You Know That Show / Live-Action TV

You Know That Show — Live-Action Tv

The purpose of this page is to allow contributors to post descriptions of half-forgotten shows, those old classics that sit on the edge of the mind, with details and images remembered but names tantalizingly forgotten. Whether to gather trope examples or just for peace of mind, post them here. Be warned that, due to necessity, all entries may contain spoilers.

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Awaiting suggestions

• A show where a group of kids go to an empty lot that is surrounded by a wood fence and enter through a large wooden gate. Apparently the lot is magic or something because inside they have a random series of adventures in unusual locals that teach them valuable lessons. For example; a girl is given what is perhaps the straightest instance of the Knights and Knaves trope ever seen in order to get where she is going. I remember one episode, or series of episodes, where some guys were going to build on their lot unknowingly about to destroy something unique because apparently the "magic" only works for the kids. Though I do remember one episode ending with a stinger where some guy looks through a hole in the walll an sees some really strange, messed up stuff. This show may have been regarded as "edutainment.' I'm not certain about this however.
• A show about a teenage girl, her younger brother, and their mad scientist uncle. I think the title had something to do with stars. It ran between 6 and 7 on Nickleodeon in the UK, in the same hour as Mirror Mirror, probably around 1996-1998.
• I'm not entirely sure if this is live action. I'm trying to figure out where this clip is from. It's a face that's spinning while being flushed down the toilet. I thought that it was from Dinosaurs, but I watched the episode "When Nature Calls", which I thought it was from, and it wasn't in there.
• This...I haven't found anything resembling it, so here goes. I think it was a children's show, and I'm not sure if it was Swedish, but it was at least shown on Swedish television. The only scene I remember is when a man in a painter's coat has a model sitting behind a canvas, and paints, using a roller, a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa. Thoughts?
• This was a CBS Saturday Special or whatever they called it back in the 70s. This little kid (mabye just moved to New York, possibly Brooklyn, or maybe New Jersey) is deaf and doesn't have any friends. He starts hanging out with a "tougher" kid, Nick, who is always saying, IIRC, "Krupka the Magnificent!" and then jumping off of things. They go to a dump and Nick jumps off something and gets hurt; the deaf kid runs back to town and finds this hippie dude with a guitar. The kid is making noises like "Nike" and "Neek" and the hippie says, in a very exaggerated way, "Hey, are you alright?" He eventually gets the message and Nick gets help and at the end, Nick and the deaf kid are walking down the street, away from the deaf kid's mom, and the deaf kid is trying to say "Nick" and Nick says, "No, stupid, it's NICK" and the mom looks like she wants to say something, but she decides that everything's going to be OK.
• This has bugged me for decades. Might have been a dream. If it was real, it was a short student film from the early '70s that was shown on PBS. All I remember is a guy in a wheelchair wearing white clothes (sort of like scrubs or a hospital gown) and a white, tight-fitting cap like a swimming cap. He's pushing himself around in the outdoors and keeps getting into deadly situations. In one, he wheels into a construction zone and some machinery gets him and there's a shot of tiny droplets of blood spattering the ground. Then he wheels himself onto an airport runway and a plane is landing...and then you see a ball rolling down the runway (echoed later by the scene in Mad Max where Max's wife and baby get run over by bikers). Either this was real and someone had issues, or it was a dream and I'm the one with issues.
• This show that aired on Nickelodeon, stories were two parters and one which I recall was about a family whose mother dissapeared and it turned out the mother was a mermaid or some other sea creature?
• I remember seeing this sci-fi series as a small kid, so it must be from the 80s. The show featured a young boy who had adventures in space. The only thing I remember clearly is the title sequence, which showed how he had ended up in space: someone or something dislodged his room (but nothing else) from his parents' house, and the room was floating in space. So when he opened the door to his room, all he could see was stars! The series also had a cyborg bad guy who was bald and had a scary, glowing cyborg eye. The show was most likely British or American.
• This show has to be from the early to mid 1980s. I swear it was on Nickelodeon. All I can remember is these children (possibly young teens) being abducted by aliens and held prisoner. They break out with the help of different aliens on the ship and use the ship to get back to earth. The final shot - that has preyed on my mind for decades - is of them looking at earth from the control room and talking about how they don't know how long they've been gone because of relativity.
• One episode of some show. Can't remembered when it aired. One recurring thing in this episode is that a blond woman dreams of chasing someone. The music is building up to something, then the woman wakes up, and the music just stops. no slowing down, no Record Needle Scratch, the music just goes to an abrupt halt. This happens multiple times with the same dream throughout the episode.
• This was a scene that switched between an opera-like show and some woman. In the opera, there was a woman who stabbed a kid. Then and there, it cut to the random woman, who was now screaming with bloody hands. Cut back to the opera, and the actress has red ribbons for blood effects on her hands.
• There was a historical edutainment series (or maybe a one-off TV movie) shown on the Disney Channel in the late Eighties about a modern-day teenager who keeps going backwards and forwards in time. Only two parts stand out in my memory today: in one segment, set in 1900 or so, he drives around in a automobile that has a tiller instead of a steering wheel. In another, set in the early-to-mid 1800s, he rides on a primitive locomotive, then gets off somewhere, and somebody comments that he must be a blacksmith because his face and clothes are covered in soot.
• It was a disturbing British crime show with flashbacks to WW 2, where a group of soldiers who found a German soldier, castrated him and left him to bleed to death were being killed off in the 90s/00s because of secrets they had. That's all I can remember.
• Tokusatsu show: Aired in the 1970s in Latino America in Spanish. Title was (I think) "Esper" but that may have been made up for the dub. It's about a little boy who acts as a superhero with a spacesuit that flies to him when called. He battles evil invaders, unaware that his own parents are aliens themselves (but good ones.) One episode had a creature brought from Jupiter to fill Earth's atmosphere with some explosive gas. Anybody know the Japanese title?
• Really obscure one, I am afraid. A live action science-fiction show, British, had two episodes. Was really more educational than plot-driven. A bunch of scientists were doing genetic research in the future on a space station or spaceship. A journalist somehow got on board and tried to convince them what they were doing was wrong and immoral. The show really just consisted of these folks arguing with each other. They had a computer that could make simulations of people from the past, like Galileo or T.H. Huxley, who joined in the debates. In the end the computer takes over the whole station, and the camera pulled back to show the space station was deserted, and kept pulling back until we could see the TV studio, which was also deserted. This would have been about 1980.
  • Not familiar with it, but the story, region, and time period makes it sound like something Dennis Potter would have written.
