Hey there, all you crazy cats and critters
out there, and welcome to our review of TV (that's television for those of you who
were born after the year 2010) in 1992, which is a long time ago in a galaxy far away.
Hey, I'm Michael. Hey, I'm Carson Daly. I mean, I'm Rameen. I'm Molly. I'm Erica. Johnny Carson
hosted The Tonight Show for the last time in 1992, which also meant that Jay Leno debuted as
the host in '92. Johnny Carson's last show, I was watching a clip from it recently, because
he had Bette Midler, and she sang "One for my baby and one more for the road," and Johnny was crying,
and it was really cute. Isn't Johnny Carson's last show what they were making fun of on The Simpsons
when they did Krusty the clown, they did his, like, final show, and they had, like, him singing
"Send In the Clowns" and stuff, and, like, crying? Also in 1992 were the first MTV Movie
Awards. It's not just music anymore. It's the beginning of the end. Also '92: Snick debuted on
Nickelodeon.
Woohoo, big orange couch! I remember that. We're going to take one night that's not
going to be Nick at Nite. It was Saturday night, so all you kids that didn't have anything better
to do than watch TV on a Saturday night could watch Are You Afraid of the Dark and get your
pants scared off you. On an episode of SNL in '92 Sinead O'Connor ripped up a picture of Pope
John Paul II. And by a picture of Pope John Paul II, you mean her career. She talked about that,
actually, and she said that s
he didn't ruin her career, she made it so the record execs couldn't
get another yacht. Her career was really fine, she just wasn't a huge millionaire after that.
What a badass thing to say. And she was right, so... Please, in no way, shape, or form do I
disagree with what she did. I'm not saying that at all. It's crazy how controversial that moment
was, because I feel like if somebody did something like that today people would just roll their
eyes. Are You Afraid of the Dark is a 10 out of
10 for me. I loved scary stories and mysteries
when I was a kid, and this consistently delivered. I was 10 years old in 1992, so as often as I
could stay up until 9:30 or 10: p.m. I would. I didn't watch Are You Afraid of the Dark at all
because I have never been into horror, but I think it's super commendable, given all the secondhand
accounts I've heard, that they were able to make a kids' show scary but stay within the, for this
time, very harsh boundaries of censorship. Anybody can make
a gore porn scary movie- can I say porn
on YouTube? I don't know, but anyone can make a gory movie super scary with just blood and guts.
That's easy. There's no limitations. But, like, I feel like in a kids format it's hard. And if you
think about the R.L. Stein novels, it was a way of storytelling that kept the gore and some of the
adult themes out of it, but still brought in the the mystery and, you know, ghost stories, things
like that. Those translate well for children. That was a lot
of it, but it did also introduce some
difficult things, like how do you deal with the death of a child? And how do you talk about why
his ghost came back and haunted his big brother? I feel like Michael's on Are You Afraid of the Dark
right now. Yeah. He's about to submit something for the Midnight Society and, like, throw the
sand on the ashes. Not the best light in here. I loved Are You Afraid of the Dark. I always found
the horror genre sort of tantalizing and, even though I knew that it
was not for me, but, like,
I thought it was cool. Like, cool people were into it, so I wanted to be into it. Actually, what
haunts me like to this day from Are You Afraid of the Dark was, like, the opening credits. Do
you guys remember? Oh, yeah. It's the playground, and there's the swing set with the one swing
that's moving back and forth with that creaking sound and the other one is still. I like cannot
walk by a playground at night without thinking of that. Lots of people have a moment
like that. For
my sister it was when the hand comes up with the match and then it gets blown out at the end. Those
kids, they would go into the woods and, like, sit around a campfire and tell these stories. And I
was always like, are you just going into the woods at night without a grownup? I thought that was,
like, way cool. Though I was too old for Barney, my mom didn't think I was. And when I was waiting
for the bus in the morning while my mom, like, wasn't completely awake yet, she'd tu
rn on Barney,
and I'd be listening to, like, "I love you" and so on, or "clean up, clean up." I was wondering
if somebody was gonna sing the song. Thank you, Michael. I was really looking forward to that. I
was definitely the target demographic for this, because I was four in '92. I loved Barney.
