Oh sorry, we were talking science show hosts. Let’s not forget Weird Al’s parody of Bill Nye (at 9:00 into this episode):
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I honestly liked both. Beakman taught through an inherent silliness, Nye used exaggeration to get the point across. Both were teaching science in a way children could easily understand.
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Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!
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Ditto.
Bill was great on Almost Live, it was honestly a bit strange when I saw his kids show the first time.
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This is also a good time/place to remind y’all that Bill Nye did live-action scientific experiments for the Back to the Future animated series, and that helps to make me hopelessly biased towards Nye.
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ive never seen it and now i can’t look away
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And now I’m trying to imagine Ted Baxter hosting a kids’ science show on WJM-TV (the Mary Tyler Moore Show’s fictitious TV station)…
…and failing in ways only he could.
Clearly this video predates the first time someone dropped a Mentos into a glass of Diet Coke.
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But not the reaction in the mouths or coke cans of children.
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I really, really wanted Mr. Wizard’s robot. I imagine it was a huge pain to program.
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The biggest pain was keeping all the punch cards of the program in order.
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Mr. Wizard’s robot was a Heathkit HERO 1.
Not quite — it was modern enough for its time to use cassette tapes for program storage. And while it could be programmed directly from its onboard hexidecimal keypad, higher-level programming languages were quickly developed to write and compile programs for it on IBM PC compatible computers. ANDROTXT was one that was very BASIC-like in its structure and syntax.
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To continue my earlier short post: It suddenly occurred to me that watching Beakman’s World early only was not only fun and educational, but also kind of a decent prerequisite to getting some the humor of MST3K when I stumbled upon it years later.
While definitely being more New York than Minneapolis in atmosphere, there’s the puppets that always opened the show, the helpful cameraman Ray (making the camera itself a character too), the wacky-but-understandable experiments to test various hypotheses/concepts in the viewer mail, the viewer mail itself, the rotating assistants, the dutch angles, the fisheye lensing!
Looking back, while I didn’t know much about the film industry, the in-universe running gag of Lester the Rat being an out-of-work actor who took the mascot role out of necessity, always made me laugh; That kind of silly “it’s just a show” stuff also familiar in MST3K.
And, last but not least: An astoundingly catchy theme-song. (Thanks Mark Mothersbaugh!)
Watching some clips, I forgot how intensely edited and dubbed with sound effects it was, and yet it all seems to work just fine, gotta commend the VT editors for all the extra effort and it actually working out!
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I also grew up with Mr. Wizard, saw Mr. Lizard needing another Timmy plenty, and saw Bill Nye’s BttF bits, but I’m a Beakman fan, (I still even remember when there was a comic in the comics section of the newspaper). That show paid tribute to Mr. Wizard by having the Penguin’s named Don and Herb. And the Assistants were all really cute, (especially Josie 
)
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If forced to choose between only Bill Nye and Beakman, I’d have to choose Bill. Why? He’s a fellow alumnus.
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It has to be Bill. I can’t tell you the amount of arguments I had with my (late) brother over if I could watch Bill Nye that Saturday.
Of course that all stemmed from my love of the Back to the Future Cartoon because Doc Brown was my favourite character ever, and Bill did the post cartoon science wrap up. What can I say, I was young and wanted to time travel.
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As a small ColdStorage, I watched both. Science is science.
In hindsight, I preferred Bill Nye. There’s a measure of bias in the choice (I had been previously aware of him from his tenure with Almost Live!) but it ultimately comes down to presentation. Nye’s show talked to the viewers like almost-adults (being at least a little aware of a younger crowd tuning in and what their worldview is like at that age). Beakman’s show wrapped the science into a cartoony realm with a story arc each episode – which was fine and merely shows that they were targeting their audience differently, is all.
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