Boy did I love the weekends when I was kid. Getting to sleep in, playing videogames, going outside to play, and of course watching Saturday morning cartoons. As fun as all this was I always used to wish that something eventful would happen on the weekends like some sort of adventure. Well it never happened so I had to settle for watched the Weekenders a show about a bunch of kids and their adventures during the weekend.
The Weekenders was another one of my favorite Disney toons. The setup is pretty simple. Tino along with his good friends Lor, Carver, and Tish just go out of school, it’s the weekend, and they make plans to hangout and have fun. But each weekend there would be some event that takes the group for a spin. Friday would be the start of premise, it would escalate on Saturday, and then on Sunday it would all be solved just in time for them go back to school. What a clever setup. I really do like the flow of this show. I like how they always managed to solve their problems by Sunday no matter how big they may be and they were all pretty realistic problems. I like how diverse the group of kids were. Tino is fun-loving Italian who is pretty much the leader of the group and always breaks the 4th wall to talk to the audience and give his the lesson of the episode, Lor was the Scottish tomboy always full of energy, Carver was the self-proclaimed cool black kid who tried desperately to popular but whenever he realize he was doing something his conscience would always stop him, and Tish an intelligent Jewish girl. But my favorite had to be Tino’s mom. She is such a cool mom, the way she handles Tino is great. She doesn’t talk down to Tino or treat him like a child. She has mature discussions with him, often helps him solve his problems, and even likes to pick on him a few times to get inside his head but she never stops being a mom and setting the rules despite being a single parent. The show had some good works and good stories that were both realistic and relatable. For example, there’s this one episode where the group pretty much has the worst weekend ever and at the end of it all they just laugh because that’s really all they can do. Another good joke throughout the show was the local pizza joint kept changing their name each episode. One episode it would be called alien pizza and in the next episode it would be called robot pizza. The show taught us the value of weekends and how we should savor and enjoy them with our friends while providing us laughs and making us wish we had friends like Tino and the others. This show is also famous for being known as the Pokemon killer as the show aired in the same time slot as Pokemon and when it debuted it stole ratings from the show and took their place as the number watched show on Saturday mornings ending Pokemon’s 54 consecutive weeks at the time. That’s impressive. Keep in mind this was during the middle of the Pokemon craze nobody could touch them. So for the Weekenders to come in and steal the thunder from Pokemon is a testament to how good this show was. The Weekenders were one of the staples of my Saturday mornings and one of those shows that helped influenced my humor. Later days.