I remember distinctly the point at which, in my grade school years, I realized Barney was no
longer cool to like, cuz all the other kids would, like, sing, you know, mean made up versions of the
s
ongs with, like, horrible lyrics. And I realized, like, "oh, I'm not allowed to like this anymore.
Okay." But Barney is good kids TV. I think it's the best version of Batman aside from the comics.
I love the noir art direction of the show. I love the voice talent: Kevin Conroy is the perfect
Batman. Having Mark Hamill as Joker is incredible. And it also had some really excellent writing,
including things like they invented Harley Quinn for the TV show. Mr. Freeze was a comic villain
before
this, but they really fleshed out his character on the animated series, and I think
that episode won an Emmy. That's often held up as one of the better examples of voice acting in
all of animation as well, because you talked about Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy and some of the
others. Having not been a Batman girl myself, I didn't watch it. And that's one of the ones,
I think, on my list that I would go back and watch the whole thing now. I am also not a Batman
girl, and I didn't really watch
this regularly, but whenever I watched it, I remembered enjoying
it. I agree completely on everything you said, especially the art direction. It's hard to think
of many other animated series at the time that got this dark aesthetic right without going too far.
And that is another one of my things I love about this version of Batman: I think Batman can either
be, like, hyper-camp right or hyper dark. Like, it's either the Dark Knight or the 1960s show.
This one, I thought, struck a good bal
ance. It was not campy. Like, you you couldn't really call this
show campy, at least that I remember. It had its moments, but usually those moments would then turn
dark again. One reason I've always disliked Batman is I don't find his character relatable at all,
and this is one of the only versions of Batman that I do find relatable. I'm kind of tempted to
light all these candles behind me and make it look like I'm in a Contrapoints video. ...Which I never
really watched a lot of, but I alw
ays thought it was a ripoff of Bill Nye. But no, Bill Nye came
later. Somebody was dressed like a rat... I can't remember much about it, though. And he had weird
hair. I feel like it was weirder than Bill Nye. Like, Bill Nye was, like, whimsical. But, like,
Beakman's World was, like, bizarre. Zany. Oh yeah, I remember this. Yeah. I never watched this, but
I remember seeing it and thinking "that looks a little strange." That was kind of kids TV of the
time period, right? The precedent was se
t by some of the Nickelodeon shows like You Can't Do That on
Television. Going into the '90s it just got weird, and, like Michael said, zany. If I turn the light
on my computer all the way up I get more light on myself. Yeah, and your glasses are glowing. Yeah.
I loved Lamb Chop when I was growing up. That woman was talented, first of all. People don't
appreciate puppets anymore. But I loved this show. I thought it was amazing, all the things she could
do. And the characters were charming.
But when I rewatch it - and I don't very often, but when I
do, it's a little creepy. And maybe it's just the fact that it's puppets. Maybe when I say "people
don't like puppets anymore," I'm the problem. Are we gonna talk about the song? Don't start it!
Because then it won't end! This is the song that never ends, yes it goes on... Well, there goes
Rameen for the rest of the night. But yeah, I know Shari was super talented. I loved her. And you
were saying the characters: Lamb Chop, obviousl
y, but Hush Puppy and Charlie Horse were great. It
did feel like a show that had been around forever, sort of like "The Song That Never Ends." Like,
it's just, like, this eternal loop, forever. ...Which starred Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt. I
remember it's a show that my mom watched, but I don't remember a whole lot about it. But I do
remember there was a big deal about one particular episode, several years into its runtime, where it
was an entire single take episode. It's after the two of th
em had had a baby, and they were making
the baby sleep through the night without going to get it. And so they were just, like, sitting
outside the baby's door, um, the closed door while it, while the baby was crying, and they were just,
like, feeling really bad, but, like, no, we got to let him cry himself to sleep. So, like, you're
saying it was, like, the first, like, gimmick episode of a sitcom, basically? Probably not.
Or it was just the way they filmed it for, like, art reasons? Other
gimmicks like that I'm sure had
been done before. I don't know about that specific gimmick. Yeah, I do remember it as being, like, a
show that my parents watched, and the Helen Hunt of it all. Like, remember when Helen Hunt was
a huge star? Like, what happened to Helen Hunt? Talk about the beginning of the end. It was, like,
the first unscripted reality television show, like, of, like, we're going to put people in a
house and film them. I can't think of anybody having ever done that before.
