The Worst Kids' Show Ever Made: BIG BAD BEETLEBORGS

Welcome back to Birdbath, motherfuckers.

I used to watch this show. It was like Power Rangers, but they were children who got turned into bug-themed superheroes by a Liberace/Jay Leno/Elvis Presley/Boo Berry-styled ghost who was trapped in an organ in a haunted mansion. They fought supervillains and monsters and occasionally a comic book writer who was enslaved by the former groups. This was real, I swear to God.

Its name was Big Bad Beetleborgs.

When I think about Back 2 School, the great theme and title of our first issue under this beautiful new regime, of which I am the self-appointed generalissimo, I think of when I called school "school". I think of the waning days of summer as the fall inevitably rolls in, when I have to go sit in a room for hours and hours as I'm taught about things like math and Christopher Columbus and making Thanksgiving turkeys out of my hand. I think about when I was a kid and, when I do that, I think about Big Bad Beetleborgs.

I think I've been irreparably damaged for it. I answered why I dressed up like a clown and sat in Ankeny last volume, but I think an equally valid answer is this show right here. It is a show that makes you wonder how everyone who watched it didn't dress up like a clown and make people do tricks for your entertainment.

How could I not?

There's nothing about this show that connects. These children are granted powers by Flabber, the aforementioned ghost in the organ - who is in fact a phantasm from the seventh dimension - and take after the superheroes from an in-universe comic book series, who are bug themed. They also are granted vehicles from this, with two of them getting a car and the red one getting a plane. Or maybe it's a helicopter. It flies. The vehicles are also bug-themed.

The haunted house that Flabber resides in is also filled by all of the Universal movie monsters. Not the actual ones, but thinly-veiled ripoffs. The Frankenstein was a coward, named Frankie, which was short for Frankenbeans, like the meal. I think the Dracula was also a coward and his name was Count Fangula. I think they were cowards, mostly. They had Wolfie, a wolfman whom they treated as their dog despite his sentience, in some manner a kept person. There was a mummy who could rap. I fundamentally think this affected what I was as a person.

There was a Jawa, too. I don't remember the Jawa.

The red Beetleborg - Jo, the only girl in the group - was the youngest of the ‘Borgs, but was then hit by an errant spell and transformed into a new body. This was never resolved. She is played by a new actress for the rest of the series. Flabber cast another spell on her that made it seem to everyone else that she was the same child that her parents and family members remembered and loved. 

This show got two seasons. The second theme of the show, after the first season tackled beetle superheroes, were metals. The second season of the show was about the metal versions of these beetles. Now, you may ask, weren't they already wearing metal armor when they were superheroes? Yes, they were, I'd answer. So what's the difference between their original forms and their new Metallix forms? I wouldn't answer, at that point, because I feel like having that long of a conversation about Beetleborgs out loud would kill me.

It's not a good show.

More than once, I've attempted to rewatch Big Bad Beetleborgs and have been fundamentally unable to. It is completely, utterly terrible. It is unbearably bad. I'm someone who has watched CATS (2019) six times in a row (and will do it again this year) and I cannot do this. I have tried to watch it alone and with people, on my computer and on television, in the middle of the day and the middle of the night, and I have not managed to get through more than a single episode.

So why am I writing about it? Why am I choosing to inaugurate my first issue of Birdbath with this bizarre, forgettable '90s children's television series?

Because I can see him.

I can see him, so sucked into the big box television that he doesn't notice anything outside its frame, putting VHS tapes into the box, watching them over and over and over. He's just a little kid. Things are so simple. An hour feels like thirty and all he does is play and sit in the sun and sleep. 

He was me.

My first home was the only home I'd ever known. I still went to Blockbuster Video with my mother. I knew the names of the twins that were my closest friends. My first dog still snorted and ran around and licked my face. I picked up every roly-poly I saw, felt them tickle my skin as they crawled over my fingers. My grandmother watched me draw with chalk on the back patio. Her hair was still black. She was still alive.

My world was so small, small enough that I could love every piece of it. 

Then I grew up. I was on the edge of that precipice, with VHS tapes in a knit basket and a Kindle Fire on my mom's bedside table. I felt it change. The rest of the world suddenly was at the tip of my fingertips, when I had never looked past the trees of my neighborhood. I went to schools where you took the work home. I got taller and wider and somehow more scared. I made friends and lost them and fell in love and fell out of it. Is this what every generation has felt? This anxiety as things go faster and faster and it just seems like nobody can keep up?

You remember, too. How little we were, our hands and feet, how we laughed at anything. I still do that. We were kids and we watched kid's shows. We watched Big Bad Beetleborgs or Tak & The Power Of Juju or Johnny Test or whatever it is you can't forget. We watched our garbage, parents unable to imagine how we could stomach something like that. Maybe we wonder that ourselves, why we watched something so bad.

We forget that we are continuous. There is no "kid you" or "teen you" or "adult you", nor any of the things in between. There is only you. We are not moments in time. We are straight lines, forward and backward, stretching on from our birth and ending in our death. We are the continuity, we are the change. These moments back then are just as important as the moments in front of us - and just as unimportant. 

We watch media because it inspires something in us. There are paintings that bring us to tears and movies that raise us to anger and songs that fill us with something we cannot describe. And yes, there are shows that bring back memories to us, things we have not thought about in so many years. People forget, too, how much that we matter in that equation. Beetleborgs is not a good show, but it is a show that allows me to look back on who I was and what I once loved. It is a show that meant a lot to me. For that, I can only be grateful. 

I hope you find something that makes you feel like that. I hope you write about it and you think about posting it here. I'd love to read it. 

P.S., here’s the Beetleborgs intro - a piece of music that has haunted my memory for the past fifteen years and ruined more than one conversation with my brothers: