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What you are about to see is top secret

It is a videotape recorded 900,000 years ago, by an alien using a remote-controlled camera.

It shows his attempts to educate a caveman.

They have been codenamed “The Prometheus and Bob Tapes”.

Remember these guys?  Prometheus and Bob was far and away the best segment on the defunct Nickelodeon show KaBlam – get outta here with that Action League Now bullshit – following an alien named Prometheus as he attempts to educate a caveman nicknamed Bob.  There’s a lot to love about this series: novel concept, awesome stop motion animation, absurd adaptations of the premise, and the general slapstick nature the creators employed.  Prometheus and Bob was like a youtube series before we had youtube and strangely enough, its found its second life because of youtube.

Pieces of media like this are what remind me that there is a niche for your concept so long as you are willing to search it out instead of forcing it into an established paradigm.  The wonderful people at Nickelodeon Films even attempted something similar when they tried to adapt Prometheus and Bob into a feature film.  Thankfully it didn’t pan out but it’s press releases like that which remind me how out of touch the majority of Hollywood is with the consumers.  No one wants to watch Bob grunt like a doofus for 90 minutes while he tries to work a pulley system or learn how to bowl, that’s not what the show was designed for.  Prometheus and Bob worked in the same way that the Robert Smigel SNL animated shorts work or any successful and enduring skit does…  sadly, Hollywood has proven that they don’t get it time and time again with the SNL example.  They’re filming a feature length film out of the Macgruber skits with Will Forte….  People got over mocking Macgyver fifteen years ago when The Simpsons did it and just cause you have a popular video on Hulu doesn’t mean people want to watch your bullshit for 90 minutes in a theater.

Anyway, I’ve been writing about the importance of communication technologies and their growth in contemporary culture and looking at something from my childhood like Prometheus and Bob has been pretty damn interesting.  All of the people I grew up with who would watch these two and a half minute shorts are rediscovering them on youtube and dailymotion.  Its like cave art for our mediated past.  We can show these crude stop motion videos to our children on youtube and reminisce about what television and media used to be.  And the great thing is that what used to be funny about the shorts is still funny now.  Watching an apparently retarded caveman try to learn to box or build a treehouse with the help of an alien is still funny to me.  It doesn’t try to be anything more than it is but it uses its concept in nuanced ways that I didn’t even pay attention to when I was younger: I’m talking about the obvious Roswell/Area 51 parody, and the intercut alien language frames, and things of that nature.

I think there’s a lot to admire about media created for young people as it represents people that once held those same tastes almost trying to play to their former selves while mixing in elements of humor and narrative that adults can appreciate.  I have a lot of respect for Prometheus and Bob and I can’t say I’m not jealous that i don’t have a walking remote controlled video camera.