GROWING up, I didn’t fit in. I was not alone. But I couldn’t tell that from watching the majority of TV programs.
I wanted to be normal like “The Brady Bunch,” but we were more “Addams Family” with our manipulative matriarchy, eccentric patriarch and weird uncles dropping in at odd times (or out of the closets).
Times have changed – radically.
For kids today, it’s no apocalypse to be different. And that’s very healthy for youthful self-esteem.
Three of our daily standards glorify the strange and the unfit in ways that Harry Potter would understand: Nickelodeon’s “Hey Arnold” and “The Wild Thornberries” and Fox Family’s “Angela Anaconda.”
The Arnold of the title is a freakish football headed orphan. He lives with his grandparents in a boarding house inhabited by a Russian slacker and assorted characters that would feel right at home on the fringes of a Raymond Chandler mystery.
Arnold’s best friend is black, with a silo of hair like chocolate cotton candy. They’re not popular; how could they be? They’re not geniuses. But they’re blessedly decent in the way they take the curves that life throws them.
And, of course, there’s hostile Helga Pataki. Desperately in love with Arnold, Helga shows it by threatening to punt that football head of his. Ah, young love!
“Angela Anaconda” is even less popular than Arnold is. This latter-day Pippi Longstocking is the teacher’s pest. The Tapwater Falls elementary school is filled with kids whose faces resemble those memorable mug shots: school photos.
Angela’s posse has braces and freckles, winged glasses and crossed eyes. They’re paste eaters and klutzes. They’re real, they’re bratty, they’re prone to mean thoughts and act against their own interest out of weakness.
And they get themselves into trouble in their unwavering battle against the arrogant Nannette Manois and her pint-sized Heathers – the teachers’ pets that spoil life for everyone else in their struggle for playground domination.
“Anaconda” demonstrates that even geeks need leaders, and Angela is a natural. And the show reminds me why I never feel nostalgic for my childhood.
Equally freaky, but a more positive role model, is the heroine of “The Wild Thornberries.” Despised by her older sister, encumbered with braces and an overbite, best friends to a monkey, 12-year-old Eliza Thornberry can talk to animals – and they respond!
For Eliza, who travels the world with her filmmaker parents, the advantage of being a social outcast at the bottom of the social food chain is that it gives a resourceful kid a lot of time to explore the world without worrying about fitting in. And she can save her entire family from a pack of hungry lions! Wow!
Of course, self-esteem begins at home. There are equally important things – like math and reading and hitting the long ball – that are best learned away from TV’s imaginary friends.