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Chapter 1: What nostalgic children's show is referenced in this episode?
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How delightful. A child said, What is the grass?
Fetching it to me with full hands. How could I answer the child?
I do not know what it is any more than he. Walt Whitman The way I look at it sometimes, it's like I'm a prisoner of my own nostalgia. And I'm lucky if I can get an hour out in the exercise yard every day before my creaky memories say, dude, you got to get back inside. Come on. But I think, you know, everyone's a prisoner of something. At least nostalgia is quiet sometimes.
Chapter 2: How does nostalgia impact our perception of childhood experiences?
WMBR just never came in right, and my dad tried everything. He'd pass the tower, like, on the way to work. It was maybe 10 miles away, still lousy picture. And this was a guy who loved his antennas. We were like the last kids on the block to get cable TV. He was so proud of his antennas, he didn't want to knuckle under to the cable TV people.
I mean, everything else came in okay, I guess, but not MBR, which is typical. Funniest thing from my childhood ever was I'm sitting in the living room, I'm looking through the front bay window, and I see my dad's body falling off the roof like a stone. Boom, he hits the grass right on his side, like really hard. I jump up. He gets up like he gets up like it's nothing.
And he's got a part of that TV antenna in his hand, just like looking at it like, oh, I wonder if this got broken. Is this a little bent? And he goes right back up the ladder. He should have been dead or paralyzed at the least.
Chapter 3: What are the memorable characters from the discussed TV show?
I could still see his body going to the ground. Definitely the best weatherman ever. They had John Leo, the only weatherman in the history of TV to make you worry he was going to start crying on the air.
He'd come out and he'd do the weather.
Oh my God, what was it with him? He always looked depressed. He was never happy. There was no banter. Yeah, John Leo, the sad weatherman. That's what your station wants, right? Jesus, it wasn't like being peppy when you did the weather wasn't a thing back in the 80s. What I remember, and I'll never forget this, is...
It was very late 70s, probably, and when he did the forecast, he didn't have any tech behind him. I mean, there was lights and stuff, but there was this big whiteboard thingy behind him with Rhode Island on it. And he'd take a big marker, I mean, like an oversized marker, and he'd draw the temperatures really quick, really fast, right on the map.
Chapter 4: How did the show 'Cheeseburger Pie' influence childhood memories?
And then he'd draw these, like, arrows, like, to show you where a front was coming from. And... I remember thinking that that was the neatest thing in the world. I wanted to draw the weather on a big map real quick, just like the guy on MBR.
I remember asking my mom to pin up a roadmap from the car, and I took a magic marker and I drew temperatures and arrows and little suns all over it, and I imagined a forecast in my head, I guess. It was the 70s. It was good to be a kid.
I would swear. Okay, so they had Saturday Star Theater, 10 o'clock to midnight, and the movies were pretty low down, very, you know, whatever was five years old and they could get the rights to for a night. I watched the reincarnation of Peter Proud one time on Saturday Star Theater. That was my favorite.
And maybe there was one I kind of liked where Sissy Spacek was a hippie radical, blows herself up by accident. It had Henry Winkler in it, that kind of thing. But I swear to you, as I'm sitting here, okay, one time, totally out of nowhere, they put on the 400 blows. I'm totally certain that...
Chapter 5: What unsettling aspects of the show are explored in the conversation?
was the Saturday Star Theater. You know what they also showed one time was Husbands, the Cassavetes movie. And I always wondered if some intern just couldn't take it anymore and switched out the tapes or something. They had to watch something good, you know, wash away the WMBR stain.
They also had that guy Morgan Canning. He usually did some dumb local politics show, but really he was great because he would go all out when there was snow and there were late openings. He knew all the kids were watching, so he'd put on a party hat and he'd throw confetti up in the air anytime it was official a school was going to be closed for the day.
And this was just for schools, just for the kids. I think he went into that studio whenever it snowed just to read all the closings. And I don't know, I always thought that was pretty endearing. Today there'll be sun. But some clouds. A high of 58. Tomorrow, rain. The next day, sun.
Chapter 6: How does the character Joby evoke fear and nostalgia?
But some clouds. So, Cheeseburger Pie, I think it came on at about 9. After the first wave of cartoons. One hour show. Whenever I pretended to be sick so I could stay home from school, I always watched. Which was a lot, I wasn't a big fan of school. I think it went off the air when I was in sixth grade, so maybe five years it was on. I watched a lot of that crap. Stupid title, drove me nuts.
Was it a full hour? I guess it was. It must have been half an hour. A lot of dumb skits, you know, puppets, and then to fill more time, you had these knockoff cartoons. You had to wait for the weekend if you wanted your Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and Marvin the Martian. That was the big time.
Chapter 7: What theories are presented about Joby's mysterious disappearance?
We're talking now about whatever cheeseburger pie could afford. This was stuff from... I mean, I remember this one that had to have been from Scotland, and the narrator had a Scottish accent. The animation was bad. That was about some kid who walked around barefoot all the time. I mean, I was mostly a live action kid. I watched Bang the Drum. That was the least awful one on there, I can recall.
Little kid band going around their town and solving problems with, like, gospel music or something. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what the hell was going on there. Bang the Drum. But I think that was an import, too. I remember a lot of British accents and really bad production values.
Chapter 8: What conclusions are drawn about the legacy of the show and its characters?
Like, it was all put together on 8mm or something.
The king of Zenmark would demand to be told a joke. He had this big gold staff and he would tap on this little monk looking guy and say, bring me a joke. And in would come this puppet with a big scroll and he would read a terrible dad joke. And there was this princess puppet with way too big a chest and pigtails. And at the end of every joke,
Everybody in the king's court would like laugh and she would look around with this completely confused look on her face. She never got any of the jokes and they'd cut to a close up of her face just baffled. And I always felt bad for her.
i always assumed the king was her father and he thought she was dim and tried to ignore her all the puppets were pretty basic stuff i mean this was back in the day when you had to accept all the wires that were totally visible you'd see someone's hand drop into the frame and i absolutely remember this because i saw it all the time they were always getting the boom mic in the frame
Oh, and if any of the characters, the puppets or the live people, if any of them touch the walls, they would totally shake.
Nah, Cheeseburger Pie didn't have any live actors. MBR was probably too cheap for that.
Ooh, there was, uh, Belinda Bell. She was a horse. There was a clown puppet, but... It was barely a clown, really. That was Little Mason. The Big Wow was a... Sort of a... Sort of an anthropomorphic planet? There was a... Ooh, Sis and Sass, the sisters. Their hair was kind of tied together and it was really long.
but uh but it was tied together so you know they never moved far apart and there were other ones that would you know they would come in and out three or four other ones and uh and there was joby i was at my high school reunion 30th high school reunion and we started talking about our video production class
And Mr. Rodriguez, he'd worked for MBR back in the day. He was our teacher. I think he died. So we got to talking about cheeseburger pie. And my girlfriend, not now, but my first girlfriend ever, said, is anyone but me kind of terrified of Joby now? I said, oh, my God, Joby.
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