Pete & Pete Will Live On Forever
We had it lucky growing up. The kid shows we had were truly great, like The Tick, and Pinky and the Brain. But before an invulnerable idiot in blue spandex foiled a chair-faced madman’s plan to deface the moon, and before two albino lab mice tried to take over the world, there were two red-headed brothers with the same name, whose whose epic suburban adventures became the stuff of cult legend.
The Adventures of Pete & Pete blended together the anxiety, awe and adventurousness of The Wonder Years, the over-the-top dramatics of Baz Luhrman (before he was even famous) and added in a dash of random crudeness from You Can’t Do That On Television – this was a Nickelodeon show after all.
Masses Say: What the Heck?
There are plenty of people who just don’t get it. Pete & Pete was melodramatic, but light-hearted; mundane but extraordinary; familiar but bizarre; geeky but cool; childish but insightful. And if the preceding sentence doesn’t make sense, you can see why the show might be difficult to understand. But if you can grasp these ideas all at the same time, Pete & Pete provides compelling explorations of individuality, love, self-acceptance and brotherhood.
Highlights
Season two, recently released on DVD, had some of the show’s best material. Who could forget the time little Pete (Danny Tamborelli) was grounded through the Fourth of July? Inspired by America and its tradition of freedom, he uses a Statue of Liberty paperweight to dig an escape tunnel under his front yard. When he breaks ground at the other end of the tunnel, there is a legendary shot of a miniature statue of liberty breaking through the ground, rising out of the lawn like Pete’s freedom from the ashes.
Big Pete (Michael Maronna), in another episode, faces one of those challenges of growing up familiar to many of us: to find out whether his long-time best friend, Ellen (Alison Fanelli) is just a friend, or romantic soul-mate. Not content to explore a cliche at face value, the episode juxtaposes it against little Pete’s scheme to become a riboflavin-saturated time traveler when the clock falls back an hour at the end of night daylight savings time. In the end, the show wraps these chaotic, nonsensical themes together in a way that celebrates honesty, second-chances and just going with the flow when good things happen, even if you don’t understand them.
A Legal High
It’s difficult to describe this show to someone who doesn’t get it. I’m familiar with it from when I was a kid, but when I watch a good episode of this show as a young adult, I always become physically disabled by the weight of the profound life truth I’ve just witnessed on my TV screen. All I can do is sit on my sofa, suddenly unable to feel my arms or legs, and utter: “Wooooaaaaaaa.”
I think it happens to my sister, too.
A Happy Ending
Most of the people I share this show with just look at me funny and tell me I’m weird. They just see a show that is outlandish, and is so far removed from reality, they can’t make sense of the humor or the story.
But there’s something I see that they don’t. I think the words of big Pete describe it best: For those of us who do get it, The Adventures of Pete & Pete offers us “a way of looking at the world… making everything in it a little bit stranger, and a little bit better.”