The It Was a Thing on TV Podcast Network

One week from now, the kiddies (and an adult or two) will dress up and scour the neighborhood for Halloween treats.  I wish we had a treat for you.  Instead, you get this Canadian entry from the early 70s with known quantities (and one really good and very appropriate quantity), but with little humor.  Who puts in a legitimate science segment in the middle of comedy intended for kids?  This show did!

We begin the final 50 episodes of this podcast (tentatively) with a sci-fi series which started in the 1970s, was rebooted by Nickelodeon in the 1990s, and was rebooted yet again in the 2010s.  Was the third time a charm?  There must be a reason why we're covering it, besides being a CW entry.

ABC's TGIF block wasn't all rousing successes like Full House, Family Matters, and later Boy Meets World and Step by Step.  You had absolute failures like this entry from The Jim Henson Company, a sitcom which had Dinosaurs roots but lacked Dinosaurs' charm.  Bobut was no Baby Sinclair.

Today is the release of the big comic book movie of 2026, something about a brand new day.  To celebrate, this time we're looking at a very short-lived cartoon from the same general franchise, which was rushed to TV screens.  It couldn't be half bad because the lead was voiced by one of this podcast's favorites, right?  Wrong.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, there was a crew of space garbage pickers before previous installment Salvage 1.  (See episode 399.)  NBC aired the pilot episode with little fanfare and little success.  However, something happened within two weeks of the pilot airing which gave NBC a reason to turn this pilot into a full-fledged series, albeit for just a smattering of episodes.

With the new season of Doctor Who happening right now on Disney+ and the BBC, we look back at one of our earliest episodes in 2020 when we looked at when Doctor Who did a special crossover with EastEnders in honor of the 30th Anniversary of Doctor Who. Also, Noel Edmonds is involved for some reason.

Yesterday, May the Fourth have been with you.  Because of the unofficial holiday, this installment will cover a facet of the Star Trek universe.  (How many of you checked out after that intentional faux pas?)  The Ewoks were the breakout stars of the 3rd released movie of the Star Wars franchise, while droids were a big part of the series from the start.  Combine the two in separate Saturday morning cartoon franchises, and that means kids will want the toys, adding gobs of money into several coffers.  The cartoons themselves?  Typical disposable Saturday morning fare.

Chico's birthday is coming up and he chose this as his Money in the Bank.  In 1982, NBC had an upstart sci-fi drama starring David Hasselhoff and a talking car.  Fast forward 15 years and the franchise now had quintuple the vehicles, with quintuple the drivers.  Do more talking cars mean more success?  (We're covering it.  There's your answer.)

One of the biggest pop culture sensations in the 1980s was an omnipresent personality for the computer generation named Max Headroom.  Not only was Max Headroom a talk show host, a soda pitchman, and visible on different mediums in the latter half of the 80s, but this phenomenon even got a scripted television show which ran over two seasons, a show about a post-apocalyptic dystopia reminiscent of 1984.

In 1988, the film Alien Nation was a theatrical release.  That spawned this televised adaptation of that film.  While only running for a single season, the franchise showed it had popularity and staying power, as televised movies and other forms of media appeared after this show's demise.