Hello there! Welcome once again to Millennial Misremembers, where I look back at TV shows from my formative years. You know, the content that makes all us millennials go OMG when it’s brought up at an ill-advised “gender” reveal party you can’t believe your freshman-year roommate invited you to? But like, then it’s crickets, ’cause no one actually remembers anything about the show? That’s where this column comes in!
This go around, I’ll tell you what I think I remember about Clarissa Explains it All. Then, I’ll rewatch and recap the pilot (S01E01 “Clarissa’s Revenge”). Even if you never do end up on Jeopardy, nostalgia’s always a fun ride! And this is nostalgia. Clarissa Explains it All is a whopping 30 years old — its pilot aired March 23, 1991. Let’s hop to it then, shall we?
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What I (mis)remember!
Clarissa (Melissa Joan Hart) is a typical 90s middle-schooler (high schooler?) in that she looks like Lisa Frank and Sanrio vomited on top of a grunge rocker. Her room has a window with a ladder and her BFF, a dude, climbs through it all the time. Then, in some special set like several years in the future, she becomes a journalist? Also, there was some weird episode where her dad was an evil scientist …
(Also … one of my college profs was a writer on this show … )
Let’s rewatch the pilot!
We open on Clarissa, bemoaning her name — Clarissa Darling. If she could have chosen her own name, she’d have gone by a single moniker, like Madonna. Clarissa tells us that she’s gonna be explaining a lot of things to us, so we’d better get to know her a bit. Basically, she likes candy; They Might Be Giants and driving (!?). And she hates: home-done pixie cuts, germs and barf.
Clarissa also introduces us to her family, whom she doesn’t like all that much. Her mom, Janet (Elizabeth Hess), works with little kids (EWW!), which Clarissa thinks is some sort of indoctrination. Her dad Marshall (Joe O’Connor) is some sort of avant-garde architect. And then, there’s Ferguson Ferg-face (Jason Zimbler), Clarissa’s little brother. She describes him as a dork who’s a burr on her butt. O-K.
And then and then and then Clarissa tells us it doesn’t matter how much she dislikes her brother because today? Today, he’s gonna die! WTF.
Cue cheery opening credits.
After the credits, Clarissa explains that her history teacher taught her that revenge is necessary but still doesn’t say why her brother is evil. Then, she introduces her pet alligator, Elvis (“He looked a lot bigger in the catalogue”). Just then, her BFF, Sam (Sean O’Neal) climbs up through her window.
Dang. Clarissa is a jerk. She tells us Sam is going through an awkward phase because he’s waiting for his hormones to kick in and that he feels neglected because his dad is a single father!!! Meanwhile, Sam has brought Clarissa a bunch of goodies, including a straight-jacket he literally stole off his aunt’s literal back.
Sam wants to know if maybe Clarissa is overreacting with this whole revenge thing. So, now we learn WHY Clarissa is hellbent on messing with her brother. As it turns out, Ferguson brought her training bra to his class’s show and tell. Woah. Also, Sam doesn’t bat an eye at the mention of a bra.
Unfortunately, Sam leaves Clarissa to get herself out of the straight-jacket, which she’s tried on for some reason. Because Sam’s leaving to run away since his dad (a sportswriter) has bet his colleagues that Sam will make the football team. Clarissa doesn’t think Sam leaving is a good idea, albeit for very selfish reasons, so she tries to convince him he should stay. Sam, however, is under no delusions about his sports prowess.
Clarissa tells Sam to go along with the tryouts and just pretend he gets injured. School liability insurance is so expensive nowadays; no one’ll touch him.
The next day, Ferguson makes a bunch of ableist jokes that I’m not even gonna type. Clarissa then gives us an “update” (like, a picture-in-picture news update). Her mom exploded a dozen eggs in the microwave, so she made tofu pancakes instead. And her dad, who is an architectural genius, couldn’t even get through one page of comics in the paper.
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Ferguson butters his mom up by saying he’s gonna watch a doc about a tribe in Papua New Guinea and write a report for extra credit. His dad’s bummed they can’t go shoot some hoops instead. Ugh.
Sam comes in with a black grease strip under one eye and pretends it’s a black eye (🤦 ). Meanwhile, Marshall is now trying to get Clarissa to play basketball with him. She begs off and starts to have a “man-to-man talk” about how she’s a girl … Ugh. But, Sam reminds Clarissa she promised to help him.
Sam and Clarissa go over the terrible-no-good football tryout and we see a play-by-play on-screen (like on a sports commentary show). Clarissa didn’t realize it’d be so terrible, but Sam says it’s even worse because his dad said him trying out was the best thing ever — since his divorce, that is. Still, Clarissa tells Sam not to worry. They just need to figure out the Ferguson sitch, and then they can solve this football problem.
Clarissa has made a computer mock-up of her Ferguson plan. Step one) … step two) Ferguson in a straight-jacket, step three) Hook Ferguson up to a bunch of balloons, so he’ll float away!
Meanwhile, Fergy’s downstairs spraying whipped cream on Oreos, watching cartoons. Clarissa baits him with a lie that their parents finally bought him a bike. She’s able to get him into the closet to look for it and then rassles him into the straight-jacket.
Unfortunately, Sam is the one who floats up, up and away with the balloons, not Ferguson. The silver lining is that Sam sustains some injuries that get him out of football. Despite multiple injuries, Sam bemoans the fact that Clarissa didn’t get her revenge after all.
Never fear! Clarissa got some video footage of Ferguson discovering his first zit. And, that’s revenge sweet enough for her.
Does it live up to the nostalgia?
All right, so Clarissa Explains it All is way meaner than I remember it being. Which, I suppose, shouldn’t surprise me given what I know about my prof who wrote on it (fun fact, Suzanne Collins of The Hunger Games was also a Clarissa writer). There were also a lot of jokes that clearly woulda flown over my head as a kid. This is the second Millennial Misremembers I’ve done now, and I’m pretty bothered that the bumbling dad trope is so present in both shows I’ve covered. To make matters worse, there’s really no examination of why it’s so wrong for Sam’s dad to pressure his kid to play football. Also, the casual ableism and sexism is très worrisome, but a product of its time, I suppose.
All that being said, I really did appreciate the casualness of Clarissa’s bra being a central plot point, though perhaps it should have been clearer that the violation of her privacy, rather than the fact that she wears a bra, was the embarrassment. And, some of the out-there stuff was fun too, in that it was so specific (Elvis the alligator, for example).
All in all, I do believe this show is a surprising revisit, and I’d recommend it for that alone. Even if I can’t say I loved it or that I’d want to rewatch more. Were you a fan of Clarissa Explains it All? What should I misremember next?
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