I must admit that there are times where I regret my curiosity. Tonight was
one of those nights. I had the misfortune about wondering what the You Don’t
Know Jack game show on ABC was like. I think by saying it was my misfortune is
an understatement.
First I have to say that I am surprised that after years of being known as
the character of Pee Wee, Paul Reubens would actually get into something where
he once again was playing a character. With the You Don’t Know Jack television
game show he plays this horribly swarmy lounge lizard whose tone is just too
drawn out for what the original concept of this game show was. I’ve never really
thought that Paul Reubens was all that good until he played one of the vampires
in the film Buffy The Vampire Slayer. There he was the complete antithesis of
Pee Wee and it was nice to see him hit the other side of his range. He played
evil pretty well. I’ll never forget the delivery of his line, “Kill him
lots.”
With that out of the way I can’t beleive that they allowed him to play his
YDNJ character in this manner! The original computer game version of YDNJ had a
host that was a quick and flippant host that was more in the spirit of David
Spade doing his old Hollywood Minute bits on SNL News. This character that Paul
Reubens plays is just too slow… too drawn out. Hell, they should have just
tried to get David Spade to do it because he certainly would embody the original
spirit of the game.
All in all the show sucks. The only solice that I can take away from it is
that I only gave it ten minutes of my time. After that I switched the channel to
find something less insulting to myappreciation of what used to be a
really great computer game.
-WW