Wake, Rattle & Roll! You really have to have been born within a certain span to be familiar with this show, having slipped into the memory vortex since it aired in the early '90s. Produced by Hanna-Barbera back in 1990, this was shrewdly scheduled on weekday mornings before school rather than on the crowded weekends, giving us kids a bit of a boost before we headed off for the day.
I dreaded going to school, and "WR&R" ran when I was in junior high -- the most brutal period of my educational tenure -- so it made for a nice bit of whimsy in an otherwise dreary stretch of adolescence. It was a zany mixture of live-action hijinx and animation, Everykid Sam Baxter and his robot friend D.E.C.K.S. (Digital Electronic Cassette-Headed Kineric System) having crazy escapades in their basement lab, technology like the People Processor and the Mondo-View often going awry. Home video games had hit big at the time, so they figured into plots, and robots were popular, too, D.E.C.K.S. (sporting Hawaiian shirts and magnetic tape for hair, sounding like one of the Ninja Turtles) joining the ranks of Conky from "Pee-wee's Playhouse," Number 5 from "Short Circuit," and Kevin from "Saved By The Bell."
I'm going by memory here, but I believe that D.E.C.K.S. was invented by Sam's grandfather, and at one point Sam befriends a neighbor girl or classmate who's introduced into his world. Sam's elder sister was his bane, often antagonizing him via a monitor. D.E.C.K.S. would transmit cartoon shorts through the screen embedded in his chest, treating us to "Fender Bender 500," "Dino & Cavemouse," "Undercover Elephant," and my personal fave "Monster Tails." The series moved to the Disney Channel in '91 or so and was re-titled "Jump, Rattle & Roll" to air in the afternoons. You can find scattered episodes on YouTube, but I like to think that the complete fifty-episode run is somewhere in the Warner Bros. vault, or barring that, some wonderful soul has it all on VHS.
