Set Your TiVo...
...for Wonder Showzen. No, it has nothing to do with Seattle. It has everything to do with insanity. A faux kids' show...with puppets, and kid reporters, and weird found footage, and deranged ditties, and the world's perfect child, Tyler.
The show opens to the sound of a group of children singing, "Kids show, kids show/Oh my God it's a kids show/Kids show, kids show/Change the channel for kids" while a montage of a girl in that magic setup where knives are thrown at your head, a tiny cowboy, a cartoon character licking ice cream, a photo of one of the creators as a young lad, a man using a whip to break something held between two boys' teeth, a hysterical baby girl on Santa's lap, John-John Kennedy at his father's funeral, an African crowd, and finally, the flaming Hindenburg crosses the screen. Phew. We're only 20 seconds in.
If you remember the episode of Chappelle's Show where Q-Tip and Dave Chappelle sing songs about VD with a chorus of children and puppets...and you watched that and wondered how can they possibly do that...multiply it by 50 and you're closing in on Wonder Showzen.
You may be exhausted after the half hour, but in a good, hallucinatory, did-I-just-really-see-that? kind of way. Catch it, because it's so genius that it probably won't last.
You can download a bootleg of the pilot, Kids Show, here.
Technically, Wonder Showzen airs Fridays at 6:30 pm on MTV2. But since it's MTV, they replay it almost constantly. We suggest just getting a Season Pass on TiVo.
