The Final Episode #39: California Dreams (1992 - 1996)

 

For about four decades Saturday Morning was the place for kids to watch stuff. From all the way back in the 1950s when Howdy Doody or Captain Kangaroo or some dumb shit my dad would have watched. To the 1960s and 1970s of Filmation and Hanna Barbera to the toy commercials uh I mean the cartoons of the 1980s which just ALSO happened to have a toy line that clearly wasn't the total point of the show or anything!!! To the 1990s of Digimon and such. The end pretty much came in the early 2000s when even Bugs Bunny got cancelled after 39 damn years. The bastards didnt even let him get to year 40!! I looked it up and it was like the next week but NO you had to be jerks!

Uh, so what was Saturday Morning Cartoons like for me? Well since we had a dedicated channel to dumb shit for kids we got to watch stuff ALL day which was really damn cool. Anyway I didn't have allegiance to a channel so I would float all over the place. "Fuck that I'm not watching Cro even if the cast of Hangin' With Mr. Cooper  told me it was cool in a special behind the scenes look at the upcoming Saturday Morning stuff (remember stuff like that. I do. It was awesome)" but then again I never had allegiance in these weird wars people have over things like Marvel vs. DC (both are cool and good), Sega Vs Nintendo (I thought both were cool!) or to be a crass man Tits and Ass (I like both! and I like a pretty face! Hey I'm trying to win back the zero women who read this and I'm really bad at it) anyway I would just put on what I wanted to watch and that was pretty much that. I don't and never will understand how people will create weird little fights out of these things.

So I bring up "Saturday Morning" which usually meant "Saturday Morning Cartoons" because a good amount of the stuff made during those several decades were well cartoons. I also wanted to talk about how NBC got out of the game EARLY, like 1991 early. That was more or less due to a TV show that I'm sure every human being born after 1979 and before 1995 knows about. I'm talking about Saved by the Bell. I won't get into too huge a detail on it because I'm saving that for when I do the Final Episode of that show but it was a live action sitcom that dealt with kids in high school. That's pretty much it when you boil it down to its minimum. NBC left Saturday Mornings just to make 300 Saved by the Bell rip offs that apparently tons of people watched but I never did.

I'm going to be serious well at least as serious as I can be and say that I enjoy ripoffs and cash ins. I think it's really neat to see how people just go "hey that thing was mega popular how can we make a version just different enough so that we DONT get sued?" It makes for a lot of weird and interesting movies and stuff. I also like when a company rips itself off like my beloved Hanna Barbera. Some times it was just 8 different versions of Scooby Doo before they were like "Hey why don't we make this version of Scooby Doo a talking SHARK!? and thus Jabberjaw was born. I'm saying that rip offs and cash ins can be weirdly creative in some manner. Like when Jaws came out they were like "MAKE ANY MOVIE BUT IT HAS TO HAVE A SHARK IN IT" and you got Mako the Jaws of Death which is a really damn weird movie I should cover for this stupid blog.

I'm saying that I don't think I've ever seen a concept just totally 100% xeroxed into another thing. I mean except for that one Jaws movie that came so close ot Jaws that they couldn't even let it be seen in America but even that was more creative than California Dreams. This show is pretty much down to the bone 100% Saved by the Bell, except there's an Asian lady and a black dude. So it's a multi-cultural ripoff I guess. I was at first going to give them credit for being in a rock band but even Saved by the Bell did that first. The other thing is that I wouldn't be bothered at all by its rip off ness if it wasn't so fucking boring. Holy hot damn this show is tedious. From it's jokes to it's set up to its characters to everything. It's like no one on this show wanted to do it. Say what you want about Saved by the Bell but the actors were dedicated enough to make you give a shit. Like if someone said they hated Saved by the Bell you could understand them. If someone said they loved Saved by the Bell you could understand them. Anyone saying anything about this show you couldn't because no one gave a shit. This is a terrible paragraph that I really should re-do but I will go ahead and continue!

The Final Episode of California Dreams (no joke I typed in California Games and was like man I wish I had played that instead of watching this and I fucking hate that game) was entitled The Last Gig and came out on December 14, 1996. It is a high school based show that DOESN'T end on a Graduation episode. Now that's something original I can give the show. Anyway this episode is about them finally getting a record producer to notice them but the band is moving all over the place. to like Hawaii or New York or England for school and all kinds of stuff like that. The main guy isn't but everyone else is. He refuses to sign unless they do because he feels that they might regret it. They have a flash forward to the future and everyone realizes they are on the right path. They also think that the black guy will be the first black James Bond and I gotta tell them the future is bleak because we get 40,000 youtube videos when they decided to just add a black woman to the cast. 2021 sucks and I hate it.

Uh enough with my anger towards dummies who get angry over something. You do realize she's there to test the waters and if shes good and the public likes her she'll get her own damn movie series. Do you think they are going to just quit the damn James Bond franchise that has made them money for 83290 years for nothing? These companies still care about money. They just realized that they can get the money of black people too. Holy hot damn I need to stop thinking about these dumb jerks.

Uh anyway, back to California Dreams they tell the main guy to join up even though the record producer now wants EVERYONE but its all cleared up. They do a song. They say their good byes and I was sure we'd get like 4 or 5 minutes of wacky moments from the show like Boy Meets World did but we didn't. I'd still rather watch that Boy Meets World episode because at least I liked that show even if I wasn't over the moon about that episode. 

FINAL VERDICT: Uh this is just barely better than that episode of the Power Rangers I watched for my blog. I just thought a show as ho hum as this didn't even deserve the top spot of worst Final Episode I rewatched for this stupid blog because it was that uninteresting. Just watch Saved by the Bell and realize I won't be able to put out this many words for either Hang Time or City Guys.