Farewell Mr. Wizard: An Appreciation

A Guestblog from The Scorebabe

Like most kids, I spent much of my childhood wishing I was on various TV shows. Many nights were spent in pleasant dreams of being one of the dancers on Kids Incorporated. I entered the You Can’t Do That on Television annual Slime In religiously, hoping to get the chance to be covered in green goo alongside Moose, Lisa, and that dreamy Kevin Kubusheskie. In the deepest recesses of my heart, though, I really wanted to sidle up next to another Nickelodeon idol: Mr. Wizard.

As the child of a microbiologist and a natural born nerd, I developed a love of science early, and Mr. Wizard’s World was one of my very favorite programs. Most of the experiments were completely accessible, easy to duplicate at home. The ones that weren’t – like his freezing a rose in liquid nitrogen and then smashing it to bits – were so damn cool, you were happy just to watch him do them.

I devoured the book Mr. Wizard’s Supermarket Science and would have done every experiment in it – twice – if only my mother would have tolerated it. (“You want to do WHAT to a hot dog with two forks and a battery?!”) I remember having the coolest science demonstration in second grade thanks to Mr. W teaching me how to make spaghetti dance, and I spent more than one happy afternoon powering a tiny foil boat around a pie dish with a sliver of soap.

It’s rare for a sixty-something year old man in a brown sweater over a button down shirt (which is how I always picture him) as cool, but, damn it, he was. He was just so low key and down to earth and never talked down to the kids on the show no matter how thick they were. (I was insanely jealous of the kids that assisted Mr. Wizard, judging them harshly for their ignorance and bad haircuts.) For me, Mr. Wizard was more influential than Mr. Rogers, and it was with great sadness that I learned of his death on June 12. Thank you, Don Herbert, for teaching me the glories of science . . . and the allure of elderly former actors who make their livings entertaining the nerds of the world.