  • A little bit of Googling throws up this article suggesting it may be The Scientists from September 1979. Sounds interesting, but I'm struggling to find any hint whether it was part of another strand, or anything further about it (indeed, IMDB denies knowledge of the characters, and Googling those names brings up only that article). It's not helped by being the same year as the original Life On Earth.
• A sketch comedy show, in English, but I don't remember which English-speaking country it is from. There were a series of sketches about Kermit the Frog, in which a girl would ask Kermit why he never stands up, and then she would try to pull up the Kermit puppet, and something funny would happen. One time she pulled the puppet off the puppeteer's arm, and the bare arm kept on talking and complaining that she had stolen his clothes. Another time she forced the puppeteer to stand up, and he was dressed like a giant Kermit. This would have been from the 70's, maybe the early 80's.
• It might be the same show as the one with the Kermit puppet immediately above, but I remember a long complicated sketch about a Rugby team that only had six players because they thought 13 was unlucky, so they kept losing, but then they get some "bionic pills" but these turn out in the end to be vet pills for a dog. This one and the one with Kermit would have just been obscure, interchangeable sketch comedy shows, maybe the same show, I think.
  • Rugby + 13 suggests it's probably Australia or New Zealand, where rugby league is a big deal.
• A show about a family of immigrants to the U.S. In one episode they for some reason had to pass themselves off as a typical American family for a TV program that came to their house. The son had to pretend he was an astronaut. The mom by mistake put the dishes in the clothes washer. 70s or early 80s.
• A show about an American family. A teenaged son liked to read the backs of cereal boxes. A teenaged girl kept saying "I don't get it". Some character (maybe the same teenaged girl) gave people speeches that began "look at your lives". Maybe this was a failed pilot? 70s or early 80s.
  • I think I've seen that, too, but I can't remember the name, either. x.x;
• I'm not sure if this was even a real program, but I remember one part of it. It was a non-English language, (I'm pretty sure) and it included a boy who was trying to hide from... someone, in some sort of warehouse or factory. Then he hid in a box, and the box was shipped off to the house of a little girl, who had been expecting some sort of expensive/elaborate toy. And he had to pretend to be a toy and have tea parties with her, and when he asked if he could run away, she got annoyed. Weirdly, I'm not sure if I really saw this or if it was All Just a Dream.
  • You must have seen a French movie which got remade into an American film called The Toy, which starred Richard Pryor.
    • The Toy was based on a French film called Le Jouet. I suggest this is the film being sought.
      • (Not the OP) I haven't seen either version, so I can't be sure... but it doesn't sound right. From the summaries I've seen of each, Le Jouet is actually fairly close to the American version in overall plot outline, and would thus lack a little girl, and have a rather different story of how the lead character became a toy.
• OK, an American TV show but I remember it from channel five's childrens programming in Britain in the late nineties (the programme may be older than that though). Aired on Sunday morning it was about a young man named Jessie who was in different time periods (like one episode in ancient Rome, the next in 1950 America) but he wasn't a time traveler. The show had a vaugely moralistic/Christian subtext, Jessie would say things like "Throughout my travels I have seen what pride does to people". I remember loving it and I would love to find out what it was called since I cannot for the life of me remember. Thanks.
  • This is a long shot, but could it be Pappy Drew It?
    • No, thanks for trying.
  • A few major differences with your description, but I'm just going to throw it out there: "Voyagers!" Different time period every episode, but it has 2 main characters. One is called Jeffrey, which sounds a bit like Jessie. And they were time travelers.
• I remember watching this as a kid, possibly on Nickelodeon. A children's TV show with this cute mascot character who was a snake named Jake and they were trying to feed him something. Worms, maybe? It may or may not be from a separate show, but I also remember this puppet character named Zoe who talked like she had a cold.
  • Not sure where Jake is from, but Zoe's a Sesame Street muppet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v9hFWy86Ok
• I remember a sitcom when I was little. All I remember about it was there was a family (maybe just a man and his wife), and whenever the man had a problem, he went into an area of trees in his back yard and got advice from various talking animals. I distinctly remember an alligator.
  • I remember it too, there were number of animals and in one episode his parot is the only other witness to a crime. He puts the parot cage under a sheet and has it testify in court. It isn't until the other lawer objects that the judge makes him take the sheet off the cage in a "dramatic reveal" as if a parot cage under a sheet could possibly look like a person. I just can't think of any thing that I could actually put in a search.
• This was a Made for TV movie, and it concerned ghosts and an Unfinished Business / Due to the Dead plot. With a dash of Revenge thrown in I think. Two Starcrossed Lovers (at least I think they were) got in some sort of trouble. It was the 50's, the guy was a James Dean type with a leather jacket and the works, the girl was like Sandy from Grease, pre-Vamp makeover. Somehow or other someone wanted them (or maybe it was just the guy) dead, so they were both Buried Alive in an old empty gas tank beneath a gas station, and their car was also buried nearby in the soil. Cut to the future, where the ghosts are trying to find peace and rest by having their bodies dug up and given a proper burial. The way they are found is through a song which the car radio somehow was still playing, or something like that. The song was "their song" and it was Earth Angel. Ringing any bells? I also think the ghosts wanted revenge on the person who killed them, or perhaps their descendant, but I could be wrong about that part.
• I'm pretty sure this was a tv show. All I remember was that in one of the scenes a male character looks on as a woman (who I think he was into) and some other guy kiss and he says "This can't be happening". I have a feeling it's a pretty well-known show. I picture it in my mind as being CSI Miami but I have a feeling that's not it.
• I don't even know if this was a TV show or a movie. It was in Chinese, and it was on tonight. When it cut to commercials, it had some hanzi, and two of them, from my knowledge of Japanese, seemed to mean "God speak" or something. They were set apart from the others, so they might have been the title. There was a kid— well, not a kid, more like a young man— in modern clothes with a cell phone. He saved some guy and there was an epic battle (with terrible special effects) with a lot of archery and blade-on-a-stick-style weapons (pikes?) and ancient Chinese dudes. Oh, and he saved them with a beehive.
  • Your description isn't enough for me to guess (though it might help others if you specify which "tonight" it was and where it aired), but the kanji you describe are likely 神話, which means "myth".
• I thought of this while making the Real Joke Name. I vaguelly recall a comedy sketch where two characters have really odd names. First both think that the other one is joking, but after they are introduced to each other they both assume that the other made up a pseudonym for himself to make fun of their odd name. Anyone remember this? It would have made a prime example, but no-one seems to know it.

