Media Finder

open

No Title Live Action TV

I have been trying to find this show for years. It aired in the mid-late 90s though it may have been earlier since I lived in Hong Kong at the time and remember a lot of 80s reruns too. I'm positive it's American, and it was sort of educational but not specifically like Bill Nye or Popular Mechanics for Kids.

Forgive the info coming; I have very specific memories though they are few.

There are a bunch of kids (preteen/teen) of varying ethnicity who enjoy sneaking into this seemingly vacant lot, that's represented more or less by a tall wooden fence. There's a door that has a sign saying to keep out (or something of the ilk) but they sneak in anyway. The door is really a magical portal of sorts that brings the kids to different worlds, some abstract and animated, and some real. Here are some episodes I remembered:

- Two of the boys, one brunet and one blond, entered an animated room full of talking portraits. The portraits are all real people, but they have the same nose. They sing about having "the family nose" and look down upon the brunet boy for not having the same nose. The boy pulls up his sleeve and on his arm it literally says "family birthmark." The portraits do a complete about-face and congratulate him heartily. The blond boy rolls his eyes and walks into an animated garden where a live action man dressed as a monk sits on a bench drawing in a notebook. He introduces himself as a scientist studying the concept of genes and shows up the drawings of the flowers that are related to each other. The blond boy asks if this works with noses and the monk flips a page to show him drawings of noses, and explains more about his work.

- An Asian-American girl (long hair) goes inside the portal and finds herself in an animated forest of trees, but instead of leaves there are portraits hanging off the branches and each trunk has a last name. They are "family trees." She finds her own family tree and climbs the branches, finding pictures of her parents and herself on there. She climbs all the way to a branch and sees a portrait of an ancestor her age. Suddenly, the ancestor is sitting on the branch with her and they chat about how back in the day, family was important and they would have big family dinners together. The modern day girl is a bit envious because her family never eats together. After she leaves the magic lot and goes home, she talks to her mother about arranging a big dinner with extended family and her mother agrees with the idea.

- The Asian girl and another girl went inside the portal to be on a yacht sailing the sea (this is all live action). After having a great time, I THINK they fall asleep and the yacht crashes on an island. The girls go about creating a sort of Robinson Crusoe living on the island - building shelter, finding seeds and growing food for them, until they're pretty happy and content. I forgot what happened in between, but the boys from before somehow get shipwrecked too and they bump into each other on the island.

The thing about this series was that it also had some sort of overarching plot about the people who actually owned the lot. It seems that the first owner (who seems to have lived in the 1800s and is long gone - he was a Caucasian man with a big bushy white beard) was aware of the magic and therefore willed that nothing would be built there. The kids who sneak in are able to talk to him within the magical properties of the door. The bit I remember particularly is that they are pleading with him about his descendants, particularly a man (a young boy with an older sister in the bearded guy's "memory") who wants to knock down the portal-door and build stuff. I have NO idea how this ended.

I thought this show was so cool as a kid. I liked how I learned stuff that wasn't STRICTLY educational like maths or whatever. But I thought for years it was called "Take Off" or something, but Google shows nothing of the sort...