I was thinking about doing another NES game review set but there’s three of them in a row and I like to make things a bit more different around here. Like A post on a different subject every day or so. I just wanted most of the Baseball shit out of the fucking way so that’s how it all happened. I also just don’t have it in me today to talk about fucking Battle Chess. You know the days when it’s hard to muster up the want to talk about things you like. Well it was mostly one of those days for me. Talking about Battle Chess on a day like today would have been impossible. It’s literally nearly impossible on the best fucking days and I want a decent review of every NES game. Or at least passable. The other reason was that I found out through a youtube video about YTV’s 35th Anniversary and I want to celebrate that and also complain about things because that’s what we do here. So I’m just gonna talk about YTV, Canada’s Premiere Kids Channel (or how it used to be that)
So, September 1st, 1988 a channel came out of the ether (actually two! a bit on them later on) in Canada. It was known as YTV. YTV showed American shows, British shows, Muppet Shows and because of laws that Canadian TV channels need to show Canadian content, Canadian shows. YTV was the thing I watched for whenever we got it in my house (I have no idea if it was day one or in like 1991 or something and I don’t care enough to really check it out) to at least 2001. I mean that’s when I stopped being a “oh man gotta sit down and watch 12 hours of television before playing 8 hours of Super Nintendo!” thing. I mean I’m sure I still watched it until YouTube came around. Also my nieces watch way too much YouTube and it weirds me out. So much of that stuff I do not think I would have a single interest in, especially the toy videos. Those would have just been a time for me to yell to my mother “WE GOTTA GET TO ZELLERS A NEW NINJA TURTLE THING CAME OUT” and go there and get it so I could play with it. I needed Television, not bite sized little clips. I wanted a narrative to my stuff, dangit!
Anyway YTV had all kinds of TV shows from all over the place during it’s run. At one point it would show movies in the evening, stuff like The Slender Thread which is about a woman attempting to commit suicide until Sidney Poitier saves her (the woman is also Mel Brook’s wife!!!! Like real life wife!!!). It’s not what you’d find on a “youth and family” channel today. The sheer wildness of it all is what I remember the most. Along with the PJs. or Program Jockeys. You see they would have set program blocks of shows. One was Treehouse (I think until it became it’s own tv channel) for the young viewers. Another one was The Zone (more on them in a bit) and THE BREAKFAST ZONE. They knew the Zone was the biggest draw to the channel. These were people, usually young adults (I believe thier ages ran from late teens to mid 20s.) that would talk to us about stuff (new shows, their lives, stuff like that) these people had a very nice “big brother/sister” vibe to them.
This was an idea that could have crashed and burned if they picked the wrong people but for like 35 years they did it right. Until now. They stopped having someone talk to the kids about the shows, or themselves or just do silly stuff. I mean I’m just taking the word from this YouTuber, but I can see it because the last time I watched YTV with my nieces it had a ton of the charm and everything taken out. The YTV logos used to look like this:
Now it looks like this:
It had different variations over the years but the stuff from the 1990s and 2000s and probably even early 2010s felt like YTV hired a really good graphical artist type person to create the stuff and the last one just feels like YTV got a random executive to make it in some cheap computer program in like an hour. That’s not all, they used to make unique commercials for a show. Trying to edit something so the announcer could do some goofy shit. Most of them come off kinda cringy nowadays (hey sometimes I look up YTV commercials on youtube when I’m bored) but I’ll take cringe over no fucking emotion at all! All of this is very depressing but I can totally see why they do it.
For like the first twenty five years of its existence YTV didn’t have to deal with any of the American channels. YTV was where you went to get Nickelodeon shows and Cartoon Network shows. Now you get the Disney Channel (if you wanted any Disney stuff you needed Family Channel and it was a premium cable channel that I believe I didn’t get until at LEAST 1995. Along with TBS, I used to watch it scrambled like a pervert would watch porn. It was wild) and Teletoon (I will probably blather on about them but they didn’t have the personality of YTV) became Cartoon Network Canada now. I remember when Cartoon Network killed Teletoon Retro, the last TV channel I would watch (well alongside Comedy Gold which showed old sitcoms). I didn’t get to enjoy either very long but man they were pretty great stuff.
I don’t know if Nickelodeon is in Canada now or what. I don’t watch any of this new stuff. I know people are shocked about that. However it’s not all. They have to deal with the internet and streaming and YouTube. You can easily find whatever you want on the internet, a good amount of things on streaming, and kids love YouTube, so I can see why they gutted everything that gave the channel a personality. I just think it’s pretty sad.
You know for all the things I was into as a kid there’s still things I kinda wish I had watched or enjoyed and I never thought this would have been one of them. The YTV Achievement Awards was an award show that I never cared about as a kid. It was an award show and honestly the first few shows looked drier than a British man’s sense of humour which is probably why I thought they stopped doing these after like three of them in 1992. Nope, they ended in 2000. The YouTube video that I watched that inspired that this incredibly insanely long ramble is like an overview on all of them and I’m kinda sad I missed out on at least watching one of these. I don’t even know why. I do know that at least three would have been interesting. One because it was hosted by Weird Al Yankovic who is someone I’ve been a fan of SINCE I was a kid. I think the year I got into his st uff was the year he hosted in 1994! I really feel bad that I missed out on that, even if it was something I wouldn’t have watched all of it. I should have at least watched some of it. The other two involved Newfoundlanders winning the award. That would have made for some great discussion at the schoolyard. I mean if any of the other children would have talked to me about anything instead of being like “ew the weird kid”. I dunno, but this was a pretty interesting YouTube video (although hearing about how a lot of the kids who won awards passed away very young. Very sad)
Remember when TV channels would “sign off” and “sign on”? Well if you do you are probably old enough for the retirement home but I do! They were really kinda weird. TV channels would just go to color bars for like 8 hours and then 4 hours, then 2 hours now all TV channels just stay on all the time. I don’t know but they are one of the weird things I get nostaliga for and I felt like talking about them here in the most scattershot thing I’ve ever wrote. Ever. But seeing as I will not get a chance to talk about them here because I don’t think I’m starting a post series of “RANDOM YTV THINGS WOO”. YTV Sign offs changed all over the time. At one point it was random things done by fancy kids (one of them was a fencer!) called YTV Really Me. Then some old lady talking about a place in Nova Scotia. Then then ask you to send them comments if you had any. Then you’d get the national anthem. They changed all the time and as someone who spent a lot of time up in the middle of the night I’d see a lot of sign offs and hell even a few sign ons. I just felt like talking about them.
While not a tv show this is something I remember so well from YTV. I loved Short Circuitz which were computer animated shorts, ranging from like 30 to a minute thirty that would play during the commercial breaks or in between shows like Reboot or Beasties (what we called Beast Wars in Canada. Yes I know it’s weird) and they came from The Mind’s Eye, Beyond the Mind’s Eye and Imaginaria. They are on VHS and I want to own them. My personal favorites were the rubber ducky one shown above (it would get faster and faster and was always an amusing delight to me and my sister) and Styro the Dog which is still the best CGI thing ever made. Sorry Toy Story.
Well, I hope you enjoyed talking about these things today. I’m honestly glad that I did and didn’t force out another NES game review thing. I think forcing something out when you aren’t really into it but now I am so expect to see it soon. I cannot wait to give at least three of the next games glowing reviews and then get eh about the next two. Anyway enjoy.
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