Questions with suggested answers

• A late-80s or early-90s sitcom where a character climbs onto the roof of his house during a rain storm wearing golf shoes, and it cuts to the inside of the house where the roof is now leaking due to the holes punched by his cleats.
  • Al Bundy did that. [1]
• I seem to remember watching a British game show in the mid nineties. It was basically The Crystal Maze with kids, except for a few things: it was set in a 200-floor building; there were only three contestants; they all took part in each game, rather than just one of them; each game was on a different floor of the building; there was a lift which took the contestants to each level; and the lift had an AI which hosted the show.
  • The show was Incredible Games, and the face of the lift was David Walliams.
• It was a western show during the nineties. I think it included steam punk elements because I remember a giant metal orb with rods that were pulled out gave people some kind of super power.
  • The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr
• This is not very old but a few years ago (2004? 2005?) when I was eight or nine I was flipping through channels and found some sort of parody show. It was extremely cheesy and not very funny (so not Saturday Night Live) and in it there were a group of men with coal miner hats on digging through what appeared to be an underground coal mine? Worst of all, they were singing. They were singing "We're going to the center of the Earth! The center of the Earth!" or something similar and finally they struck the center of the Earth. Then it showed a blank black screen and said "Ten Seconds Later...They All Died". This was quite random and I was young, so I started laughing so hard when I saw this I had to change the channel so that's all I saw...it was only about 2 or 3 minutes long. I've tried searching Google with no luck.
  • Actually that was a Saturday Night Live skit
• I saw this on video a REALLY long time ago... it was a musical with these two kids who were shrunk onto a train with an anthropomorphic elephant. It somehow involved singing vegetables (BROWNNNNN potato in the tune of "Hallelujah") and a "yes, no, maybe so" routine.
  • Wee-Sing train. Part of the Wee-sing series, produced in Portland Oregon in the 80s and early 90s. (incidentally, my aunt did some of their art design/sets)
• I saw a series on British TV (but it was US-made) in the late 1990s. Its general style was firmly mid or late 90s. It was about some people (probably from a Stargate-style special unit, which used a laptop, VR-style goggles, etc) who would travel to a virtual world to fight viruses and other bad stuff in person. It made extensive use of CGI (as you'd expect) but the stupid thing is, I can't remember if it was *pure* CGI, even for scenes IRL, or if it used live-action as well. I remember one episode where the hero went to a world that seemed split into two halves - a Mordor-ish dead black area and a pleasant green area, possibly with a mock castle on it - by a river, and had to stop a virus from encroaching onto the nice part.
  • Never saw the show myself, but maybe VR Troopers?
    • Sorry, no. That wasn't it. I'm leaning towards thinking this was a pure CGI series now, like the one about racing mechas.
  • It could be ReBoot. Completely CGI.
    • Nope. Again, sorry. Never heard of ReBoot before. I'm fairly certain that the show I saw involved scenes in Real Life as well - this group of humans would 'jack into' a computer world. It didn't *all* take place in a computer. I also remember it being less comedic than the ReBoot clips on You Tube.
  • I hesitate to suggest another Power Rangers knockoff series, but Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad? No real "CGI" though, given the age and budget... Or perhaps "VR.5", though at that point I'd just be pulling examples that I haven't seen straight from Inside a Computer System.
• I remember watching this educational show. It was about this guy who kidnapped a teenage girl (I think she was a redhead in biker gear), and dragged her into this phone booth. The phone booth turns out to be an airplane/spaceship, and so this guy and the chick he kidnapped fly around in his...craft to different places on Earth. There, they learned about different cultures and science and stuff, and eventually the girl fell in love with the guy.
• A Disney live-action serie, set between the 80's and the 90's.An angel have the appareance of a young man dressed like a biker.He was only visible for his "customers".He first help a high school guy, then a girl of the same age, especially on love side.It's not easy at first.A date in theater end as a disaster for the boy, and for the girl, her clumsy attempt to discuss with her love interest about the frog they have to dissect.At the very end, she dance with her new boyfriend, and the angel announce he go away.She answer him,and her boyfriend don't understand her because he can't hear the angel.The french title was: "An angel with sneakers".
  • Teen Angel, a 1989 series starring Jason Priestley, and the 1990 sequel series Teen Angel Returns. Never seen them myself, but I found it because I thought your description was close to the 1997 ABC sitcom with the same name.
• While it was still on air, there were kind of a lot of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes where I only got to catch part of the movie, so now I have a handful of riffs I remember without remembering much about the actual movie, and would kind of like to know what episodes they're from:
  • During a driving scene a car passes by an "arcade" that's obviously just a single pinball machine in an otherwise empty room. This is of course mocked thoroughly.
    • This was from Clonus. "Mike's Arcade seems understocked". "More like 'Mike's Pinball Machine'".
  • During the opening credits there's a long shot of half a broken sawhorse with the "SED" part of what was presumably "ROAD CLOSED" written on it. I believe it's Crow who chimes in with "So ah sed to the guy, ah sed..."
    • Ah, the epic Village of the Giants episode. Followed by the unsexiest mud wrestling ever put to film.
  • Someone is getting murdered in a car while some wildly scene-inappropriate jazz starts playing and one of the bots exclaims "Death jazz!".
  • There's a scene that takes place in a hospital and it's scored by slow, ambient synth music, someone imitates one of the characters and asks the doctor to turn off the Brian Eno.
    • Also from Clonus.
• A Halloween special I seem to remember. It was heavily tied to halloween candies promotionally. I'm fairly certain it involved alien robots and a run-down old water mill that kids try to restart by skipping stones and one of the aliens eventually restarts. It was pretty heavily marketed at the time as well, I believe. It may have been a local thing, so it would've been in New York State.
