"Mom, don't you realize that if I don't watch TV, I won't be able to keep up with the cultural level of my peers? Where else can I experience the vast wasteland that we call the 20th century? Where else can I get chewing gum for my eyes?" - Melissa Joan Hart as Clarissa Darling when her mom banishes her from TV for a week
Clarissa Explains It All: Season One DVD Review
By A.J. Carson
Clarissa Darling (Sabrina the Teenage Witch's Melissa Joan Hart) is a typical teenager with typical teenage likes and dislikes. She likes junk food. She likes driving, even though at fourteen, she's too young to have actually gotten behind the wheel yet. She likes to dance to the beat of her own drummer. She also likes her best bud, Sam (Sean O'Neal), who prefers to enter Clarissa's home by climbing in through her second story window. She hates germs and barf, especially since it tastes like "orange juice and pizza." She also hates her pesky little brother, Ferguson (Jason Zimbler), a budding Republican she not-so-affectionately calls Ferg-Face. And her parents? Well, she's on the fence about them. Janet (Elizabeth Hess) runs a children's museum and is a major health food nut. Soy sorbet, anyone? Marshall (Joe O'Connor) is an architect specializing in gimmicky buildings that resemble what goes on inside them - a giant molar houses a dentist's office, and an enormous pickle is home to a pickle-themed restaurant. As parents go, they're okay, but they are parents, after all.
Welcome to the world of Clarissa Explains It All, the high-energy sitcom that premiered on Nickelodeon in March 1991 and helped to anchor its Saturday night Snick programming block ("It's Snick, or it's not"). Its writers went on to work on some of TV's most popular and groundbreaking shows, including Friends and Sex and the City, but Clarissa's simplistic story lines will be familiar to anyone who has watched family sitcoms in the last fifty years. In "The School Picture," Clarissa wants to express her individuality by wearing a cool outfit in her school picture, but Janet insists that she dress conservatively. It looks like Janet will win this argument, until Clarissa discovers that her father was once an iconoclast, too. His picture was even left out of his high school yearbook because his hair was too long. Confronted with this information, Janet agrees to let her daughter pick her own outfit, but Clarissa is horrified when her individualist clothing actually makes her look exactly like everyone else. In "Haunted House," Clarissa tries to scare away a houseguest, her annoying aunt, by pretending that the family's house is haunted. In "Brain Drain," Clarissa signs up for a TV quiz show just so that she can beat Ferguson, but discovers that the show's producers want them to work as a team. In "The Bully," Clarissa defends Ferguson from a nasty schoolmate, but suffers when the bully transfers his attention to her. All of season one's plots are similarly simplistic.and they've been used before by everything from Leave it to Beaver to The Brady Bunch.
While Clarissa's plotlines may not be innovative, the show does manage to jazz them up with some creative storytelling. Clarissa often interrupts the story to present newsbreaks in which she reports on the action - complete with onscreen graphics. She uses her computer to create plot-related videogames, and to do things like track that annoying relative using a computerized surveillance system. The series is also prone to fantasy sequences, as when Janet and Marshall reenact a scene from their favorite movie in "No TV." These techniques and effects are imaginative but low-tech. Everything about Clarissa is low-tech, from its cheerfully cheap-looking sets to its not-quite-Emmy-caliber acting.
While the series is pretty charming (Melissa Joan Hart is especially irresistible), Clarissa hasn't aged well. Or maybe I haven't aged well. After all, even though I was older than Clarissa's target audience when I first watched these episodes back in the early '90s, at least I was closer to the target audience then. Even so, current day teens and tweens may not get references to the now-elderly Madonna, much less Martika or the Nelson twins.
The thirteen episodes that make up Clarissa Explains it All: Season One are divided onto two discs. The discs are housed in thin, clear keepcases. The front covers feature photos of Hart and Zimbler. The back covers include episode titles and brief episode synopses. The interiors simply feature colorful pink and blue patterns. The cases slide into a cardboard outer sleeve decorated with a picture of Hart.
The plain, static menus feature the same photo found on the cover of the cardboard sleeve. Viewers can play all of a disc's episodes or select an individual one. The episodes are not divided into chapters.
One annoying trait of this DVD set that needs to be mentioned is that both discs begin with six minutes' worth of commercials (for Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, Spongebob DVDs, and The Brady Bunch DVDs). The commercials can be bypassed using the skip button on your remote control, but since they are followed by the mandatory copyright screen, it is impossible to simply jump to the menu.
