#tbt: Out Of This World

#tbt: Out Of This World

To be a successful sitcom between 1985 and 1994, your show had to have:

A) A Smart Ass Kid (Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties)

B) A Nerd (Urkel from Family Matters)

C) A Moron (Cody from Step by Step, or Boner from Growing Pains)

OR

D) An Alien or some such freak (Small Wonder/Alf)

My favorite category was always D.  Any show could have some combination of A, B, and C, but it was the true pioneers of TV that strived for something higher.  Out of This World was one of these shows.  I only watched it in syndication on Sunday mornings*, but it was brilliant.  I barely remember the premise because I was about 7 when I watched it, but I do know that it starred a girl who was half-human and half alien.  She lived in California with her mother and her uncle was a comedically funny fat guy.  Her dad was an alien, voiced by Burt Reynolds (YEAH. BURT FUCKING REYNOLDS) and we never saw what he looked like.

Every episode, typically when the lead girl Evie was going through some drama, she would call her dad on her pyramid machine?  It was this big pyramid diamondy thing that she could use to communicate with the father she never saw.  Evie had a boyfriend too (some guy who became HUGE on General Hospital) and if memory serves, he didn’t know she was an alien.  Her only powers were that she could stop time by sticking her fingers together (because it’s easy for tv), but she mostly only stopped that paint can from spilling in the opening credits.  When the show got long in the tooth, she got some other powers as well, but they were weird. Other than that, her life was mostly normal outside of the fact that her mom banged an alien and was totally ok with not only never seeing him again, but bearing his child.  Basically Out of This World was the precursor to shows like Sabrina the Teenage Witch, where our lead protagonist has typical HS problems that get complicated by the fact that she has powers and doesn’t want people to know about them.  Every single episode was basically that, and that didn’t make it any less awesome.  I don’t want to get too in-depth talking about the misadventures and hijinx Evie went through over the course of the four years of the show, but I did find this youtube link of an episode:

http://youtu.be/TfOh_0r8V0M

You haven’t lived unless you watched this show.

* Everyone knows Sunday is where the bootleg kids shows went.  If you were a big league cartoon or teen sitcom, you were on Saturday.

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