  • Sounds a lot like "The Last Halloween". Check Youtube, it's on there.
• A show that was puppet (maybe). It had one of the puppets/characters getting a magic eraser that could erase anything in the puppet (maybe)'s land. He erased one of his friends, and that... That is all I remember.
  • There's a very early episode of Sesame Street in which Ernie erases the Cookie Monster. Could that be what you're thinking of? Summary here: http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Episode_0008
    • That isn't it... It wasn't Sesame Street, it was a lot darker, both in reality and mentally. Thank you for trying, though!
      • No puppets I can remember, OP, but are you thinking of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lHIz4oLOWw this] episode of Are You Afraid Of The Dark?
• This was a PSA, possibly an EU one, and it was these two teenagers at a party, a guy and a girl and there's another guy looking at them from across the room. He walks up to them and it looks like he's going to dance with the girl, but dances with the guy instead.
  • It probably is from the EU. No way in hell they would let that PSA run in America.
    • I've seen it on You Tube - it's Scandinavian. I'm sure you could find it by just searching for 'gay Swedish PSA' or something similar.
• I remember this one show. It was a game show with I think Carmen Sandiego was in it. Before you go with the obvious, here is the kicker: The Carmen Sandiego look-a-like is in space, and hires aliens to... I don't know, rig the quiz. Usually something Bad happens and one of the contestents is sent... somewhere. The alien has something to do with it and the contestant's team mates have to rescue him. I could just be remembering a combonation of memories of the Carmen Sandiego game and Power Rangers In Space, but hey, I could be right...
  • Could be "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?"
    • Now that I remeber, I think so. I saw an episode (the one where they have to get the pigs) and it's not as I remember it. I might have to accept it. By the way... ALL HAIL BRITANNICA!
• An ad for a show. A narrator said something about a fallen angel, and the corresponding scene showed a winged woman landong on a car, with unspread wings, eyes wide open and no injuries whatsoever.
  • I think it's a commercial for an episode of Life called "The Fallen Woman". The episode can be found here.
• I remember a live-action Canadian (I think) Children's show that aired during the morning block on YTV during the early to mid-90s. It involved a bunch of puppet creatures who lived in a forest and had adventures, I think. There was also a metal puppet who looked somewhat like the tin man from the Wizard of Oz. I can only remember one episode, in which the characters were all preparing for a hail storm, and at the end of the episode, the hail storm came and they all ran off into hiding. For some reason that's stuck with me ever since, and I can't remember what the hell the show was.
  • Groundling Marsh?
• This was kind of a variety show from what I remember, it was a Children's show that either aired on CTV or CBC in Canada in the mornings. As far as I know, it followed a group of children as they went around the downtown of their town and went to a bunch of different buildings (well, different sets) and did a bunch of different activities/ sang a bunch of songs. I remember that the last place they always went to was the ice cream parlour and everyone who was in that episode met back up again and sang a final song.
  • That sounds a lot like Tell-A-Tale Town. Was it something like this?
• I'm trying to remember the name of a mini-series. It was Australian, I think, and it aired on either CBBC or CITV in the late 90s/early 2000s. It was about a teenage girl whose father, a private detective, goes missing, and she teams up with a boy to find him. Something like that. My memory is hazy. What I do certainly remeber is that, over the course of the mini-series, she and the boy got togther, and, more inportantly, she discovered her father wasn't her father and she actually the daughter of a rich russian diplomat who had been murdered trying escape Russia with her, and the guy she thought was her father had found her and raised her as his own. Any ideas?
  • Eugenie Sandler, P.I.
• Many years ago (1996 or '97, to be more specific), I went to a pizza place with my best friend, where we watched a movie while waiting for our food to arrive. The plot revolved around an army of killer robots disguised as teddy bears that turned against their human owners when brought into people's houses. In particular, one little girl was celebrating her birthday with all her friends seated around her when her "teddy" suddenly attacked all the party guests. Immediately afterward, when another girl was having a tea party with her "teddy," she asked it, "Would you like some tea, Teddy?" The robot replied, "Would you like to die, human?" and unfolded its arms to reveal a pair of machine guns. Eventually, there was a scene with a mechanical dog, but I don't remember anything other than that. At the time, I found it perverse that a pizza place would show what appeared to be a science fiction-styled horror movie to a crowd of children. (Then again, the same restaurant's arcade contained Primal Rage....) Obviously, this wasn't a first-run movie, since it was being shown as a public performance. The movie must have been made earlier than 1996. Does anyone have any ideas?
  • YES! This wasn't a film; it was an episode of the long-forgotten TV spinoff series of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which I am pretty sure went by the same name! Wayne Szalinski invents a cybertronic teddy bear which is just supposed to be super smart, but it gets infected by a computer virus called Legion which turns it evil. The dog was one of Szalinski's earlier experiments from a different episode; the original prototype bear resurrected it to get it to laser the Szalinski family away. The pizza place probably played it because it ran regularly on the Disney Channel at a certain spot in the morning way back when. This was one of my personal favorite episodes!!
• A scene I remember vividly: A woman, naked or near-naked and with burned and reddish skin, is prostrate on the ground, which also looks burned and parched. I am certain she is in Hell, because when her friends try to rescue her, someone speaks and says that she cannot go with them, as she has eaten the food in Hell. Previous to this scene, she had been shown resisting her hunger but then slowly giving in to it. Also, I'm fairly certain I saw female angels in a later scene.
  • That sounds like the two hour pilot to "Hercules". The show started as a series of two-hour movies, and they had him married with children. They had to kill off the family angle in the last one before the series, so that he would wonder about town to town for the series (and of course eventually meet up with Xena)..
