Remember 'Beakman's World'? The Wacky Scientist Is Still Big In Latin America
Remember 'Beakman's World'? The Wacky Scientist Is Still Big In Latin America
September 26, 2015 7:39 AM ET
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Beakman, played by performance artist Paul Zaloom, was on TV in the U.S. 20 years ago, but is still beloved in Latin
America, where it plays in reruns.
Courtesy of Sony Pictures Television
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A children's television program that ran for only five seasons in the U.S. 20 years ago has gone on to enthrall kids around the world in reruns. The show was Beakman's World and its star was a wacky pseudo-scientist in a neon green lab coat and a Don King wig. The show is still beloved in Latin America, where the performance artist who played Beakman tours a stage version of the show to audiences of thousands.
Beakman's World mixed elements of MTV and Pee Wee's Playhouse. But the premise was straightforward: The title character answered kids' science questions, such as why does a bump appear on your skin after a mosquito bite.
Beakman began as a comic strip, called Yes You Can with Beakman and Jax, created in 1991 by Jok Church while he was working at Lucasfilm answering letters from children who wrote to the director.
"I just offered it to my local paper, the Marin Independent Journal," Church says. "I gave it to them for free. And I'd mail them to a list of feature editors and if they said, 'Please stop sending me this, we don't want it in our newspaper,' they still got it next week anyway."
It caught the eye of folks at Columbia Pictures Television. The man hired to direct the show happened to know a performance artist named Paul Zaloom, who took a zany approach to current events in his shows.
More:
http://www.npr.org/2015/09/26/443168428/remember-beakmans-world-the-wacky-scientist-is-still-big-in-latin-america
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Yay, Beakman![/center]
= new reply since forum marked as read
Mark Ritts passed away years ago, and was saddened what I heard about it - loved Lester.
Nice to hear Zaloom is still pretty popular down in South America. 
