Yellowstone, Zoboomafoo

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Y

Yellowstone- A show that I haven’t watched and don’t plan on watching starring Kevin Costner and other actors whose skillsets primarily consist of doing above average western rancher accents and growing decent patches of facial hair. I’m pretty sure the show revolves around Kevin Costner arguing for fracking while everyone tries to tell him that fracking is pretty bad for the environment, but goddamn it it’s his land and his country and he’s gonna frack if he wants to frack. There is a whole hullabaloo about Kevin wanting to purchase the entire Alaskan oil pipeline just to fuel his ranch lands and his farming pursuits. The US government tells Kevin that he can’t simply purchase the pipeline, and Kevin throws a fit. Season two features Kevin learning about nuclear power. The US government is suspicious about Kevin harnessing nuclear capabilities, but Kevin ensures them that he, “totally isn’t gonna like, nuke D.C. so that they can no longer bother him about his purchase of the Alaskan oil pipeline”. That is good enough for the US government, and they let Kevin develop a nuclear reactor on his ranch lands. Kevin is so consumed with trying to create a new strain of American Wagyu Cattle that he forgets to properly check the reactor. The reactor completely malfunctions and causes a Chernobyl-level fallout in the middle of Montana. Kevin has the US government come in to clean up the radioactive leakage and while they’re distracted he races up to Alaska to seize control of the pipeline. Season two concludes with Kevin getting in an argument with the middle-eastern cashier at a gas station in eastern Washington who won’t let him buy out the store’s supply of old trapper sausages for the final stretch of his road trip to Alaska.

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Z

Zoboomafoo- A show featuring a real spotted lemur named Zoboomafoo and his handlers—Great Value versions of Steve Irwin created using the machine from The Fly—that aired on PBS Kids from 1999 to 2001. The show was intended to teach preschool age children how to responsibly care for and handle animals, but what it actually did was convince children that it would be fucking awesome to be a lemur instead of a captive in an authoritarian household where “fruit snacks” refer to organic produce and not gummy candy and PBS Kids is considered a passable substitute for Saturday morning cartoons. The show flip flopped between real life, animation, and a psychedelic sort of Claymation that was equal parts cute and terrifying. In the real-life scenes, Zoboomafoo’s handlers, let’s just call them Irwin Clone Attempt #1 and Irwin Clone Attempt #2, would decide on an animal to feed on set. They would do this by selecting a specific image on a feeding machine which had pictures of a lemur, an armadillo, some other shit, and, conveniently, their own two faces. The types of food in each section of the machine corresponded to the diets of the animals portrayed. Naturally, the sections for Irwin Clone Attempt #1 and Irwin Clone Attempt #2 contained Cap’n Crunch Berries and pizza. I always sensed it, but this just confirms it: Those fools were sparking up before the show! The Irwin Clones were baked as hell! The show’s entire concept screamed a bunch of stoned bros sitting around a writers table pitching a kid’s TV series. For being absolutely cooked, they actually developed a half-decent product, which went on to air for 65 munchies-filled episodes. Zoboomafoo (the lemur) passed away from kindey failure in 2014, probably because he got into the Irwin Clone’s grass stash, hit the mini oreos in the snack machine, and his body went into toxic shock from all the processed garbage that a lemur should not be eating.