    • I'm actually pretty sure that's "Fallen Angel", the first episode from season 5 of Xena Warrior Princess.
• As a kid in the 80's I saw this sci-fi show where a teenage guy goes to a Lazerdome-arcade and shoots a camera or something in a corner whereupon he is transported to a ship in space or another dimension with a crew of aliens on board. I remember one of the aliens in particular, a shapely female alien with a Paintball-like mask. I also remember she had a fear of heights when in one episode a villain preyed on their weaknesses.
  • Photon?
• A Sci-Fi TV series from the '70s; don't think it was Buck Rogers In The 25th Century or Battlestar Galactica but it was in that same genre/timeframe. Protagonists had a really big ship, and in their arboredum they had the only apple trees left anywhere. They served it to some guest humans once.
  This is delicious. What do you call this?
  Homemade apple pie.
  • Possibly The Starlost? It's got a Big Ship and arboretum-like domes, but I don't recall anything about apples.
  • Actually, I seem to recall that being Buck Rogers. I think I have that episode on tape somewhere and I distinctly remember that line.
• Possibly an episode of a supernatural/sci-fi/and horror themed anthology series like Twilight Zone or Outer Limits or something similar, I am trying to figure out which one. In this episode a scientist(?) and his assistant get into contact with microscopic intelligent life forms living in a water tank in the lab. The creatures turn out malevolent which we learn thanks to the assistant being contacted by another group of microorganisms who ultimately get genocided by the former group. I remember the creatures developing a method of creating a multi-cellular model of their appearance, which gets killed by a person it attacks, and eventually convincing the scientist to inject them into himself and taking over his mind.
  • Sounds like an episode of Monsters, did the microbe plan to have the guy go to the ocean and cut his throat so it could take over every living thing?
• I remember a shot of a really old show. It showed what is supposed to be Bruce Wayne in a flying bike, tied up and mouth held shut with white clothing. My question is what Batman installment series is this from?
  • Is it possible he was on a flying umbrella? (It Makes Sense in Context). If that's the case, then it would be the 1966 Batman movie. If not, then I apologize. X3
• A Science Fiction show where they had a purple skinned doctor and the Big Bad was named something along the lines of Drago, he might have been an evil vizier who overthrew the King. From the mid to late 70's I think.
  • Jason of Star Command? It's from the late 70s and has a Big Bad called Dragos, not sure about the purple skinned doctor though.
  • I can't confirm who he was, but there was definately a purple-skinned character of some sort.
• This was at the beginning of a show, it wasn't the main plot point or anything, but it involved a group of people arriving on a planet, and they watch in horror as a woman starts to throw her child out the window. They try and convince her not to, but she does anyway, revealing that the child has wings and needed to learn how to use them. This WASN'T the main plot. May be related to Farscape, but I've never actually seen farscape, so I don't know.
  • That's from the final scene of the Sliders episode "The Prince of Slides." Like most of the joke worlds seen at the end of episodes, it's never seen or mentioned again.
• A sci-fi series I only saw in advertisements and promos when I was a kid in what was probably the late 80's, about an alien resembling a floating, one-eyed ball that was visiting our planet. I remember the alien even guest-hosting my usual Saturday morning cartoons one weekend, but I never saw the series or caught its name.
  • The series was actually about an alien criminal, a former soldier who committed murder and was exiled to Earth in a human form where he would have to help humans to prove he had been rehabilitated enough to return. The flying eye was there to watch him and see whether he was reforming or not.
    • Hard Time on Planet Earth.
• A children's show about a blonde girl who got sucked into a fantasy forest world inhabited with animals. The animals weren't puppets - they were actors in animal costumes and had really big animal heads. I remember a lion, who was the girl's closest friend there, and a spoiled female cat. Occasionally they would burst into song. In one episode, the cat became a queen and the girl sang about the importance of friendship and the insignificance of the crown. The villain was a witch who lived in a castle and watched the protagonists through a cauldron. I think she had birds of prey as minions (puppets, not actors). Nobody used the girl's real name - I saw a Hebrew dub, and there she was nicknamed "Light".
  • Could be an adaptation of The Wizard Of Oz
• This might belong under film, but I am pretty sure it was either a miniseries or a made-for-TV movie, probably the latter. I never actually saw it. I read an article about it in TV Guide (or a similar magazine) sometime in the seventies, or maybe the very early eighties. There was also a photograph that went with the article (maybe this was on the cover). There seem to have been two main characters, one a heavier man, who I am pretty sure had a beard, and may have been played by Orson Welles. The other main character was a younger man who somehow had the power to make his wishes come true. I gather that the plot was the younger man tries to use his power to improve the world, but instead it turns into a sci-fi dystopia. For example, he tries to wish racism away, and the result is that everyone in the world turns the same color, a shade of gray. The photograph shows these two guys, and some other people, in a dystopic future where they and everyone else have turned grey. Maybe the stuff isn't really happening, but is some sort of virtual reality or dream?
  • The Lathe of Heaven. Excellent adaptation of an excellent novel.
• There's this programme I used to watch on CITV that had something to do with a girl and a librarian (I think). Somehow the girl had lost her brother (at least I think it was her brother) because he'd been taken by a villain and his minions. The villains, BTW liked some yellow liquid from a cauldron which the chief referred to as "power". I remember in one ep, the girl was able to see her brother but not able to get to him (not sure why though). I remember it involved the girl and the librarian jumping off cliffs which had stars/vortexes at the bottom of them, and in one episode they ended up in a world with a caveman who liked to play rock music. I'm sorry I can't be more specific. I'm recalling hazy memories here from over a decade ago.
  • Sounds like The Ink Thief.
