A carnival of technology

Like many a young child, I spent most of my Saturday mornings eating tooth-rotting cereal and watching cartoons. I can’t even remember what cartoons I watched, but I think there were some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and some Gummi Bears and that sort of thing involved. The premiere of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers in 1993 was the beginning of the end of cartoons for me. I was eleven then, and this ridiculous live-action intrusion on my whimsical animated mornings was enough to push me out of the world of children’s morning television. The cartoons before that point were awful shows, too, but they were entertaining. The local Fox affiliate, WZDX Huntsville, took up a good portion of my attention in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I remember that the station had a Fox mascot, it’s name some kind of arrangement of the station’s letters, Zeedee or something like that. I don’t remember much more about my experiences watching Fox at an early age, like the shows or the news team or anything like that, but I do remember one particular PSA that frequently played on Saturday mornings.

My first exposure to Barenaked Ladies was a Fox Saturday morning PSA about the evils of racism. Among the commercials for Transformers toys and that furniture store with the Scotsman in the logo, Fox would play a ninety-second music video with a bunch of wacky-looking people dancing wackily while a green-faced alien sang about his persecution and the benefits of looking beyond skin color. The song was very catchy, and even a decade and a half later, I often find myself humming the tune and a handful of the words, especially the list of alien skin variations at the end of the song after “It don’t matter if you’re black or white.” That particular lyric caused me to sometimes associate the song with Michael Jackson’s “Black or White,” but Michael didn’t have a crazy green alien in his video. Maybe I learned some kind of social lesson from the video on Fox, but one thing I did pick up from the repetition of this piece was the odd band name displayed at the beginning, and some years later I sought out the music of Barenaked Ladies and mostly forgot about the video, thinking that perhaps I imagined it.

While avoiding work today, I happened to come across this video from my childhood. It’s “The Ballad of Gordon,” and someone dug up a tape and posted a video on Youtube. My childhood really did exist. Also, I think this means that I liked Barenaked Ladies way before they became popular.