There wasn't even,
like, a prize or anything. It was just, like, we're just going to, like, bring these people
from disparate walks of life together. And it was great television. I, you know, I would still
watch The Real World today, if they started a new one. Although, I don't know, maybe it would be
trashy nowadays. Like, the Jersey Shore of it all. And I'm also wondering, if I went back and watched
these older seasons, if I would feel the way about them now that I did when I was a teen.
Weren't
the early Real Worlds, like, less, quote unquote, "trashy," to use Molly's word? I think it's
always going to be a little trashy. Like, I seem to remember there was more, like, serious
discussion around things like the AIDS crisis, for instance, in the first couple seasons. There
was a character, was it the first season or the second season? Or, not a character, a person. An
actual person who was HIV positive. And that was, like, kind of radical for the time. Most of the
Real Worl
ds I watched were the later seasons, because I was four, and nobody was going to let
me watch this. I just remember, whenever I would watch it, all these moments when they would be
like, "so and so is about to sleep with such and such." And then the camera would, like, follow
them into their bedroom, and you were expecting this, like, steamy, not-for-TV thing, and all it
was was, like, the covers sometimes coming up, maybe a little smooching. Like, it was, it was so
tame. It was television,
after all. They couldn't just, like, show actual people doing it. It was
filmed in this, like, documentary style. Like, I think the difference between The Real World
and, like, similar shows today is that nowadays you have a lot more of, like, even though it's
technically unscripted, you have a lot more of, like, producers going in and, like, manipulating
people and shaping the arc of a story. Whereas, back then, they were, they were literally just,
like, putting the camera on people. I me
an, I think there was some manipulation, but, like,
it was not like is now, where it's almost, they're almost feeding them lines. A very important part
of the Snick line up, because we talked about Snick premiering in this time. The reason I always
stand up for Roundhouse is because it was just truly a brilliant show, and it's one that almost
nobody has heard of: even people who religiously watched Snick or Nickelodeon in general. It was
a sketch comedy show. It premiered in 1992 on my birt
hday. All of the cast were, like, these
big quadruple hits: every single one of them could dance, act, sing. Some of them were playing
instruments: they had a band that was on stage. And what they would do is stage it around the sort
of microcosm of the modern nuclear family: they had a guy who regularly played the dad, and the
mom. And then they created these sketch moments of just brilliant comedy. Like, the acting was
fantastic, the dance choreography was wonderful, the music was always
thrilling, and they had a
really good band playing with them, and it just had a theme and a lot of elements to it that were
very edgy but funny. They had a lot of audience participation. You're not alone, I remember
Roundhouse. It was probably only on for a couple of seasons, right? Because- Three years. The mass
market audience was not ready for show like that. And I think it was later replaced in the Snick
lineup with All That. Do you guys remember All That? I was going to ask, how was it
like All
That? Yeah. And Kenan and Kel. But before that it was Roundhouse, and it was much artier. Like,
All That was much funnier, and Roundhouse was much artier. The earliest lineups for Snick were
really geared more toward teenagers, and that's where Roundhouse fit in really well, because
you get into, like, All That, and Kenan and Kel were stepping down into pre-teens and older
kids. And they were great, they were wonderful, but Roundhouse and, like, Ren and Stimpy -
like, really earl
y Ren and Stimpy - was all very raunchy. You had Are You Afraid of the Dark. That
was definitely for, like, teenagers, pre-teens at best. And Roundhouse fit in into that paradigm.
Now, I'm a little older for the sort of Snick generation, but I was 10 at the time, and I just
found it to be very artistic and forward-thinking, and just very, very fun. But also a better idea
of kind of how I wanted my teenage years to look. Sailor Moon is a pivotal part of my childhood,
adulthood, and inevitabl
e elderly years. Sailor Moon was huge in bringing anime to the US. If you
had to name two anime that made anime in the West a thing, it's DBZ (Dragon Ball Z), and it's Sailor
Moon. And I loved, and still love Sailor Moon, because it is a series started by a woman for
women. I love Sailor Moon because all of the the most important characters are female. The only
time men quote unquote "save" the women, they are often called out for being mostly useless.