• A one-time special that must have aired on Nickelodeon in the 90s. It was all puppets, but not Jim Henson. The story was about an underground kingdom of trolls. The villains were trolls who were plotting to take over by stealing the kings' crown, which would apparently make them the rulers. However, the crown was also cursed so that anyone touching it at midnight on a certain night would turn to stone. At the climax, the good guys and the bad guys were tossing the crown back and forth to each other as midnight approached. The good guys then put together a makeshift catapult and launched the crown at the bad guys right at midnight, turning them to stone. There was a final narration about how their statues continue to stand there to this day.
  • "The Crown of Bogg."
• A 'tween' comedy, aired in France, where a young boy would turn into a girl whenever someone bumped him on the shoulder (at least, that seemed like the trigger.) It would sometimes cut to a cartoon version of the boy acting out his inner thoughts, a la Lizzie Maguire. His father tried to teach him to dance by doing the chicken dance and his sister took him shopping for female clothes in the episode I saw.
  • Title is Vice versa.
• There was this Australian (or possibly New Zealandish) show, directed toward teenagers. It was about this guy, who might or might not be called Jay, who was in a coma for some reason, and the premise of the show was him, in his coma-dreams. The setting (his dreams) was kind of post-apocalyptic, and there were no adults. Other than this, I got nothing.
  • Sounds exactly like The Odyssey, except that was Canadian.
    • It's definitely The Odyssey, right down to the name Jay and the coma dreams. Although there was a show from New Zealand about a post-apocalyptic world with no adults, called The Tribe...and it also featured a character named Jay. Maybe you saw a little of both?
• These ones were both from CBBC and they were Scotttish, but apart from that all I can remember about them was their names - G-Force and Stacey Stone.
  • According to IMDB, Stacey Stone was a spin-off from G Force. Both were original live-action Scottish programs.
• This was a TV special with Bernadette Peters starring as an opera singer making her professional debut in Tosca. The stage manager was played by Nathan Lane. Was on You Tube but I can't find it anymore.
  • That would be The Last Mile (1992), a short play by Terrance McNally. It's available on DVD with Wendy Wasserstein's Kiss Kiss, Dahlings!.
• An educational series from the eighties about a bunch of aliens who crash-land on earth and need to figure out how to use a library to get home, and another educational series about a ghost who lived in a bookstore.
  • Sounds vaguely familiar to me, but I might be thinking of a Reading Rainbow episode rather than a series.
  • The library show might be Tomes and Talismans. It was produced in the '80s by Mississippi ETV. Earth had been invaded by "The Wipers". Humanity evacuated- except for one librarian. She was accidentally left behind, and kept in suspended animation for the next 100 years, while the wipers took over. She woke up when other aliens arrived- they were called "The Users".
    • Tomes and Talismans is right. Thanks so much. Still wonder about that ghost one, though...
      • Ghost Writer, perhaps?
• Some American sitcom from the 1990s, taking place in some kind of office (at least part of the time). There was one (male) character who acted very effeminately, and implied gayness was a running joke. I remember at one point a cheesy casanova type character who tried to impress one of the women of the office by comparing hand sizes (she marveled at how big his hands were compared to his); later, the implied-gay character was shown marveling at the man's hand size in an identical manner.
  • News Radio, maybe?
• This kids' show was on PBS (in southwest Missouri, anyway) around 1995 and featured four or five brightly-colored (mostly pink and yellow, I think) bird-people puppets, including The Professor (probably) and a Wacky Guy named Skeleton.
  • That has to be Professor Iris. There was also a pink piano and a yellow potted plant, called, IIRC, Piano and Plant, respectively.
• This was a kids show when I was little. It had people who were all one colour (like one of them would have green skin and green clothes, another would be blue or whatever). One guy had a magic cricket bat and a tv screen in the peak of his baseball cap, I think he got stuck in quicksand at one point and they had to pull him out by his bat. The bad guy had like a black robe and really long fingernails which shot lightening that melted the colour people into goo.
  • ''Through the Dragon's Eye''
• OK, American TV show, possibly a miniseries. It was kind of a religious X-Files type deal, concerning the Antichrist and the Second Coming. He was a skeptic, possibly lapsed Catholic, probably a cop. He had a daughter, and I think he was divorced. I think the daughter went missing, and she and her dad had a joke about a donkey. The man was paired up with a nun to investigate strange goings-on. I think the last episode ended with the birth of the future Virgin Mary.
  • This is most likely the 2005 six-episode miniseries Revelations.
• Teenager travels through time with a CD on his computer, meets hystorical people with his crew and fights the three big bads who are a clown, a bald guy and some woman
  • I remember that one, but not the title. He entered the spaceship/time machine by shouting "Knowledge is Power!" and pressing a ring against his computer screen.
  • A.J.'s Time Travellers or somesuch. Used to run on Fox back when their Saturday lineup was owned by Saban rather than 4Kids.
  • It must be undoubtedly A.J.'s Time Travellers (known in latin america as La Computadora del Tiempo). I remember fragments of that show, too.
• A TV show (presumably a British/Australian collaboration) featuring an "ordinary" blonde British teenager who discovered by some kind of accident that an Australian soap star looked exactly like her. They swapped lives repeatedly. The intro had the two teenagers (played by the same actress) throwing a beach ball to one another.
  • Minty. Searching on Ezydvd.com.au gives 'My Little Pony - A Very Minty Christmas', though, quite a different production.
• A recent (currently airing, to my knowledge) British TV show about a Scully-esque sceptic and a psychic woman going around solving paranormal mysteries. The sceptic was a professor of paranormal studies or something - aged, snippy, male. There was one really creepy episode in which it turned out that the husband of this woman who'd moved into a new house had had his soul switched by someone who was in some kind of Victorian magic cult, and right at the end she got her soul switched with his wife - it was one of the best Jigsaw Puzzle plots I've ever seen.
  • Sea of Souls? (I've never seen an actual episode, but what I remember of the ads fits.)
