You Can't Do That on Television
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Template:Infobox television You Can't Do That on Television (YCDTOTV) was a Canadian children's television program, created by Roger Price and produced from 1979 until 1990, with a reunion episode in 2004. It primarily featured child actors in a sketch comedy format, acting out short scenes based on a theme that served as the topic for the episode. Connecting scenes based on the theme would often serve to create a story arc that lasted the length of the episode. Nickelodeon became known for its iconic green slime that has originally been used in this show.
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History
Local television
You Can't Do That on Television debuted on February 3, 1979 on CJOH-TV, a CTV affiliate in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. At its inception it was a low-budget, local comedy program that included phone-in competitions through which the viewer could win prizes (transistor radios, record albums, model kits, and the like). This portion of the program was broadcast live, although the majority of each episode was pre-taped. The format also included performances by local disco dancers, special guests such as Ottawa-based cartoonist Jim Unger, and music videos, usually three per episode. Every week the show took its "Roving Camera" to kid hangouts around town and captured footage of kids telling jokes or complaining about the unfairness of life, which would be played on the following week's episode.
The only other adult actor on the show (besides Abby Hagyard) was veteran comedy actor Les Lye, though occasionally the older children in the cast would play adult roles. The show's trademark green slime was also introduced this season, as was the practice of using "I don't know" as a trigger phrase for the slime. The thinking behind the creation of the show was to create a good Canadian-made program for children to watch on Saturday mornings that was simply fun and made no attempt to be educational. It worked; CJOH had a hit on its hands, and the show became a formidable competitor to American shows in the same time slot on other local stations. Only three full episodes from this season are still in existence, due to home video recordings being made the day the episodes were broadcast. These episodes are extremely rare and considered collector's items with YCDTOTV fans, since the studio masters no longer exist.
National television in Canada
After a successful first season, a national network version of the program titled Whatever Turns You On was produced for CTV and debuted in September 1979 (having already aired an hour-long pilot episode in May). The format was shortened from an hour to a half-hour, removed the local content, added a laugh track, and replaced the music videos with live performances from popular bands at the time, including Trooper and Max Webster. Ruth Buzzi of Laugh-In joined the cast as an additional adult performer alongside Les Lye. The cast of nearly twenty children from the first season was whittled down to just seven: Christine "Moose" McGlade, Lisa Ruddy, Jonothan Gebert, Kevin Somers, Kevin Schenk, Rodney Helal, and Marc Baillon (another first season cast member, Elizabeth Mitchell, appeared in the pilot episode only). Perhaps due to its Tuesday night timeslot, it suffered from poor ratings and was canceled after one season.
Nickelodeon
In 1981, the new youth-oriented United States cable network, Nickelodeon, took an interest in YCDTOTV, which was still being produced and broadcast locally by CJOH. (The format of the 1981 local episodes on CJOH was similar to that of the inaugural 1979 season, except that each show had a special topic to be dealt with and the disco dancers had been replaced by video game competitions. A few of the original uncut hour-long episodes from this season also do exist thanks to home video recordings made on the day of the broadcasts.) Price and director Geoffrey Darby had edited the entire 1981 season of episodes into a half-hour format similar to Whatever Turns You On for national and international syndication. In late 1981 Nickelodeon began airing the edited season and YCDTOTV quickly became their highest rated show. Over the next few years, the ratings gradually declined in Canada (by 1985, it was seen only once a week in a Saturday-morning time slot on CTV), but YCDTOTV continued to go strong on Nickelodeon, where it aired five times a week.
By 1987, many of the "veteran" cast members such as Matt Godfrey, Doug Ptolemy, Vanessa Lindores, and Adam Reid had grown too old for the show. Christine McGlade, who was probably the most well-known cast member, had departed the previous year. Only five episodes were filmed in this season.
Price moved to France in 1988. CJOH decided not to make new episodes without him and production was suspended. When Price returned to Canada, he wanted to resume production on the show from Toronto, but was convinced to return to Ottawa and CJOH.
The program resumed production in 1989, but the only child cast members to make the transition from 1987 to 1989 was Amyas Godfrey and Andrea Byrne, and thus fans often refer to the 1989 and 1990 season as "new episodes".
Production ceased at the end of the 1990 season. Nickelodeon continued to air reruns until January of 1994, at which point it was only being aired on weekends.
In the future
As of 2005, CJOH had no plans to release re-runs of YCDTOTV nor are there any plans to produce new episodes. In 2006, rumors began floating that Nickelodeon would release DVDs of the series as part of its "Rewind" series of DVD releases of shows from its past. However, in early February 2006, ycdtotv.com reported that because of changes in the hierarchy of Viacom, there would be no DVD release in the immediate future (which is not to say that the series will never be released). However, unoffically produced DVD sets of the series' entire 11 seasons can currently be purchased at www.limitedclassics.com.
