Trivia / Clarissa Explains It All

• Actor-Inspired Element: During her audition for the show, creator Mitchell Kriegman asked Melissa Joan Hart whether she liked New Kids on the Block. She responded that she hated them and preferred quirky alt rock bands like They Might Be Giants instead, and Kriegman decided to utilize several of Hart's own personal tastes to inform the character.
• Dueling Dubs: The series was dubbed into Italian twice. The first aired on Junior TV in the early '90s, while the second ran on RAI's RaiSat subsidiary towards the end of the decade.
• Dueling Shows: Both this show and Blossom have often been compared. Both shows began in 1991, and both shows had a young teenage actress in the lead role.
• Edited for Syndication: After the first season's initial broadcast, its opening was replaced with the second season's for all subsequent releases.
• Fake American: Though the show is set in America, Janet Darling is played by Canadian-born Elizabeth Hess.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • The first season got a DVD release and is even popular enough that 7 episodes of it are on PlayStation Network's Playstation Store. Though 35 episodes from the first four seasons did appear on iTunes, no DVD set was ever released for the fifth season.
  • This Is What "Na-Na" Means, credited to Clarissa and the Straightjackets, was a 1994 tie-in album with the premise of Clarissa Darling fronting a teenage garage band, and featured a mix of original Alternative Rock style Image Songs for Clarissa sung by Melissa Joan Hart and short skits (presented as phone calls to the listener and/or Studio Chatter between Clarissa and her fictional bandmates). It was released on CD and cassette but never reached streaming outside of a fan upload to youtube.
• Late Export for You: The show didn't reach Japan until 1998, when it aired on Nickelodeon.
• Missing Episode: The second season episodes "Sam in Love" and "Total TV" are missing from Paramount+.
• The Other Marty: In the original pilot, Marshall & Janet Darling were respectively played by Terry Layman and Nancy Youngblut^note who would later appear as guidance counselor Mrs. Cheesebrow, while Sam was played by Daren E. Higgins. For the series, the roles were respectively recast with Joe O'Connor, Elizabeth Hess and Sean O'Neil.
• Recycled Set: The show was recorded on the same set as Gullah Gullah Island.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In 1995, a spin-off called Clarissa Now was pitched to CBS. It would have shown Clarissa as a college student in New York, working as an intern for a newspaper. A pilot was filmed and later aired, but it was never picked up by the network.
  • Interestingly, that was almost the exact same career path that Melissa Joan Hart's next character, Sabrina, did follow after high school. This has led to more than a few people joking that they didn't know it was two separate shows, and just assumed that Clarissa woke up and discovered she was a witch.
  • Nickelodeon announced a reboot of the series in 2018 with Hart reprising her role as the title character, but the project was scrapped before production began.

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