RRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNN!

No, it never came up.

Oh good, it's time for another round of Helga briefly seeing another side of a family member. Bob is… more or less a lost cause, but every now and then something manages to puncture his enormous bubble of blithe self-absorbtion, and without Miriam or Olga around to distract him, suddenly Helga's bone-deep unhappiness…

Ha, good point. God, Simmons would wither in post-No Child Left Behind schools, forced to teach endless test-prep. The very concept of "standardized" would just kill his soul.

It's not subtle.

Wait, they aren't?

What, like I'm not going to suggest something from an old edutainment game? Because this prompt says one thing to me and one thing only, and that thing is Treasure Cove! If you know of a better way to spend the summer than SCUBA diving through a magical underwater wonderland to clean up a whimsical oil spill, I don't…

Economics for kids! That's the essence of "The High Life," at least, demonstrating the importance of properly balancing supply and demand, as well as the concept of market saturation. Gerald's dilemma makes genuine economic sense, as does his solution (though it depends on his mark being surprisingly gullible for a…

Plate o' shrimp.

No, no, the rhyming Becktionary.

WHO'S KICKING WHO AROUND NOW?!

There was not a whole lot else to do at lunch. Although I did play on the school's flag-football team, come to think of it. Again, blocking and rushing. Hitting your growth spurt before other kids has its advantages.

"Mud Bowl" is another one of those "Arnold was always right, if only everyone would realize it" kind of episodes, which can get tedious but in this case is livened up by delightful sports slapstick. Plus, Helga gets to be a full-on aggressive jerk, and the girl's always fun when she gets all wound up. Gerald catching…

"Freeze Frame" is another of those episodes that's more a genre exercise than anything else, but the execution is so much fun that it doesn't matter how obvious the solution is. The central Hey Arnold! dynamic of the kids getting involved in some mundane situation and blowing it way out of proportion still works. And…

So far so good!

I always assumed he was some kind of ape.

Yeah, this episode isn't as much fun to revisit because as an adult you can see every gag and plot beat coming a mile away. The good stuff is in the details. There's something inexpressibly delightful about Oskar's vocal enjoyment of the Buddy Love filmography. Great delivery by Steve Viksten (RIP). Plus, I always…

<fry>Oooooh, now I get it!</fry>

Holy shit, why is that not a movie I can watch right this second?

"Whether humanity is worth saving remains an open question" could be a fitting closing line for just about any Newswire, really.