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babydracoSo I'm doing these. Um, not every episode of the entire series, because it ran for 10 years, usually with a full season's order of 22-30 episodes. Many of those episodes are NOT worth talking about and get increasingly less interesting to me. Nor do people have to comment, I'm just trying to keep my brain moving on days when I should be writing better things but don't feel like it.
I've also been taking screenshots of some of their more insane outfits.
Anyhoozle.
A sunlit morning in an idyllic two story stone facade home. The outside of the house does not at all resemble the Spanish style split level house which will later be used as the Walsh home and only a couple areas of the inside do. A “teenage boy” wakes up in bed to the sound of a Godzilla alarm clock. His hair. Is so.Eighties. Late Eighties to be precise, that time at the end of the decade when all the white guys who'd gotten mullets started letting them grow out but it hadn't gotten long enough for the grunge look. It could also be described as "hockey hair". It probably borders on unfashionable for LA. Anyway, I put “teenage boy” in parenthesis because most of the cast was in their twenties, and obviously so, except the ones who were even older and looked it.
In oddly sharp contrast to the cast of the Lifetime anniversary bio pic, where they are all played by tiny baby faced children. Although Brian Austen Green and Tori Spelling really were a little bit younger than everyone else.
A dark haired “teenage girl” dumps out a box labeled “Brenda”. She is portrayed byinfamous child star Shannen Doherty. In contrast to the neat appearance of the boy's room, hers is a disaster area. That's because she's the Jessica to Brandon's Elizabeth Wakefield. Because this is basically Sweet Valley High but in LA instead of Orange County and with a Rule 63 Elizabeth. For the rest of the series, they will even live in the same type of aforementioned Spanish style split level and the twins will have an adjoining bathroom just like in the books. The phenomenal success of this show is probably one reason why SVH's tv adaptation never really took off. This ran for ten years and defined the fashion and slang of a generation. Most of the main cast still has A or B list name recognition, they can all still usually get work, even though almost none of them ever had the same amount of success again. The SVH show lasted about two seasons and sank like a stone, nobody remembers who was in it, unless you were a huge fan of the book versions and young enough to read Tiger Beat and you have an amazingly good long term memory for pop culture facts. I think the 90210 21st century sequel series ran into the same problem, the 90210/SVH For The New Millennium was already on and it was called Gossip Girl. It did alright, it got okay ratings but it was not the phenomenon Original Flavor was.
The boy's name is Brandon. Brenda complains to her mom (known henceforth as “Cindy Walsh”, their dad is “Jim”) about potentially having “the wrong hair”. She does, by the way.
The camera is panning through the streets of Beverly Hills, showing off the wealth and cultural contrast to Minneapolis,including the requisite palm tree lined streets. The twins pull up to their new high school, where we see a “valet parking” sign (I can't bring myself to believe that's a real thing). We're also seeing several examples of high end cars, the sorts of cars no high schooler outside a town like this one would drive and much ethnic diversity (including some traditionally dressed Arab men) we will basically never see again at this school. And there's some amazing footage of extras that's all coming together stylized yet natural and seamless, expertly directed, this is when the network probably started to sit up and get interested. Brandon and Brenda look at each other, non plussed. They are dorks in head to toe beige.
If there's any flaw to this sequence, it's that some of the things the kids are doing around them that made them hip and cutting edge at the time would invoke laughter in 2016. Or on my first day of high school... Like the Cool Skater Dudes. One of the ways the show illustrates the wealth and technological advancement of West Bev is by showing footage of someone using...wait for it...a remote car starter. Someone else walks by with what appears to be a lap top computer. West Bev has a radio DJ instead of the typical boring Morning Announcements (the 2010s series updated this to an on campus tv show). The DJ is super annoying.
West Beverly is played on 90210 by Torrance High School, coincidentally also the same location for the original Sunnydale High on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When both shows returned to a high school setting much later, Torrance no longer allowed filming, the noise from the Season 3 Buffy finale was too much for the neighbors. There are a lot of similarities between the shows (sometimes beat for beat and reusing the same Torrance High stock footage, I kid not) because Buffy was a horror parody of 90210.
Buffy also worries, like Brenda, about showing up with "last year's hair".
A wild David Silver appears. He's so tiny and dorky and squeaky voiced! We also see his equally dorky blond friend, Scott Scanlon who is a regular character for awhile and seems like he's going to be part of the main gang but, well, we'll get to that. A hot blonde girl honks at both of them consecutively to get out of the way, then she stops to have a conversation with a huge curly haired blond guy in a Letterman jacket. They talk about her new nose job, and her new driver's license, and it's strongly implied they used to date, or have some sort of off/on romance. Okay, let's not beat around the bush, their names are Kelly Taylor and Steve Sanders and they're going to be very important.