  • As someone who's watched almost every episode of the program in question, this troper can confirm that it is indeed Sea of Souls, arguably one of the best paranormal dramas in recent history (well, I think so anyway). Sadly, it's not airing at the moment, but I'm still hoping that they'll get around to doing a new series.
• A British comedy sketch. There was a doctor/medical person of some sort. The main character was playing himself and asking the doctor/medical person if he could use him (the doctor had a stupid wig and fake glasses). Eventually it flat out breaks the fourth wall when the actual doctor gets up in the audience and complains about his portrayal.
  • "That Mitchell and Webb Look". I can't remember which episode, though.
    • Here it is.
• Every once in a while, I manage to track this one down, then promptly forget it again. Public TV show, the sort that's made to be sold in a package to public schools, possibly contemporary of Read All About It. Educational about library sciences. A race of bad dudes called, I think, the "Wasters" had invaded Earth, forcing humanity to relocate. A wizard puts a librarian in suspended animation, and some friendly but stupid aliens show up centuries later, and, using the librarian's help, defeat the Wasters using their newfound prowess with the Dewey Decimal System. I recall that the final solution involved creating a giant hologram of a horse, which scared the Wasters away. This was the culmination of your standard series-long collection-quest plot to gather the necessary information from the library to formulate and execute this plan.
  • Tomes and Talismans!
    • With such a name and premise, I guess it fits in Magic Ampersand?
    • If the Arc Words were Ruby-Crystal Laser, I second the title suggestion.
• This one show where a 34 year old man suddenly wakes up as his 16 year old self back in the 1970's. He then set's about fixing what went wrong in that part of his life.
  • Could this be Do Over? [2] Except it was on the early 1980's
  • There was another show with the same premise called That Was Then, which came out almost exactly when Do Over did (and was even more short-lived).
• There was this Australian tv show for children, in the nineties, but I think it was set 20 Minutes into the Future. It was set on some sort of... space station type thing, but in the sea. Sea Station? I assume on earth. And there were two boys, the sons of a lady scientist who worked on the ship. And she might have been a single mother, but I'm not sure. Anyway, the boys were friends with this girl who lived in a forest, and they used to go and visit her.
  • Reminds me of Ocean Girl.
• This children's show was on in the mid-90s (probably 1994-96) and involved a bunch of people in animal masks (and costumes?)...doing stuff, and probably teaching An Aesop. At the end of one episode, Cockatoo (who was female, if that helps) taught the kiddies how to say "I love you" in American Sign Language.
  • Zoobilee Zoo. The Cockatoo's first name was actually Talkatoo. Cockatoo was her Species Surname.
• Live action, mid-70s or earlier. Comedy. Possibly a one-off segment of an anthology show like LoveAmericanStyle. An average man became a super-hero, named Captain Hero. Only bit I really remember was the protagonist standing on the stairs to the 2nd floor of the house, his hand cupped over one side of his mouth, yelling "Captain-an-an-an-an Hero-ro-ro-ro-ro!" (He made his own echo voice.) Definitely not Drawn Together although that's the only show I can find with a character named Captain Hero. Don't think it was Mr. Terrific or Captain Nice either, although it was a loosely similar premise.
  • there was a character named "Captain Hero" in the series "Hot Hero Sandwich", but this was a kid, a boy, who I think tied a towel around his neck.
    • FOUND IT! An episode of Maude t=6m10s
• OK it was a Sci-Fi series but the only thing I can remeber that is likely to be of any help is the phrase "Chiggy Von Ricktoffen"
  • Space: Above and Beyond, episode "Red baron".
  • Seconded. The bad guys in that show were called Chigs. It was an Air Force-like military space opera.
• A Disney Channel show I only saw one episode of, which I remember for it being a triple subversion of New Media Are Evil. The girl characher was severely irritated by her brothers playing a Lawyer Friendly version of Tomb Raider, and its obvious Third-Person Seductress. ...Until she actually sat down and played the game, and discovered that it was pretty fun, and the female character could kick butt too. Then she beat the game... and discovered that at the end, the character poses in her underwear in a sultry fashion. Cue RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION!... Or so it seemed. Then she goes and writes an essay for her social studies class about the character, and decides that, even though the Fanservice was annoying and gratuitous, the character was still a strong female character, and concluded that video games, so long as they tone down the Fanservice, are a good medium for portraying strong females.
  • I think I remember that! But they were step-siblings, weren't they? And the game was "Babe Raider"? I think it was called Life With Derek.
• This troper remembers an early scene from a TV show or movie where a newbie on the police force is seen at the target range, apparently doing abysmally...and then it turns out she (I think it was a she) matched another officer's shots perfectly. I'm fairly sure it was recent, though I could be wrong.
  • Sounds like one of the episodes of Castle.
  • It also sounds like the pilot episode of Psych, where the main character (male) did indeed match the cop character's (female) shots perfectly.
• Another one from Nausicaa: Mid-to-late '90s comedy about/satire of the music business, on Channel Four, I think. Followed the story of a fake boy band. From what I can remember, it was incredibly Troperiffic. Sorry I can't be any more specific than that, but that's all I can remember about it!
  • The Young Person's Guide To Becoming A Rock Star?
• It was a reality TV show where a group of people had to live in the same house, and had to be as unpleasant as they could, so as to make the other inhabitants leave. The last person to stay in the house won it and a cash prize. (I'm not sure about the cash prize)
  • The Golden Cage?
• A sitcom basically built on everyone's reactions to the female character, who's in her late 30's/early 40's, having a much younger boyfriend. I remember an episode where her ex-husband came for a visit, and both him and her parents kept trying to convince her that her current relationship was just a phase and that she should remarry the ex. At the end of the episode the ex is sitting in the backroom of a cafeteria or something like it. The owner is a friend of hers and tried to made the ex get that she wasn't going to return to him. The conversation went something like this:

