Last Updated on: 6th October 2013, 02:05 pm
If I needed any more proof that having the flu sucked major league amounts of ass, I got it at about 5:30 this morning. Since my sleep is even more screwed up than usual these last few days I’m up at odd hours watching TV for lack of much else to do or the energy to do it if I had to. So there I am, flipping channels trying to find something to help me go back to sleep when I see something that I thought I would never see again. Ok, let me rephrase that. Something I hoped I’d never see again. Right there in front of me on channel 16 was a rerun of one of the stupidest shows in TV history. Harry And The Hendersons.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the greatness that is Harry, I’ll be kind and fill you in. Around 1987 the Harry And The Henderson’s movie came out. It was a cute kids movie kind of deal about a family that happens upon Bigfoot while out camping or something. I can’t remember how they found him, for some reason I’m thinking they hit him with their car but that’s neither here nor there. If anybody knows, shoot me an email or leave it on the new comment boards when they’re up. But anyway, the family decides for whatever reason that they’re going to take this big bastard into their home for awhile, I suppose to nurse him back to health since they just finished putting a vehicle up his ass. One thing leads to another and the family grows to love Harry in spite of all of the hilarious trouble he gets the family into and all of the stuff he breaks. They decide to keep him as their pet and as their friend even though they know that they’ll have to go to great lengths to hide him from the Bigfoot hunters and the people who live near them who are quite rightly suspicious when they see that the folks next door have a big fucking unidentified animal living with them. Pretty ok concept for a movie when left on it’s own. Heck, I remember thinking it was pretty cool back in the day. Of course, the key part of all of this is “when left on it’s own,” which it wasn’t.
Flash forward to 1991 when somebody decides that this movie would make a mighty fine TV show. How he got anybody else to see things his way is something I’m only failing to comprehend a little bit less than how it managed to last for 2 years. Seriously, this show was like ALF, only lame. Yeah, this show was exactly what ALF would have looked like if ALF was a Bigfoot and if all of the funny parts were cut out, and if you replaced the Tanner family with people who couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper bag and changed their name to Henderson. Oh yeah, don’t forget to replace the good writing with whatever it was they were serving us here. And while we’re changing things, replace all of ALF’s witty dialogue with classic lines like “grrrrrr” and “errrrrg.”
Now having said all of this I have to shamefully admit that for a short time I was a fan of this show. I used to watch it with my brother and sister and all the exposure started to go to my head. Thankfully, even the kids, who were 5 and 3 at the time soon realized just how fucking idiotic this show was and didn’t want to watch it anymore. And when you consider that we’re dealing with kids who still watched Sesame Street for years to come, that’s pathetic.