A bus pulls up and dislodges several older women and one young, kind of frumpy girl with glasses. In a school this wealthy, where the Walshes are embarrassed at their middle classness, it is important that she's the one taking the bus. That is poor, yo, nobody takes the bus in high school unless there's no other choice. Although it should be somewhat suspicious that it is not a West Beverly official school bus she's disembarking from but a city bus and the women she was riding with are clearly implied to be domestic help...
Brenda begs Brandon to sit with her at lunch. I remember hearing that California schools traditionally hold one school wide lunch period, with several food carts or stations positioned around campus and everyone just eats where they feel like. This is pretty sharp contrast to how they do it on my coast, especially at the specific rural school I went to. Lunches were staggered in like three large groups. Your assigned lunch period was your lunch period and you needed permission from a teacher to go to a different one. If it was lunch time, again, you were required to be in the lunch room unless you had a pass to be somewhere else. You could eat outside but you had to be where an adult could see you, which meant one of the two or three picnic tables near the windows. From November to April, you probably wouldn't have wanted to eat outside anyway. You were absolutely not allowed to leave campus for lunch, not even as a senior. Did people sneak out? Oh yes, if they had cars, but officially, no way. I bet it's even worse now in the hyper security era.
Kelly asks Brenda to sit with her in science to avoid having to be lab partners with a fat girl who clearly has no friends. The overweight science teacher, like all the other teachers we see in this episode, looks totally demoralized watching the discrimination.
Brandon is in Spanish with Steve Sanders, the girl from the bus, and one other major character we've yet to be formally introduced to (It's Donna Martin, alright?). Then Brandon goes to try out for the school paper, which is, surprise, run by Bus Girl, whose name is actually Andrea Zuckerman. She has thick glasses, terrible frizzy hair and dresses like a teacher, which doesn't help the fact that the actress was almost 30 when cast. She tests him by offering to let him cover a story on the girl's water polo team and cynically expected him to fail, which he does but maybe not for the reason she thinks. Andrea struggles with the concept of men being human, like a lot of baby feminists who have never had an actual relationship.
Kelly and Brenda talk on the way to lunch. By the way, Kelly's outfit today in addition to the orange top and polka dot vest, includes high waisted denim shorts with lime green cotton biker shorts underneath and electric blue socks. She's telling Brenda how important it is not to be seen as a friendless loser “Like that guy over there” in reference to Brandon, who is eating alone. Brenda pretends she doesn't know him.
David and his little friend Scott get bullied by some football jocks. You can tell they are football jocks because they're all wearing their Letterman jackets. The cheerleaders are all wearing their uniforms. In real life, this doesn't happen quite so often. While I suppose there must be schools where jocks go around every day in their Letter jackets, cheerleader uniforms are only worn to school on game or competition days. But tv is theater, and that's how theater works. Stock characters wear stock costumes so the audience can immediately tell who belongs where. Sometimes this sacrifices accuracy for ease of visual storytelling. It's a theatrical convention and a visual language which has existed for hundreds of years, not a result of laziness in research or thinking we're too stupid to figure it out on our own.
I don't know why, of all the noises and things going on, a plane passing overhead draws their attention but it does.The plane has a banner advertising a back to school “jam”.
The banner has an address.
“That's Marianne Moore's house,” Kelly says. “She's incredibly rich but such a party girl.'
Kelly brings her friend Donna (from Brandon's Spanish class) when she picks Brenda up for the party. Cindy Walsh embarrasses Brenda by asking when the other girls curfews are. Because she's a mom with Solid Middle Class Midwestern Values and these girls are feral brats.
And look, I'm going to gloss over most of how Brandon ends up in a romance with Marianne Moore (who is in classic 90s dark lipstick and a red crushed velvet empire waist party dress) because it's pretty cliché and we're never going to see her again. In a nutshell, she's actually very introverted but her parents manage rock bands and push her to be a social butterfly. So she throws parties but she's lonely and miserable at them so she has sex with random guys. The most relevant thing that happens at this party is that Brandon and Kelly describe each other from a distance as “cute”. Just trust me, that's important.
David is a huge fan of Steve's mom, Samantha Sanders the sitcom actress and starts glomming onto him when he learns about the connection. Steve is clearly irritated by his presence. David also likes Kelly, but Steve assures him that Kelly is “the biggest bitch at West Beverly” and “lousy in bed” and that he dumped her. Later, Steve's friends make David, who does not have a driver's license, drive him home because he's too drunk. David crashes the car at Steve's house and runs away. Drunk Steve's hilarious though.