  Owner: She's going to ride free.

  Ex: And then she'll return to me.

  Owner: *with a tone of "didn't you hear me the first time?"* She's going to ride free.

  Ex: And then she'll return to me.

  Owner: *sighs* Would you like a sandwich while you wait?

  Ex: :D Yes please!

  Owner: *brings out a 6-foot sandwich, dumps it in front of him, and smirks* Bon appetit.

  • That was the basis of Fran Drescher's sitcom Living With Fran [3]. Could that be it?
• This show, I'm fairly sure, was on PBS in the early 2000s. It featured two kids who used a time scoop to bring famous people into the present. They knew better, they really did, but they couldn't help expecting the pop culture versions of these people. When they brought Moses forward, they got a considerable shock: They were expecting someone like Charlton Heston's character in The Ten Commandments, and got an eighty year old Judean shepherd with a stutter.
  • Sounds like Mentors. I don't remember your specific example offhand, but I only saw probably half the episodes of that show.
• I remember an animated movie, with really exceptional animation. It was about a young man in a construction company or something who was cutting down a forest for some reason. Then, through some event, he was shrunken down and came in contact with what I assume to be forest nymphs or sprites, one whom he falls in love with. I don't remember much else, including the ending, but I know I saw it in 2005.
  • Could it be Ferngully?
• I'm pretty sure this was an episode of Are You Afraid Of The Dark, but, since we didn't have cable and I saw it for only five minutes in a Hollywood Video, not entirely certain. The evil monster guys had put this girl with a cloak into a cage, and were taunting her and putting mice or bugs or something while she screamed and begged them to let her out.
  • It sounds like it might be "The Tale of Watcher's Woods"; check here starting at around 5:30.
• A British series where the protagonist was a young man who went to school. There may have been an evil teacher with powers. Strange things were happening in his town. One of those was that there was a cave that seemingly allowed passage through time - another boy from King Arthur's time came through there and eventually decided to go back. I think it may have ended without resolving what happened to him.
  • It wouldn't be The Demon Headmaster, by any chance?

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