And, most importantly, Sailor Moon and
her friends gain their power from their femininity.
What is it they use to transform? Makeup kits, and putting their nails on. What is it that they
gain their power from? Twirling around a lot for no apparent reason. And that's the point. I also
love that Sailor Moon didn't shy away from some tough topics. I mean, there is no special Sailor
Moon episode about caffeine pills or, you know, sex education or what have you, but there are many
episodes about typical like teen angst things, like,
you know, not being able to make friends,
or being picked on for being a nerd, or being picked on for being a tomboy. I love that all the
characters do not feel- and this is, really makes it, this makes it unique among animated shows-
the characters don't feel like caricatures or flat characters. They are all really well-developed
characters. Sailor Jupiter is a tomboy who's tall, but she also likes to cook and clean. Sailor Mars
is a Shinto Priestess but also a huge [ __ ], and is, like,
not shy about what a [ __ ] she is, and
would probably tell you that herself. I was also a big fan of Sailor Moon when it started airing
in the US. I think what I loved was how the lead, Sailor Moon, what was the, like, when she wasn't
Sailor Moon, like, what was her name? Serena. Serena, that's right, was, like, so relatable.
She was, like, so normal, right? She was, like, boy-obsessed. Couldn't wake up in the morning to
get to school on time. You know, was constantly, like, late, was a me
ss, her room was always a
mess. Like, she was always, like, struggling. And I loved that about her, because it was, like,
she was on The Struggle Bus, but she was also, like, a freaking superhero. And Rameen and I
have talked about this before in a completely unrelated video about how, yeah, there's the big
bad of every season that they have to deal with, but also, one of the main arcs of every season is
that she has to get her [ __ ] together. And she does by the end of the season. And the
n, like,
there's usually some sort of mind wipe and they start all over again. Rameen was talking about
the heavy things: at the end of that first season it gets really heavy, and I don't want to spoil it
for anyone who hasn't seen it. Missed opportunity: I should have worn it today, my "but you didn't
do anything" t-shirt. When people thought of the anime, at first they thought of, like, Dragon
Ball Z, right? Or Gundam, or, like, all these, in Japan they're literally called Shonen anime,
which means boy anime, anime for boys. But Sailor Moon did, I think, also did a great job of,
like, straddling that gender line, because I knew people of every gender expression who liked
Sailor Moon. Now, it was more popular with, you know, women and queer people, but I still knew
plenty of straight guys who liked Sailor Moon. It was the one show that I rushed home from school
so that I could watch. I loved X-Men so much, it even got me into collecting comics for a very
brief amount of tim
e, but all X-men comics. I both had a crush on and wanted to be Gambit. But I also
want to talk about how this show was surprisingly adult for a kid's cartoon show. In the very first
episode one of the heroes dies. Permanently. Does not come back. This show doesn't hide how it's
a metaphor for civil rights. It's, like, a very, very thinly veiled metaphor for civil rights, the
whole show. And how politicians get involved in that, and it's all self-serving. And how it messes
with people's liv
es in ways that it shouldn't, just because of other people's prejudice. I have
a story, and I don't know if you want to include it in the video, but I've held this story within
my breast for many a moon, and it's time that the world knows about my friend Brian. So when I was
a kid, like, all children were into X-Men, pretty much. Brian and I were among those children.
And Brian had a really fascinating talent for stretching the truth just enough that it still
seemed like it could be true. A
nd Brian and I, when we would play X-Men, he would just take these
kind of adult romantic story lines and, like, step by step take it too far, to the point where
finally I was like, "I don't know..." Because, you know, one of the big themes in the show was
the love triangle between Wolverine and Jean and Cyclops. Brian, when he and I would play, he would
be pretending he was Cyclops. And he's like, "yes, I am going to..." Look at me, like, voicing Brian
at age eight like he's freaking Chris
tian Bale. "I am going to take Jean with me, and we are going to
kiss, and then Wolverine will get mad, and then we will start to take our clothes off." And, like,
it would be at this point, like, yeah that face. It would be at this point where I would be, like,
"did they do that?" And I think, in some tiny part of my, like, second grade brain, I knew that Brian
and I were not the same, but I couldn't verbalize why it was that Brian was so into the idea of
Jean Gray's boobs, and I... I was
not. I guess I'll just echo that I also loved X-Men because
of the way it felt so adult, and it felt like it didn't talk down to you. I felt like, when I was
watching the X-Men, even though it was a animated cartoon that was marketed toward children, and I
was a child, it felt like I was watching a very sophisticated, adult, almost soap opera, right?
