During the later half of the 80's there was a popular trend in television of first-run syndicated sitcoms. These shows weren't on the networks, but instead were sold to local channels to air whenever they wanted. At that point in time the only sitcoms on local channels were reruns of former networks hits, it was very unusual to have original programing debuting on non-network channels. Anywho....I used to love all these syndicated sitcoms for two reasons: they were mostly crappy and I could watch the same episode more than once in a given week. Where I grew up, we got the Baltimore and Washington D.C. channels, so I was able to watch the shows at two different times each week, and on top of that...the DC channels aired the shows a week later than the Baltimore stations so each weekend I had two different episodes (even though I had seen one of the episodes six days earlier) I know....whatever...I didn't have a lot of friends growing up so this kind of thing was exciting to me!
One of my favorite shows that was on every weekend was OUT OF THE WORLD. I almost forgot about this show until I stumbled across some clips of it on good ol' YouTube the other day. OUT OF THIS WORLD told the story of a young girl named Evie who was the daughter of an alien father and an earthling mother. Her father was away fighting a war in space, but she could communicate with her dad via a little box that glowed and opened up by itself. We never saw her dad, but his voice was supplied by Burt Reynolds. (I didn't know that at the time, but thanks Wikipedia!) Since Evie was half human, half alien she has some alien powers. Her coolest power was the ability to stop time. Whenever Evie wanted, she could point her two fingers at each other and everything around her would freeze. Then if she wanted to, she could touch someone or something and unfreeze just them. Clapping her hands together one time would unfreeze everything else. You can imagine the wacky times Evie had with those powers!
Great, great show that I used to watch ALL the time! It ran for four seasons from 1987 to 1991, in fact it's first episode aired a few weeks after I started high school and the last episode aired around the time I graduated! It also debuted a year after ALF started, I suppose it was inspired by that great sitcom as well! Anywho...someone needs to pick OUT OF THIS WORLD up and start running it again. Or better yet, how about a little DVD box set treatment!??? Who's with me!?
Honest to goodness, they just don't make `em like that anymore!
Joe Alaskey in the hizzouse!!!
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