Kelly makes a fake ID for Brenda, but at a club, Brenda gets in but the bouncer rips up Kelly's ID as a too obvious fake. So because the other girls couldn't get in, Brenda thinks they ditched her and becomes easy prey for an older guy. I mean, it is so, so obviously obvious to him that she's sixteen at best. Isn't it? Shouldn't it be? And mark this down as a Problem Cell Phones Could Solve.
The pilot was a two parter and cuts off in a weird place, right in the middle of the action but not on a cliffhanger, so I'm gonna do that too!
I've also been taking screenshots of some of their more insane outfits.
Anyhoozle.
A sunlit morning in an idyllic two story stone facade home. The outside of the house does not at all resemble the Spanish style split level house which will later be used as the Walsh home and only a couple areas of the inside do. A “teenage boy” wakes up in bed to the sound of a Godzilla alarm clock. His hair. Is so.Eighties. Late Eighties to be precise, that time at the end of the decade when all the white guys who'd gotten mullets started letting them grow out but it hadn't gotten long enough for the grunge look. It could also be described as "hockey hair". It probably borders on unfashionable for LA. Anyway, I put “teenage boy” in parenthesis because most of the cast was in their twenties, and obviously so, except the ones who were even older and looked it.
In oddly sharp contrast to the cast of the Lifetime anniversary bio pic, where they are all played by tiny baby faced children. Although Brian Austen Green and Tori Spelling really were a little bit younger than everyone else.
A dark haired “teenage girl” dumps out a box labeled “Brenda”. She is portrayed by
The boy's name is Brandon. Brenda complains to her mom (known henceforth as “Cindy Walsh”, their dad is “Jim”) about potentially having “the wrong hair”. She does, by the way.
The camera is panning through the streets of Beverly Hills, showing off the wealth and cultural contrast to Minneapolis,including the requisite palm tree lined streets. The twins pull up to their new high school, where we see a “valet parking” sign (I can't bring myself to believe that's a real thing). We're also seeing several examples of high end cars, the sorts of cars no high schooler outside a town like this one would drive and much ethnic diversity (including some traditionally dressed Arab men) we will basically never see again at this school. And there's some amazing footage of extras that's all coming together stylized yet natural and seamless, expertly directed, this is when the network probably started to sit up and get interested. Brandon and Brenda look at each other, non plussed. They are dorks in head to toe beige.
If there's any flaw to this sequence, it's that some of the things the kids are doing around them that made them hip and cutting edge at the time would invoke laughter in 2016. Or on my first day of high school... Like the Cool Skater Dudes. One of the ways the show illustrates the wealth and technological advancement of West Bev is by showing footage of someone using...wait for it...a remote car starter. Someone else walks by with what appears to be a lap top computer. West Bev has a radio DJ instead of the typical boring Morning Announcements (the 2010s series updated this to an on campus tv show). The DJ is super annoying.
West Beverly is played on 90210 by Torrance High School, coincidentally also the same location for the original Sunnydale High on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When both shows returned to a high school setting much later, Torrance no longer allowed filming, the noise from the Season 3 Buffy finale was too much for the neighbors. There are a lot of similarities between the shows (sometimes beat for beat and reusing the same Torrance High stock footage, I kid not) because Buffy was a horror parody of 90210.
Buffy also worries, like Brenda, about showing up with "last year's hair".
A wild David Silver appears. He's so tiny and dorky and squeaky voiced! We also see his equally dorky blond friend, Scott Scanlon who is a regular character for awhile and seems like he's going to be part of the main gang but, well, we'll get to that. A hot blonde girl honks at both of them consecutively to get out of the way, then she stops to have a conversation with a huge curly haired blond guy in a Letterman jacket. They talk about her new nose job, and her new driver's license, and it's strongly implied they used to date, or have some sort of off/on romance. Okay, let's not beat around the bush, their names are Kelly Taylor and Steve Sanders and they're going to be very important.
A bus pulls up and dislodges several older women and one young, kind of frumpy girl with glasses. In a school this wealthy, where the Walshes are embarrassed at their middle classness, it is important that she's the one taking the bus. That is poor, yo, nobody takes the bus in high school unless there's no other choice. Although it should be somewhat suspicious that it is not a West Beverly official school bus she's disembarking from but a city bus and the women she was riding with are clearly implied to be domestic help...