And I was so into it, and how dark it would get. Like the Phoenix Saga. Like, I remember, like,
when the Phoenix Saga was happening, like, tha
t was, like, unmissable television. Like, I
have to get home to see the stunning, thrilling conclusion of the Phoenix Saga. What Rameen was
saying about his friend being obsessed with Jean, I was with you with that. But I was also strangely
obsessed with Emma Frost and Psylocke... but for, like, different reasons. For, like, the, like,
diva-worship reasons. All I have to say is, Brian, wherever you are, I hope you're happy, and happily
married to a woman who looks just like Jean Gray. What
is CBS Sunday movie? I've pre-loaded that
one. There was a movie that they played on CBS every Sunday in the evening, and this particular
year, one of the movies was really popular and pushed it into the top 10 Nielsen ratings for
the year. My parents like to inform me that, before Blockbuster and movie rentals, if you
wanted to watch a movie that wasn't in the theaters, you had to wait for somebody to air it
on television. Now, Full House premiered in, what, 1990? You know what, I already
called everyone's
attention to it, so I might as well guess it. Full House. Full House was number 10. Oh wow,
really? I was expecting better. Okay. Erica. Home Improvement. Home Improvement was number three.
Erica gets eight points. Molly. Rosanne. Rosanne. Rosanna Rosanna Dana. Was number two. Molly gets
nine points. You took my [ __ ] guess. Um. Great. I seem to remember this being popular in previous
years: 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes? Number one. Rameen got it. Nice. Don't call it a comeback
! Number
one was a news program? Uh huh. Can you imagine in 2024? The power of grandparents. Erica, what
you think? Rescue 911. Rescue 911 was not one of the top 10. Erica's first error. Molly. Got to be
Cheers. Cheers was the other number eight. Three points for Molly. What you think, Rameen? How
about some Monday Night Football? Monday Night Football? It's number seven. Rameen gets four
points. Erica. Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Fresh Prince was not one of the top. Molly. I'm gonna
go with.
.. okay, there's two I'm trying to decide between. They're both contenders. They're both
very much, like, shows my mom watched. Uh, yeah, I'm going to let's go with Murphy Brown. Murphy
Brown was number four. Seven points for Molly. Take that, Dan Quail! That was going to be my
guess. Um, Murder She Wrote. Murder She Wrote was number five. Wow. Okay. Damn. Erica. That was
going to be my next one. Can you pick the last one? Coach. That's it! What I would have guessed.
Yeah, cuz Michael would
n't have included it if it weren't in the top 10. Right. It's also been on
the top 10 in, like, the last few times we've done this. Yeah. And almost all of the ones that are
left are new shows from this year or children's TV. Yeah. Right. None of the children's shows
are gonna be... Yeah. Okay, so any thoughts about TV in '92? Very 1992. One of the things that
I was noticing when I was going through is, like, I didn't recognize basically anything that was
not a children's show. And stuff fr
om years before this I still recognized, even if I didn't watch
it. It seems like this was just a big year for children's television, because I didn't recognize
as many children's shows from previous years. Oh, there's my cat. Yep. Posing perfectly.
He's been meowing at me. He wants to play, I think. And I will recede into the darkness.
Thanks, everybody, for watching! Give this video a like if you liked it. Give it a pity like if you
didn't like it. If you wanted to drop any trivia, or any
thing that you wanted to say about any of
these shows, or any other shows from 1992 that I didn't write down because I didn't know what they
were, write it in the comments below. We'd love to chat with you about that, or read what you have to
say. To this side is a video that YouTube thinks you might like, so check that out. Up there in the
corner is the link to our Channel where you can subscribe to us. We put out usually once a week
videos about media. Mostly video games and music, but oc
casionally other videos like this, like TV.
And that's about it! Maintain your groovy selves!
Comments