Yesterday, I was having a chat with my sister about old school TV shows from our childhood. Among the shows that came up were Darkwing Duck, Wild & Crazy Kids, Wishbone, The Puzzle Place, and Eureeka’s Castle. All were great shows in their time but the best in the game during that time was the series that featured a group of Brooklyn kids who solved neighborhood crimes with the help of a ghostly spirit. That brings me to this week’s moment in the Flashback Friday series: Ghostwriter.
How I first came across this moment? I first came across Ghostwriter in 1992, when it premiered on PBS. I remember it coming on at 4:30pm right after Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, a show that happened to pique my interest in geography.
What it meant to me then? Back when the show premiered, I was only 7 years old. Me and some of my neighborhood friends would watch it together. We even had out own team, trying to solve perceived mysteries around our block…even had the pens and notebooks. That fizzled out pretty quickly when we came to the realization that we couldn’t solve anything without Ghostwriter. Watching the show actually was one of the reasons I spent time researching in the encyclopedia back then as I learned about arson, copyright infringement, tetrachloroethylene, the country of Mozambique, and the Internet during the series run.
What it means to me now? Looking back on it some 20 years later, that TV show was really “coming of age” for kids my age. It certainly helped me with my attention to detail in my early years and I took an increased interest in writing. Part of the reason why I started Triumphs & Tribulations is because the team wrote down everything in their notebooks. There was some weird stuff happening in the series that I noticed as an adult that passed me by as a child…like the fact that everybody on the team wrote the same way…or how those computers had that blue typing screen that I couldn’t find on mine. It’s a shame that the series ended midway through the 3rd season due to lack of funding. It was a great show though and it’s a good thing that it’s on YouTube and available for order on Amazon.