You Still Can't Do that on Television
During late 2005, a group of fans of YCDTOTV worked on a fan-made animated version called You Still Can't Do That On Television or simply You Still Can't (YSC) as a tribute to YCDTOTV. The character designs are in a Japanese anime style, somewhat reminiscent of Sailor Moon, and the show's theme song is an updated, dance-flavored remake of the original YCDTOTV theme (which was a Dixieland jazz-style rendition of Rossini's William Tell Overture).
Notable episodes
Adoption and Divorce
The 1987 season included the episode Adoption that was banned after only one accidental airing on Nickelodeon. Among the content that led to the banning is a scene where Valerie (Abby Hagyard) and Lance (Les Lye) adopt Doug because it was cheaper than buying a dog. In another sketch, Lance adopts Adam Reid only to serve as a hired hand to do chores around the house. When Adam finishes the chores, Lance calls the adoption agency to send Adam back, and is furious when he is told that "adoption is for life." Although Adam and Vanessa Lindores gave a disclaimer in the episode's opening link explaining that the show was all in fun and not to be taken seriously, Nickelodeon was deluged with complaints from adopted viewers.
Similarly, it has been reported that Canada's YTV banned the Divorce episode from the 1984 season when it began showing YCDTOTV in 1988. Curiously, Divorce was not banned in the United States.
Anniversary airings
During Nickelodeon's 20th Anniversary, CJOH allowed the network to rerun three episodes of YCDTOTV. On June 26, 1999, the Music and Enemies and Paranoia episodes from 1986 aired, and on June 27, 1999, the Parties episode aired. Nickelodeon chose to feature only episodes that featured now-famous Alanis Morissette because of their "Nickelodeon Knew Them Before They Were Stars" theme. In 2005 for Nickelodeon's Old Skool Pick 1 episode was picked to air and another episode was picked but 15 minutes in to the show YCDTOTV went to a commercial but when it came back Chalkzone began airing.
Reunion episode
In July of 2004, a reunion episode called Project 131 was produced at CJOH starring five members of the original cast. These included Vanessa Lindores, Brodie Osome, Marjorie Silcoff, Justin Cammy, and Alasdair Gillis. Directed by David Dillehunt and executive produced by Josh Yawn, this was the final production ever made in Studio D, the same studio where the show had been produced fourteen years prior.
Trademarks
Episodes of YCDTOTV included recurring gimmicks and gags. The following is a partial list.
Openings
The show opened with an announcement that a previously scheduled program had been pre-empted in order to show YCDTOTV, along with an image (usually a drawing) from the fictional program. Pre-empted programming included:
- Pavarotti Sings the Blues
- To Tell the Truth with Richard Nixon
- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Wizard
- Carl Sagan Meets Billions and Billions of Martians
- The Muppets Get Stuffed
- Kermit the Frog Tries Unsuccessfully to Cross the Road
There was also a tagline, usually a disparaging pun related to the show's theme. One YCDTOTV episode supposedly pre-empted The Six Wives of Henry VIII; "In its place," said the announcer, "we present another show you can lose your head over."
Opposites
Each episode had an "opposites" segment, introduced by a visual effect of the screen flipping upside down, shifting left to fade to the next sketch, and then righting itself. Right before this happened, one of the cast would generally be giving a monologue (or several would be having a group conversation) that was interrupted by another cast member with something that would (generally) be opposite what the monologue (or dialogue) was about, all present cast would say, "It must be the introduction to the opposites," and then the inversion fade would happen; several sketches would follow that were a tongue-in-cheek reversal of the show's subject of the day, and also in which the normal principles of daily life were reversed, often with children having authority over adults. A show on marketing, for instance, would then have a sketch or four of how not to market something.
A return to the show's daily subject was hallmarked by another of these inversion fades.
Opposite sketches were used in the inaugural season of the show on CJOH in 1979, but it was not until Whatever Turns You On that they became an integral part of the show.
Locker room
During the "locker room" segment, cast members, residing in gym lockers, would tell jokes to each other. The person telling the joke would open their locker, sticking their head out to call another cast member to tell the joke to. For the duration of the joke, those cast members would be the only ones seen with open lockers. When the punchline was delivered, there would be a laugh track and the actors would close their lockers, allowing the process to start again with different people and a different joke. This was almost certainly an homage to the "joke wall" segment on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. This feature of the show was also introduced during its first season in 1979 and continued until the end of the series, with the lockers undergoing a few physical makeovers during the show's early years.
