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Square One Television
two and two always make
a five
written by B on january 13th - 2003
As far
as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far
as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
--Albert Einstein
Barney the Dinosaur: Two plus two is
four / Two plus two is four / Two plus two is four….
Homer: Heh heh heh heh! I can
see why this is so popular! Look at him!
--The Simpsons, Rosebud (1F01, 10/21/93)
Giving personal attention to a
child is overrated. What you see above is a row of five
squares. These are the shapes that make your television
evil. Think of them like levels of Hell.
Square two, or level two of television Hell, is
reserved for the lustful. This includes anything featuring
Carmen Electra, blind date shows with hilarious thought bubbles
(she says she likes rock climbing...I bet she wants to rock climb
my penis!), and any episode of the Real World where a cast member
justifies cheating on their significant other with another cast
member in the hot tub on the first night with the old "five
months is a long time to be away" defense. This sphere
is run by Montana from "The Real World: Boston."
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE
Square three is for people who like the show
Absolutely Fabulous. Jesus Christ, what's your freaking
damage? People who liked Primetime Glick have to hang
around outside this level, passing the time collecting stones to
skip across the lake where all the people who laugh at Who's Line
Is It Anyway? drowned under the weight of their own bad taste.
Square four is for wrestling fans who watch
"for all the crazy characters and storylines."
You assholes are ruining it for the rest of us.
The deepest level of television Hell is square five,
Dave Coulier, and is reserved for the greatest of sinners.
This level is occupied by that one studio audience that decided
to laugh at Joey going "CUT...IT...OUT" and got taped,
so we had to hear them laugh every other time he said it, which
was once an episode for like seventeen-hundred seasons.
Joey Gladstone; more like Joey BADstone.
Which circle of television Hell do you think you'd end up
in? Here is an online test for you to find out! Just
kidding. This is not an online test! This is an
offline test! Your paper should be right in front
of...wait, hold on, I'm tracing the phone call...the test
instructor is IN YOUR HOUSE OH GOD RIGHT BEHIND YOU WITH COMPASS
AND PROTRACTOR OH GOD DON'T GET ENCOMPASSED OR PROTRACTED
And that brings us to Square One, which is a show about math. Square One aired on PBS for 230 half hours spanning two decades, from 1987 until 1992. It's goal was to teach and increase interest in mathematics for middle school children and Mormon kids who couldn't watch actual shows through entertainment, most notably parodies of other shows (Dragnet, The Thornbirds, Roots) and other networks (BET, with their hilarious "Black People Can't Grasp %15 Gratuity" sketch), professional music videos, animation, and game shows with real kids from NYC-area public schools. Regular NYC-area public school kids like James Earl Jones and hip-hop armada The Fat Boys. And Gregory Hines!
Yes, even the high stakes world of competitive tap-dancing was influenced by Square One, as it remains the most popular and seen show about mathematics in history.
Choose your Joke
Quality:
a) P-Boi Quality: "That is, until
Ellen Degeneres' new talk show, 'I Like to Masturbate With the
Number 4' debuted in daytime in late 2003."
b) Saturday Night Live Quality: "In
fact, it even got higher ratings than arithmetic sitcom 'Math-ter
Belvedere.'"
c) MadTV Quality: "MATTTTH
(character stutters and makes a funny face) Math...MATH...MAAAAAAATH
(character skips hilariously, then dives headfirst through plate
glass window). He looks like a man."
Square One Television was produced
by the Children's Television Workshop, which as a child I
pictured to be a giant television shaped warehouse in which
children slaved away to sew up Snuffleupagus's asshole so the
depressed intern in the butt portion didn't fall out like an
anthropomorphic Muppet turd in the middle of one of Big Bird's
songs about friendship. To corner the market on Internet
humor, here is my hilarious Photoshop depicting one of the
characters from Sesame Street doing something naughty!
Square One had a whole thirty minutes to dick around about math,
so of course it had some memorable segments. Remember that
time we learned about long division? Of course not!
