-master Ron Jancula’s hands. Additionally, Ray
was said to be operating the camera as well as various other systems around the
set, and would also send in a “viewing screen” known as the Boguscope. It would
display simple computer-generated animations to help illustrate what was being
explained to the audience.
Don and Herb at the South Pole watching Beakman's World.
Each episode usually began and ended with two puppet penguins Don (Bert
Berdis, operated by Steve
Sherman) and Herb (Alan Barzman, operated by Ritts), named after the
legendary Mr. Wizard (aka Don Herbert), tuning in to
the show in the South Pole. The TV would explode, leading to Beakman in his lab
where would lay down a fast fact before the title sequence. For the closing,
the penguins would deliver an intentionally bad joke related to the episode
before turning the TV off and cutting to the credits. The penguin duo would
also sometimes appear during segments or between commercial breaks.
Professor I.M. Boring.
Besides
Beakman, Zaloom play multiple characters. His two recurring ones were slovenly
fry cook Art Burn and Professor I.M. Boring. Burn’s segments took place in the
kitchen area of the set and saw Lester ordering the materials needed for the
experiment from a menu, which were then rudely handed to him by the female
assistant dressed as a waitress. Boring appeared in black and white segments
reminiscent of boring old educational film reels to deliver a definition related to a topic being explained.
Other times, Zaloom would appear as a famous scientist or historical figure
(treated as a separate individual, but a recurring gag had Lester aware that it
was just Beakman). Ritts also occasionally appeared outside of his rat suit as
other minor characters, such as a sportscaster.
Beakman with Captain Disillusion.
Although
the series wrapped in 1997, the comic strip that inspired it continued until
July 17, 2016; ending three days after its 25th anniversary and
three months following
the death of Church from a heart attack. Zaloom maintains the rights to use
the Beakman character to perform at live events for children and continues to
do so around the world in a show called Beakman Live! There was also a traveling exhibit called Beakman’s World On Tour started in 1998
that visited science halls across America. In 2016, Zaloom appeared as Beakman on an episode of the viral
video debunking web series Captain Disillusion,
which was filmed and acted in a style similar to an episode of Beakman’s
World.
In
1997, Columbia released a VHS collection called The
Best of Beakman’s World, which was later re-released onto
DVD in 2004 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and again
in 2016 by Mill Creek Entertainment.
The complete series was made available to stream on Netflix until 2014. In 2016 it became part
of MeTV’s Sunday morning line-up preceding Bill
Nye for the next few years, and was later made available to stream on Tubi.
EPISODE GUIDE (as there were no story plots, there are no episode descriptions):
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