Being that my claim here on this blog is that I’m the world’s biggest LazyTown fan, you might have an image of me in your head where I have watched all of the episodes a million times over, and could read you the scripts backwards and forwards. Not only is that not the case, but you might be surprised to know that it has actually been a few years since I’ve sat down and watched an episode just for the sake of it. That’s not a testament to any lack of enjoyment of the show, rather, just a consequence of my love for LazyTown being deep and multifaceted enough such that I don’t absolutely need to watch the show all the time. Still, it’s a good idea to revisit the show from time to time to refresh my thoughts and feelings for it. I figured it was about time for that, so a few weeks ago, I started to give the whole series a once over.
Before I go on, I want to briefly rewind to last year, when I did a LazyTown interview with Shelby Young, the actress who portrayed Stephanie in the pilot episode of the television series. While speaking with her, I was able to convince her to release the previously unseen pilot presentation for LazyTown fans to see. I am profoundly grateful for Shelby’s generosity and willingness to do so, as her actions uncovered a part of LazyTown that very well could have stayed hidden away somewhere in a Nickelodeon storage warehouse forever. It’s an incredible treat as a LazyTown fan to be able to fit a new piece of the LazyTown puzzle in, because the full picture is then one step closer to being realized.
My metaphors for this whole “big picture” thing might seem cheesy and cliché, which is partly because they are, but it’s just the plain truth. You see, I had not watched any LazyTown episodes since the pilot presentation was released, and while the concepts from the pilot were certainly familiar, there was an appreciation that was unknowingly lost to me because it had been so long since I had watched the series. Since I am watching the episodes again, now I can identify even the most granular pieces of dialogue or direction shared between the pilot and the aired episodes and use them to develop a more complete appreciation of LazyTown.
One way in which that is done, is by taking note of the kinds of things that were added, subtracted, or kept as it. This allows for a deeper insight into what kind of things are important in LazyTown, and that’s what I am talking about when I mention all this “big picture” stuff. For example, there is a shot in both the pilot and what aired where Sportacus is doing a handstand on a ball/melon, and then smiles to the camera. That exact shot was for whatever reason important enough to where it was kept in mind for years until it was finally able to be realized on camera.
The revelation was important enough to me to where I felt like I had to make a video for others to see. The video being a showcase for each and every one of the scenes in the pilot, comparing them to their counterparts in the aired episodes. So that’s exactly what I did. It is my hope that LazyTown fans will watch the video that I made and have the same inner delight that I had when I was able to connect all the dots between the pilot presentation and what was eventually aired.
There was a time when I made LazyTown fan videos regularly. They were mostly stupid and pointless, but they made me laugh so that was reason enough for me to do them. For a very long stretch of time, and for no particular reason, I fell out of making LazyTown videos. However, I’ve been coming around to making videos again, though with a different aim. The kind of videos I make nowadays are more meaningful. They’re meant to do more than just make me or others laugh. They’re meant to help fill in the gaps that LazyTown has, and to try to make others see the same things in LazyTown that I see.
lztblog.wordpress.com 