It Came From YouTube: Kidd Video

Like a lot of kids in my generation, I watched too much television when I was young. It wasn't as easy back then. We didn't have Disney or Nickelodeon. We had one day a week, in fact only half a day, to pack in all the cartoon goodness we could get. We had Saturday mornings.

The thing of it is, you forget some of these things, and then one day, you randomly remember some show you watched as a kid. Not a big name. Not a Smurfs or a Tom & Jerry. Not even a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. No, some show that was on a couple of years, somehow hooked you, and then vanished without a trace.

Such a show was Kidd Video.

Kidd Video had a typically ridiculous premise. A rock band of four young people gets sucked into a cartoon world, The Flip Side, where they are pursued by Master Blaster, a fat guy hell bent on forcing them to create music for him to profit from while making everyone else do anything he wanted (kind of like the RIAA actually). There was of course a fairy on their side, complete with headband and leg warmers. Seriously, the only way this show could have gotten more eighties is if Micheal Jackson had occasionally run through holding a Pepsi with his head on fire.

So what was the hook? They were a band in the spawning MTV generation. That allowed two things. First, each episode featured a popular song being redone by the band playing in the background, typically during a Scooby Doo-esque chase scene. I distinctly remember them doing a cover of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax" (I'm guessing they didn't concern themselves as much back then about song meanings). Then, at the end of each episode, they would have an actual video by the band.

Well, I got curious (which is almost always a bad thing), and Googled them, and by God, there they were. The ridiculous outfits, the mediocre but catchy tunes, the whole mess, right there on YouTube. There are times when I don't know if the internet is a good thing or a bad thing in terms of information never dying. This, my friends, is one of those times. The highlight of the video, for me anyway, is that it gives us a taste of what diversity meant in the eighties. As you will see, the band featured three white guys with different hair types and colors (which was all the diversity one required back then), and a Latina girl who says not-at-all-stereotypical things like "Aye aye aye". It's a small world indeed.

And so, without further ado, I give you: Kidd Video