Outerscope

Every now and again, I hunt down this old educational series that piqued my imagination: Outerscope. Kids--er, small puppets with largely frozen expressions juxtaposed against adult human hands that move with human grace--build a clubhouse out of scraps and go flying off to other worlds. The episodes came in tantalizing bits--tasty morsels but you'd never get any closure. Did they ever get to where they were going? Where did they escape? Will they ever get home? Was it as good as my memory said? Why did I like it?

In the past, I haunted Youtube and Amazon for the collected episodes with no success. It came up again, and this time I found the first episode, and yes, I enjoyed it as much as I did as a kid.

Nick Sagan and others have called it creepy. The puppets are somewhat lifelike, somewhat not, so maybe a little creepy, but you just have to use your imagination, suspend disbelief as you did when you were a child. Even then, I didn't believe they could survive in space with what little they had, but that they did anyway stimulated the gray cells.

Finally, here is the first episode, cued up for you:

I'll see if I can hunt others down.

Here are Nick Sagan's comments on the show:

"[M]ost disturbing of all: the "Outerscope" segments. "Outerscope" was a serialized puppet show about a multicultural group of kids who turn their clubhouse (or maybe just a bunch of old junk) into a rocketship and explore the universe with it. They meet aliens, have all kinds of adventures, and along the way they learn lessons about tolerance, friendship, etc. Not a bad premise for a kids' show. Just two problems with the idea. 

"First, the puppet children were incredible creepy. They had a certain "dead mannequin" quality, with weird, oversized hands. "Man hands" some might say. 

"Second problem: These segments are frightening just in their tone. Again, imagine you're six years old. You watch these dead-eyed big-handed (but otherwise likeable) puppet kids fly off into outer space and get lost. They try to get home, but each episode they just get further and further away. Everything goes wrong, one puppet kid sadly looks at the other and says, "I guess we're never going home." End of episode. Sleep tight, kids. 

"Vegetable Soup scared me silly when I saw it, and yet I couldn't turn away. Why did I keep watching it? And why do I remember it fondly today, nightmarishly weird though it was?"