11/24/2023 0 Comments Class cow wayside school keep it weird![]() The two discs are housed in a single-wide keepcase. (Online sources all disagree where the season breaks go.) Considering we get all of the first thirteen episodes in order, I'm OK with the "season one" terminology. (The show is called "Wayside School" in the UK, so it could also just be a title mix-up.) The original "Wayside" title remains intact on the actual programs.Ĭonsidering the erratic airing schedules of most kids' programming, it's unclear if this is a complete season, a complete first production batch, or just a sampling that Paramount has dubbed a "season" out of convenience. Paramount has collected the first thirteen episodes of "Wayside" into a two-disc set they're calling "Wayside School: Season One," perhaps to avoid confusion with their "Wayside: The Movie" release. At this rate, let's hope we get plenty more sideways stories to come. Nickelodeon recently began airing a second season of "Wayside," which looks to be every bit as fun (and funny) as the first. (Actually, that would be "Big Head Todd," a giant mascot version of Todd that Myron wears.) These are bright, fast-paced examples of smart kids' comedy, obviously inspired by the anything-goes approach to laughs taken by most modern cartoons. The scripts, often inspired by Sachar's original stories, delight in mixing absurd humor with fond grade school memories, and it's fun to see Todd wander through this madcap environment, getting crowned king of the kindergarteners, shoehorned into a dance contest, or labeled the new school mascot. Add in a keen anarchic attitude to the action, and the whole thing has a distinctive old-school flair that's as appealing to older animation fans as it is to younger viewers who are in it for the lunch lady jokes. Production company Nelvana has come a long way since the clunky animation stylings of the 1970s, and with "Wayside," they present a sleek, colorful retro look based on attractively simple designs. And then there are the cows mistaken for substitute teachers, elevators that (naturally) go sideways (and only works when the stairs are broken - but how do stairs stop working?), and the dreaded "teacher's parent conference," in which students evaluate the teachers. Kidswatter (Kedar Brown), the principal with a knack for absurd rules and childish behavior. Jewls (Kathy Laskey), the easygoing teacher who was raised in the circus, and Mr. ![]() He quickly becomes used to the oddball proceedings, and makes fast friends with Maurecia (Denise Oliver), a hyper, roller-skating gal who crushes on him the dim-witted but sociable (and highly ambitious) Myron (Martin Villafana) and Dana (Lisa Ng), with her love for rules and regulations. The series is presented through the point of view of Todd (voiced by Mark Rendall), a new student unaccustomed to Wayside's weirdness. Eccentricity rules, with teachers who enjoy acrobatics, lunch ladies who love a good sweat sock stew, and students who sit upside-down in their desks, feet reaching toward the air, head never seen. Escher was in charge of the rest of the layout). The collaboration worked, and in 2007, the two networks began airing "Wayside" as a regular series.įans of the book and its several sequels know the setup: instead of a school with thirty classrooms on one floor, Wayside Elementary got built sideways, so it's thirty stories high, one classroom per floor (and it would seem M.C. The adaptation began in 2005, when Nickelodeon and Canadian cable outlet Teletoons teamed up to adapt a handful of tales from Sachar's 1978 debut book, Sideways Stories from Wayside School, into a one-hour mini-movie (later released on DVD as "Wayside: The Movie"). Still, it's fun to see the lunacy of Sachar's sideways-thinking characters in cartoon form, with modern animation being a perfect fit for the books' offbeat humor and unbound imagination. ![]() It's taken nearly thirty years to bring Louis Sachar's Wayside School to life on TV screens - although it was doing just fine coming to life in the minds of several generations of readers.
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