Long division sucks my middle nut. The true joy of Square
One involved the masking of knowledge beneath TONS and TONS of
HIDEOUS PUNS. This is your typical episode of Square One:
DIRK NIBLICK of the MATH BRIGADE
The Dirk Niblick of the Math
Brigade theme
right click and "save as" to listen - Mp3 format -
360kb
(Opens door)
Here comes Dirk Niblick of the Math Brigade!
He'll look you right in the eye!
He's always pleasant, never dismayed,
He seldom flusters, or rarely afraid,
"I'll show you numbers that should be displayed!"
He's a hero and what a guuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuy
Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere's Dirk!
Dirk: "This is a number that should be
displayed."
Mr. Beasley: "oic"
Don't blame me if I got some of
the lyrics wrong, it's almost impossible to decipher the Wiggles
falsetto and froggy overture of the theme song. I always
thought they were saying he'd "love you right in the
eye," which would go a lot better with his name. The
guy's name is Dirk Niblick. And his partner is Chest
Rockwell. Those are some great names!
Dirk has one of those strapping masculine voices (like the Blue
Falcon sans Dino-Mutt, and to a less queer degree, gay pilot
Simon Belmont from Captain N) that lets you know he's all about
pussy, and by pussy I mean math. Okay, he could be all
about girl math. That's when you use the techniques and
theory of differentiation, but you get to have your knees on the
ground. Niblick's role in the Math Brigade as I understand
it is to hang around until somebody has a problem related to math
so he can stick his nose in their business and show off. He
does have an inexhaustible knowledge of mathematics and practice,
but "n" cannot equal anything to make up for the fact
that his mouth is connected to the bottom of his nose and all the
way on one side of his face. It's like he's got Bells
Palsy. And that's bowling shoe ugly.
Speaking of ugly, Dirk's next door neighbor is Mr. Beasley.
He seems to be on top of things and is always running some kind
of operation despite having no grasp of basic mathematical
concepts. This might be due to the fact that the top half
of his head is missing and has been replaced with boobs.
This is easily the most self-aware
of all Square One segments, with characters acknowledging that
they are in an episode of a cartoon series. They spend most
of the time talking about how lame the concept is and referencing
previous episodes. In fact, this show is so
self-referential that I at any time expect Joss Whedon to order a
shirtless Spike on set to rape Mr. Beasley.
But at the end of the (eight minute) day, no harm has been done,
and we've all learned an elementary lesson on a shape, number, or
combination of the two. And being part of a Math Brigade is
way cooler than being part of Rob Liefeld's Math Bloodstrike.
LAME MUSIC VIDEO ABOUT MATH
The video for "Nine, Nine, Nine!"
MATHMAN
(coin drops) (boooooooowwwwww diddly-doo-da-doo!)
MATHMAN, your mission is to eat only multiples of URKEL.
When you encounter a number, you will have until the count of 3
to make your decision.
And beware the devious Mr. Glitch.
He will eat YOU...if you are wrong!
MATHMAN! MATHMAN! MATHMAN! MATHMAN! (gling!)
There's one now! (eats it) (brass fanfare)
Yee-haw! MATHMAN! MATHMAN!
Multiples of Urkel, yup, MATHMAN! MATHMAN! MATHMAN!
(gling!)
I....think so! (eats it) (brass fanfare)
Mr. Glitch: Ooooooooh.
Yee-haw! MATHMAN! MATHMAN! I play for the Michigan
Wolverines!
MATHMAN! MATHMAN! MATHMAN!
MATHMAN! MATHMAN! (gling!)
Hmmm, tough one! (eats it) (BOOOOOWWWWWWWW)
Fuck, that was a number!
MATHMAN! MATHMAN! MATH...
AUUUUGH woe is me!
Mr. Glitch: Ha ha ha, On a mountain of skulls, in a castle
of pain, I sat on a throne of blood! What was will be! What is
will be no more! Now is the season of evil!
Download the MathMan video game
right click and "save as" to play - 6.6 megs
AN AWESOME MUSIC VIDEO ABOUT MATH
I'm fine. Please, will you
just let me lie here.
MATHNET
(not Dragnet music)
The story you are about to see is a fib...but it's
short. The names are made up but the problems are real.
DUM...da dum da dum.... DUM...da dum da DUM!
Howie loses his dad's autographed baseball inside Mrs.
MacGregor's house ("This house is NOT for sale!!!1"),
and then the house is stolen! And he'll be in hot water
(cooked alive) if he can't find it... Of course, two homicide
detectives who have lost their minds save the day by locating the
house in it's "new" neighborhood, with the ball right
in the fireplace, where it had been all along.
Such is the world of MathNet, a crazy world I didn't make where policemen are replaced with mathematicians who shoot first and solve questions later! As far as I know, nobody ever got shot on MathNet, which makes me really sad that the show hasn't gotten a remake on FX where we see George Frankly doing Kate Monday doggy-style while sniffing a lines off a Geometry textbook.
George and Kate were
the protagonists, mathematicians with nothing better to do who
pun at each other to mask the sexual tension that would've no
doubt been evident if the Internet and fan fiction had been
around when they started. George is the goofy every-man,
standing up for what he believes in in a corrupt
profession. He carries the bad puns of Dirk Niblick on
throughout the live action portion of the show, without the
crippling facial deformities.
Kate is the seven year old's Agent Scully wearing a tie fifteen
years before Avril, giving a nation of boys sexual fantasies of
the lowest common denominator. Most kids I know really
wanted to multiply with her. It divided our
friendship. I thought she was greater than that. Her
acting ability was obtuse. Plus, she had a role on Days of
Our Lives, so her filmography from point A to point B was
straight. What a cutie.
Stories were told in five segments, one a day for each
weekday. Clues were provided each day so that kids could
follow along at home and solve the mysteries along with the
MathNet crew, except for the random weeks when the writers would
get sloppy and have giant eagles show up to save everybody.
Presented here is Monday's episode of MathNet, The Case of the
Deceptive Data, which has Kate & George trying to figure
out why a popular TV show's ratings plummet suddenly. Could
it be because they spend a third of the show on a cop show about
math? WATCH AND FIND OUT
right click and "save as" to play - Real Media - 2.4 MB
In case you really
wanted to know, here's how the case turns out. Using
information taken from Hoover Ratings families, the 'Netters
learn the data boxes and ratings were tampered with by the evil
head of the Hoover Ratings system, Vicious Vinnie.
Meanwhile, as they race from clue to clue, the citizens of L.A.
are gunned down in the streets. And who the fuck would find
out that Hoover Ratings would run by "evil head Vicious
Vinnie" and not think something was up? If I was
George I would've driven my math-patrol car (a "Geo
Metry?") into the Hoover Ratings building, flamethrowered
every guido in sight, and then kicked Vicious Vinnie on the
ground until his money showed up around him.
Those math cops never know how to get anything
accomplished. That's why the gym cops got all the sexy
girlfriends.
WHAT
WE'VE LEARNED
- Music videos about math are not entertaining.
- Kids are punny. Subsequently cutie patooties.
- Adults are punny. Subsequently self-referential assholes.
- Facial deformities are no laughing matter; quadratic equations
are HIGH LARIOUS.
- The number 935 is not a multiple of Urkel.
- Rob Liefeld should've married a woman with broad shoulders,
tits bigger than her head, and tiny, tiny feet. Also, she
should've been covered in cross-hatching.
- The MathNet movie didn't answer any of our pressing
questions; most of it spent killing cavemen and running
away from bees.
So ends my gift to
you, the magic of Square One Television. If you have never
seen the show, download the songs and clips and enjoy memories
you/I should've had instead of playing NARC all day. You'll
laugh, you'll cry, you'll suddenly get a notion to protect your
pockets. There is no magic in reading, don't believe their
lies. All of the magic lies in math.
You want me to end this article in a clever way? That would
be like pulling a rabbit out of my hat. I'm not that kind
of a magician.
- b
b@progressiveboink.com
For more on Square One TV visit your local library
Also, be sure to check out my personal archives for recently added classics like The Charmings, The Chipmunk Adventure, and No Human Shall Escape the Real World. If you haven't been alive for the past
two and a half years, it's new to you!
