Your Entire Childhood Is On YouTube

When casually browsing through the deepest recesses of YouTube, one can come across the most amazing thing. That was the case recently, when, while researching for another Junkee piece, I happened upon a veritable gold mine of ‘90s nostalgia: episode upon episode of the kids’ quiz show, A*mazing. To say it brought back beautiful memories is an understatement. What other relics of our childhoods were to be found lurking around the depths of YouTube’s addictive labyrinthine wormholes? The answer is SO MANY.

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A*mazing (1994-98)

Oh, the days of sitting down at 4.30pm after school (with a packet of Arnott’s Pizza Shapes, of course) and watching kids in daggy overalls compete against one another by spelling words on a giant keyboard and hunting for letters in an elaborate maze. And who can forget the segment where competitors had to play Tetris, Donkey Kong, Mario Kart, or that other game where they had to splat bugs? The winners then had to find keys in the maze to score points for their school and possibly win a Gameboy. Hint: there was always one behind the cactus!

I can’t think of a single person of my generation that didn’t want to be on A*mazing (doing the math, it works out that 2600 kids got to play — the luckiest 2600 kids in Australia). While an effort to bring the series back was a failure, the original remains an essential part of ’90s kid-culture. Thanks to some YouTube hero, you can watch an entire week’s worth of competition between St Joseph’s and Burnside, and relive the amazing memories for yourself.

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Round The Twist (1989-2001)

Have you ever… ever felt like reliving your childhood? Then it’s a good thing that somebody had the smarts to upload the entire series of this Australian classic — based on the equally memorable work of kids’ author Paul Jennings — on to YouTube. It can’t be understated just how oddly compelling this show was, and how willing it was to confront actual issues that plague teenagers in a strange and often hilarious way. Plus, it had the catchiest theme music on TV, which is half the battle, really.

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Ship To Shore (1993-96)

Kids’ fare has often been a better place to see multiculturalism on television than anywhere else, and one great example of that was Ship To Shore, the infectiously-scored series about a group of kids living on the fictional Circe Island off the coast of Perth. As the kids outwit, outplay and out-sass the likes of Hermes Endakis, the show also dealt with issues such as environmentalism, bullying and divorce. Heath Ledger even appeared in one episode, and it was co-written by the late, great Everett De Roche.

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Spellbinder (1995)

This Australian/Polish co-production was a fantasy science-fiction series about a parallel universe and the malevolent civilisation that lives there, including the evil Ashka. Mega-selling Young Adult fiction franchises have been based on lesser concepts, so it’s somewhat interesting that an original show like this aired to after school audiences on Channel Nine. To this day, I still remember Ashka’s power stone charge movement; do you?

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The Genie From Down Under (1996-98)

A show about a selfish British brat who comes across an opal that houses two Australian genies named Bruce and Baz, and then inherits a property in the Australian outback while one of the genies falls for the girl’s mother. This, dear friends, was the plot of an actual television show that really existed. It’s a truly bonkers premise that took I Dream Of Jeannie and transported it to both upper class England and true blue Australia. It’s actually surprising how well the show holds up: Alexandra Milman, as the obnoxious Penelope Townes, is a plum-mouthed slapstick ying to Rhys Muldoon’s Akubra-wearing yang.

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The Ferals (1994-95)

The Ferals was Australia’s own mad and, yes, feral cousin to The Muppets. In what’s become a running theme in this nostalgia trip, The Ferals is a truly strange piece of TV. Who on earth green-lit a series about ugly, flea-bitten animals, and considered it appropriate viewing for young audiences? Then again, the entire Australian television landscape was a weird place in the ’90s — remember Cluedo?

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It’s A Knockout (1985-87)

Long before Big Brother’s rip-off Friday Night Live, Australian TV viewers had It’s A Knockout, a Gladiators-style competition program where seemingly well-adjusted adult individuals debase themselves by wearing oversized costumes, getting pummelled by an assortment of inanimate objects, and blatantly ignoring health and safety regulations. With a host who assumed the people watching were idiots (perhaps he was right), the show now reads as a deliciously insane piece of kitsch madness. A revived version for Network Ten in 2011 couldn’t spark the same enjoyment, and it was canned just eight episodes later.

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T-Bag And The Pearls Of Wisdom (1985-1992)

Unlike the other shows on this list, T-Bag wasn’t an Australian production, but was there any kid who didn’t secretly want to be sick, just so they could take a day off from school and watch this bizarre British kids’ show (not to mention the rest of ABC’s daggy educational morning lineup, which also included such shows as Art Attack, Mathnet, and Ghost Writer)? Featuring a witch and her henchman — improbably named T-Bag and T-Shirt — there were actually 13 different series of the program, but it’s T-Bag And The Pearls Of Wisdom (1990) that everyone seems to remember. And rightly, too; it was wickedly entertaining.

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Glenn Dunks is a freelance writer and film critic from Melbourne, and currently based in New York City. His work has been seen online (Onya Magazine, Quickflix), in print (The Big Issue, Metro Magazine, Intellect Books Ltd’s World Film Locations: Melbourne), as well as heard on Joy 94.9.