Brenda begs Brandon to sit with her at lunch. I remember hearing that California schools traditionally hold one school wide lunch period, with several food carts or stations positioned around campus and everyone just eats where they feel like. This is pretty sharp contrast to how they do it on my coast, especially at the specific rural school I went to. Lunches were staggered in like three large groups. Your assigned lunch period was your lunch period and you needed permission from a teacher to go to a different one. If it was lunch time, again, you were required to be in the lunch room unless you had a pass to be somewhere else. You could eat outside but you had to be where an adult could see you, which meant one of the two or three picnic tables near the windows. From November to April, you probably wouldn't have wanted to eat outside anyway. You were absolutely not allowed to leave campus for lunch, not even as a senior. Did people sneak out? Oh yes, if they had cars, but officially, no way. I bet it's even worse now in the hyper security era.
View post on imgur.comKelly asks Brenda to sit with her in science to avoid having to be lab partners with a fat girl who clearly has no friends. The overweight science teacher, like all the other teachers we see in this episode, looks totally demoralized watching the discrimination.
Brandon is in Spanish with Steve Sanders, the girl from the bus, and one other major character we've yet to be formally introduced to (It's Donna Martin, alright?). Then Brandon goes to try out for the school paper, which is, surprise, run by Bus Girl, whose name is actually Andrea Zuckerman. She has thick glasses, terrible frizzy hair and dresses like a teacher, which doesn't help the fact that the actress was almost 30 when cast. She tests him by offering to let him cover a story on the girl's water polo team and cynically expected him to fail, which he does but maybe not for the reason she thinks. Andrea struggles with the concept of men being human, like a lot of baby feminists who have never had an actual relationship.
Kelly and Brenda talk on the way to lunch. By the way, Kelly's outfit today in addition to the orange top and polka dot vest, includes high waisted denim shorts with lime green cotton biker shorts underneath and electric blue socks. She's telling Brenda how important it is not to be seen as a friendless loser “Like that guy over there” in reference to Brandon, who is eating alone. Brenda pretends she doesn't know him.
David and his little friend Scott get bullied by some football jocks. You can tell they are football jocks because they're all wearing their Letterman jackets. The cheerleaders are all wearing their uniforms. In real life, this doesn't happen quite so often. While I suppose there must be schools where jocks go around every day in their Letter jackets, cheerleader uniforms are only worn to school on game or competition days. But tv is theater, and that's how theater works. Stock characters wear stock costumes so the audience can immediately tell who belongs where. Sometimes this sacrifices accuracy for ease of visual storytelling. It's a theatrical convention and a visual language which has existed for hundreds of years, not a result of laziness in research or thinking we're too stupid to figure it out on our own.
I don't know why, of all the noises and things going on, a plane passing overhead draws their attention but it does.The plane has a banner advertising a back to school “jam”.
The banner has an address.
“That's Marianne Moore's house,” Kelly says. “She's incredibly rich but such a party girl.'
Kelly brings her friend Donna (from Brandon's Spanish class) when she picks Brenda up for the party. Cindy Walsh embarrasses Brenda by asking when the other girls curfews are. Because she's a mom with Solid Middle Class Midwestern Values and these girls are feral brats.
And look, I'm going to gloss over most of how Brandon ends up in a romance with Marianne Moore (who is in classic 90s dark lipstick and a red crushed velvet empire waist party dress) because it's pretty cliché and we're never going to see her again. In a nutshell, she's actually very introverted but her parents manage rock bands and push her to be a social butterfly. So she throws parties but she's lonely and miserable at them so she has sex with random guys. The most relevant thing that happens at this party is that Brandon and Kelly describe each other from a distance as “cute”. Just trust me, that's important.
David is a huge fan of Steve's mom, Samantha Sanders the sitcom actress and starts glomming onto him when he learns about the connection. Steve is clearly irritated by his presence. David also likes Kelly, but Steve assures him that Kelly is “the biggest bitch at West Beverly” and “lousy in bed” and that he dumped her. Later, Steve's friends make David, who does not have a driver's license, drive him home because he's too drunk. David crashes the car at Steve's house and runs away. Drunk Steve's hilarious though.
Kelly makes a fake ID for Brenda, but at a club, Brenda gets in but the bouncer rips up Kelly's ID as a too obvious fake. So because the other girls couldn't get in, Brenda thinks they ditched her and becomes easy prey for an older guy. I mean, it is so, so obviously obvious to him that she's sixteen at best. Isn't it? Shouldn't it be? And mark this down as a Problem Cell Phones Could Solve.
The pilot was a two parter and cuts off in a weird place, right in the middle of the action but not on a cliffhanger, so I'm gonna do that too!