Water, Slime and Pies
Certain key words would result in cast members having substances poured on them from off-camera. When someone said "water" or "wet," a large amount of water would mysteriously cascade onto them from above. By the 1984 season, the word "wet" no longer triggered the water, leaving the job to the word "water" itself. This, too, was a homage to Laugh-In. Likewise, when someone said "I don't know," green slime would pour on them from above. This was known as being "slimed." Nickelodeon quickly adopted "slime" as a feature in several shows it produced, and used it heavily in its marketing. Other colors of slime were occasionally used on the show, as in the following instances:
- Christine McGlade is slimed in blue in the ending link to the 1982 "Justice and Injustice" episode, because, as Ross (Les Lye) tells her, they ran out of green slime.
- Christine is slimed in green, red, blue, yellow and "stripes" (all four colors at once) in rapid succession in the 1982 "Television" episode. This sketch was later seen in the opening to the hit 1987 movie Fatal Attraction.
- In the 1983 "Media" episode, Lisa Ruddy is slimed with the "new and improved, whiter-than-white" white slime.
- In the "Enemies and Paranoia" episode from the 1986 season, the studio is taken over by Russian Communists. Uttering the word "free" (as in "freedom") would send a cascade of red slime pouring over whoever said it.
- The 1989 "Time" episode, which was filmed largely in black and white, featured Chris Bickford doused in white slime and Christian Tessier slimed with black slime.
Several different recipes of slime were used during the series' decade-long run. Reportedly, the first slime recipe—which contained, among other things, sausage and a plethora of other nasty ingredients—was scrapped after it actually made one kid sick after he was slimed. For several years afterward, the slime was a mixture of lime green Jell-O powder and flour; eventually, oatmeal was added to the recipe, as was baby shampoo so that it would wash out of the actors' hair more easily. Especially in the later years of the show, cast members who were slimed frequently looked upward into the slime as it was falling so that it covered their faces (the same was also true of the waterings).
The classic slapstick pie-in-the-face gag was also frequently used on YCDTOTV, although pie scenes were most common during the early years of the show. In fact, one whole episode, 1981's Drugs, was constructed around the pie-in-the-face concept: to avoid the wrath of the censors, the episode showed the cast getting "high" by pieing themselves, comparing the stupidity of hitting oneself with a pie to the stupidity of taking drugs (an example of how the show could educate young viewers without being preachy or overly didactic). For several years, pies took a back seat to the green slime, although they seemed to make a comeback on YCDTOTV in the 1989 season (particularly in the aforementioned Time episode, in which the kids got into a massive silent-movie-style pie fight at the end of the show).
Cast
Over 100 actors appeared on YCDTOTV between 1979 and 1990. The following is an abbreviated list. It includes actors appearing in 10 or more episodes.
- Randi Akiwenzie 1981
- Kevin Akyeampong 1984
- Jordan Arron 1989
- Marc Baillon 1979
- Stephanie Bauder 1989–1990
- Nick Belcourt 1989
- Chris Bickford 1989–1990
- Wyatt Boyd 1984
- Jennifer Brackenbury 1989–1990
- Carlos Braithwaite 1989–1990
- Charlie Brien 1982
- Andrew Burke 1984
- Jami Burning 1981
- Justin Cammy 1983–1985
- Alasdair Gillis 1982–1986
- Amyas Godfrey 1986–1989
- Matthew Godfrey 1986–1987
- Abby Hagyard 1982–1990
- Kevin Kubusheskie 1981–1984
- Vanessa Lindores 1982–1987
- Les Lye 1979–1990
- Christine McGlade 1979–1986
- Brodie Osome 1981–1983
- Doug Ptolemy 1982–1987
- Adam Reid 1984–1987
- Lisa Ruddy 1979–1985
- Kevin Schenk 1979–1981
- Sariya Sharp 1989–1990
- Amy Stanley 1989–1990
- Jill Stanley 1989–1990
- Christian Tessier 1989–1990
- Ted Wilson 1989–1990
- Bradfield Wiltse 1979
Alanis Morissette, a cast member in five episodes of the 1986 season, later became a highly successful musician. Klea Scott, a cast member from 1982 to 1984, later starred in the prime-time television dramas Brooklyn South and Millennium.
Cast comments
Cast member Justin Cammy, now a professor, described the show like this:
- You Can't Do That on Television was the first post-modern children's program of my generation. It subverted all recognizable forms and deconstructed the pre-teen's understanding of such important institutions as the family, the school and the video arcade. When the schoolteacher did not know any better than to call Milton's masterpiece "Pair of Dice Lost," the program functioned as an ideological clarion call to future college students like you who would go on to demand the displacement of an ossified Western canon with more relevant investigations of low culture."
See also
External links
- You Can't Do That on Television - The Slime Society
- You Can't Do That on Television pictures
- Barth's Burgery
- You Can't Do That On My Website! on The 7th Level
- {{{2|{{{title|You Can't Do That on Television}}}}}} at The Internet Movie Database
- {{{2|{{{title|You Can't Do That on Television}}}}}} at The Internet Movie Database
- You Can't Do That On Television at Retro Junk