Television

The resident teenager in the house occasionally becomes obsessed with certain tunes. Such has been the case in the past couple of evenings when he has entertained us with endless choruses of a song called "You Are a Pirate". Apparently the song was written for and performed on a television show called "Lazy Town", a children's program produced in... Iceland.

Yes, Iceland.

I've never thought of Iceland as being a hotbed of television production. Aside from National Geographic articles entitled something like "Iceland: Land of Fire and Ice", my only impressions of the island involved a joke about elevator operators in Mad Magazine, a sketch about "Icelandic Honey Week" on Monty Python's Flying Circus and an exchange student who arrived at the start of my senior year in High School and who quietly disappeared a month or so later.

But why not television produced in Iceland? It's done just about everywhere else and what with all of the abundant geothermal energy, there would be lots and lots of power for lights, cameras and action.

There's quite a bit of television going on in and around the Dallas area in general and here in Allen in particular. Like kid shows? Allen is where a certain purple dinosaur was 'born'. Barney is still being produced somewhere nearby - one of the costumed secondary dinosaurs (if you will) actually works in the same building that I do. The same company which brought you Barney also produced a show called Wishbone and shot the exteriors locally. When I first moved here, the flats for the little town where the primary story took place could be seen off to the west of Greenville Avenue just across from the bowling alley. Wishbone involved a Jack Russell Terrier named "Wishbone" who was dressed up in all sorts of cute or disgusting costumes (depending on your point of view). Wishbone the dog was apparently quite prolific, too. For a time, if I ran into an owner of a Jack Russell Terrier here in Allen, the owner would be quite specific as to how his or her dog was related to Wishbone and to what degree. That prompted me to tell visitors that Allen City Council had passed a law declaring that every third dog in the city had to be related in some way to the famous TV pooch or be put to sleep.

While not in Allen, proper, the Dallas ranch is within a 10 minute drive from the Harrell homestead. "Southfork Ranch", once far removed from suburbia at the time Dallas was in its prime, is now somewhat surrounded by tract homes. If a revival of the show is in the cards, the producer will have to take a careful look at camera angles just to avoid having tourists in every shot. Southfork has become a popular tourist attraction with busloads of folk popping in to see where JR Ewing and the clan once lived.

Walker, Texas Ranger was shot in the metroplex in general. You recall the show starring the guy whose picture is on Superman's pajamas... and if you don't remember the show, be prepared to face the wrath of Chuck Norris, or endure the endless stream of Chuck Norris jokes which, like a particular Pirate song, seems to be one of the obsessions of the teenager in the house.

Somehow, I have this feeling that in less than 6 months we'll be wishing that we were inj Iceland.

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