look who's calling the pot black

When I was a lot younger, I watched PBS. I remember adoring ZOOM, The Magic School Bus, and Zoboomafoo, but I only had three real addictions as a child.

The first was the animated Redwall series. They originally aired in 1999, but they must have rerun it because I didn’t have a television then. Anyway. I loved the series and ended up collecting almost the entire book series, though I only read the first and Mattimeo, anyway. The series was on Redwall, Mettimeo, and Martin the Warrior, and it was a darn good series, I’ll add. Loved it. Watched it every Sunday morning. I literally told kids I couldn’t play with them then because I had something to do. When I dedicate, I dedicate good.

A few years later I really got into Cyberchase, but that was a math-based show that aired after school. Came home every day to watch it. Eventually I outgrew the Cyberchase math, but I loved it at the time. I get connected to characters – I loved Matt, Jackie, Inez, and Digit, and I loved them fighting Hacker and trying to save Motherboard. It was cheesy but I was ten and darn you, that was my favorite series ever.

What inspired this post is a show that I watched from its premiere in September, 2002 to its finale in April, 2003. I watched any reruns I caught as well, and I’m remembering it because my mother recently purchased the entire series for my sibling’s homeschool. It’s called Liberty’s Kids.

It’s a cheesy name, I know, but it’s about three kids and the American Revolution. It basically taught you about the Revolution and the important people and events in it. We also pushed off anything else to watch it – My brother even dressed up as the Marquis de Lafayette for Purim one year. I remember being astounded that someone didn’t know who Nathan Hale was. I thought of Ticonderoga as the fort, not the pencil, and Ethan Allen as the leader of the Green Mountain Boys, not the furniture company. This stuff worked, though – I mean, I remember this stuff. All of it. (Well, most – that’s why I’m sitting in my younger sib’s viewings). It’s good stuff.

I loved the characters in this show as well. I understood Sarah, who was British and usually took the Loyalist side of the discussion, probably had a crush on James, who was a fierce patriot and was daring and couragous, respected Moses, who was basically everyone’s dad, and adored Henri, who was little and French and funny and lovable. I loved them and memorized the theme song and the works. (I basically ignored the part where no one aged between 1773 and 1782.) Still can’t hear the name Henri without thinking of them. I still love them, to be honest, in that way you adore your old teddy bear. Also, they’re still as wonderful as they were when I was younger.

They were great characters. And after having a heavily fanfictioned dream about these characters (it dealt with backstory. Backstory that they talk about briefly and my brain filled in. I can’t believe myself either), my brain thought, “Oh, god, you can’t write Liberty’s Kids fanfiction. It’s produced by PBS. You can’t do this.”

So since my brain is an IDIOT, it decided to go look it up on fanfiction.net, reasoning, “If no one else has done this, you shouldn’t either.”

Then *BRAINFIZZ* What the hell do you mean, 101 stories? Are you effing kidding me?

And a CROSSOVER? With Pirates of the Caribbean?

I think I need to lie down. Or at least turn the computer off before my fool brain makes me read one of these, which will probably ruin my clean visions of this show forever. I bet you money someone’s written a Sarah/James porn. Just writing that makes me feel sick. Bye. I’m going to bed so I can think in the SATs tomorrow.

~DreamingOfNothing