17 replies on “Upsetting Day: A Very Special Today’s Special”
I definitely watched this as a child in Metro Detroit. CBC must have been pumping it in from across the river.
I lived in the Detroit area in the late eighties and early nineties too. Definitely remember the show (not this episode). Merritt needs to continue her journey into Canadian children’s television further with an article on “The Raccoons,” which features the most awesomely bad closing credits theme “Run with Us.”
I was worrying that this was a mutated degeneration of The Friendly Giant. Glad that’s not the case.
God we were convinced that our elementary school vice-principal (the one who administered corporal punishment according to further scuttlebutt) was the Friendly Giant’s civilian identity, even though we were in rural Alberta and the show was from out East.
I would sometimes catch this on Nickelodeon or YTV when visiting each set of grandparents and I always felt a little too old for it, but if I had seen this episode back then I probably wouldn’t have drank so much in the third grade.
My main take-away from this is going down a rabbit hole of wondering if Jed McKay, Canadian 80’s kid’s TV writer, was somehow the same as Jed MacKay, current Canadian writer of some fairly awesome Marvel comics.
And…I mean, probably not? comic!Jed doesn’t look old enough to have been writing (checks calculator) 40 years ago. But I can’t find anything definitive, and it’s haunting me!
Also, realizing that this show I remember from my youth is 40 years old…damn, that’s the kind of thing that stings. Between that and taking my son to an 25-year anniversary showing of the Phantom Menace this weekend…well, time makes fools of us all!
I wondered this too! Google and IMDB can’t seem to keep them straight.
I used to watch this on PBS on Maine, but we got a lot of shows I’ve since learned we’re not typical American faire.
Also… now I just keep singing the words “todays speeecial” in my head, with the rest of the melody and words being merely ghosts that haunt me more by their absence.
Me too, I was in New Hampahire and I used to watch this show along with 3-2-1 Contact and Pinwheel.
“For adults mired in a perpetual adolescence by multiple financial crashes and unprecedented global crises in their lifetimes” – why you gotta hit that hard, merritt?
I remember watching this episode (and more of the show) on Nick Jr. back before they had the budget to make their own shows. I thought it was some weird dream that they’d do an episode like this, but I guess not!
Nickelodeon actually had it before Nick Jr.; I remember watching it there in the early 80s. (I think it came on right after Pinwheel.)
A few months back, something shook loose a memory of it for the first time in decades, but I couldn’t remember the name of the show. I googled based on what I did remember, but “kids show mannequin coming to life department store security puppet” was somehow both too vague and too specfic. Somewhere around the 10th page of results I found it. I’ve blocked out what the first 9 pages were, and I try not to think about why.
I remember it coming on right after Pinwheel too.
I, too, am an American who used to watch Today’s Special on early Nickelodeon, back when they mostly just licensed foreign children’s shows instead of original programming.
I saw an episode of Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles where one of the mannequins looks like Jeff (and another one looks like the mannequin from Mannequin). I appreciated the specificity of the reference!
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17 replies on “Upsetting Day: A Very Special Today’s Special”
I definitely watched this as a child in Metro Detroit. CBC must have been pumping it in from across the river.
I lived in the Detroit area in the late eighties and early nineties too. Definitely remember the show (not this episode). Merritt needs to continue her journey into Canadian children’s television further with an article on “The Raccoons,” which features the most awesomely bad closing credits theme “Run with Us.”
I was worrying that this was a mutated degeneration of The Friendly Giant. Glad that’s not the case.
God we were convinced that our elementary school vice-principal (the one who administered corporal punishment according to further scuttlebutt) was the Friendly Giant’s civilian identity, even though we were in rural Alberta and the show was from out East.
I would sometimes catch this on Nickelodeon or YTV when visiting each set of grandparents and I always felt a little too old for it, but if I had seen this episode back then I probably wouldn’t have drank so much in the third grade.
My main take-away from this is going down a rabbit hole of wondering if Jed McKay, Canadian 80’s kid’s TV writer, was somehow the same as Jed MacKay, current Canadian writer of some fairly awesome Marvel comics.
And…I mean, probably not? comic!Jed doesn’t look old enough to have been writing (checks calculator) 40 years ago. But I can’t find anything definitive, and it’s haunting me!
Also, realizing that this show I remember from my youth is 40 years old…damn, that’s the kind of thing that stings. Between that and taking my son to an 25-year anniversary showing of the Phantom Menace this weekend…well, time makes fools of us all!
I wondered this too! Google and IMDB can’t seem to keep them straight.
I used to watch this on PBS on Maine, but we got a lot of shows I’ve since learned we’re not typical American faire.
Also… now I just keep singing the words “todays speeecial” in my head, with the rest of the melody and words being merely ghosts that haunt me more by their absence.
Me too, I was in New Hampahire and I used to watch this show along with 3-2-1 Contact and Pinwheel.
“For adults mired in a perpetual adolescence by multiple financial crashes and unprecedented global crises in their lifetimes” – why you gotta hit that hard, merritt?
I remember watching this episode (and more of the show) on Nick Jr. back before they had the budget to make their own shows. I thought it was some weird dream that they’d do an episode like this, but I guess not!
Nickelodeon actually had it before Nick Jr.; I remember watching it there in the early 80s. (I think it came on right after Pinwheel.)
A few months back, something shook loose a memory of it for the first time in decades, but I couldn’t remember the name of the show. I googled based on what I did remember, but “kids show mannequin coming to life department store security puppet” was somehow both too vague and too specfic. Somewhere around the 10th page of results I found it. I’ve blocked out what the first 9 pages were, and I try not to think about why.
I remember it coming on right after Pinwheel too.
I, too, am an American who used to watch Today’s Special on early Nickelodeon, back when they mostly just licensed foreign children’s shows instead of original programming.
I saw an episode of Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles where one of the mannequins looks like Jeff (and another one looks like the mannequin from Mannequin). I appreciated the specificity of the reference!
https://brontosin.space/system/media_attachments/files/110/515/660/650/494/448/original/3dd3a55a36e6f011.webp
It was on programming as far away as Kansas in my childhood. Part of the trifecta of Today’s Special, Pinwheel, and Sesame Street.
There’s something wrong with the Alf Hunter image, I can see everything but his feet.
I also watched the hell out of this show on Nickelodeon in the early ’80s.
For several years, pretty much everything on Nickelodeon was shows brought over from either Canada or the U.K.
A lot of it really stretched the definition of “children’s programming” (The Third Eye, anyone? Tomorrow People?)