How About That Thing?

LazyTown is a children’s show that aired on Nick Jr. from 2004 to 2007. Then, it got picked up in 2013 for two more, all be it shorter seasons. I, dear reader, didn’t find out about this show until 2019, and it was primarily due to the “We Are Number One” meme.

Not going to lie, dear reader, “We Are Number One” is an absolute earworm of a song. It’s a lot better than a song from a Nick Jr. show has any right to be, that’s for sure. It took a while to get that tune out of my head. Then I had a kid, it turns out he likes the show as well as several of the songs from it, and I’m right back where I started. But I digress.

I admit, I was curious about LazyTown after figuring out where the song came from,but I never really went out of my way to watch anything beyond a couple other meme videos featuring the villain. I didn’t watch any actual episodes of the show until about February of this year, and even then, I did it under the assumption my two-year-old might find it entertaining for a few minutes while daddy takes a power nap on the couch.

DON’T YOU JUDGE ME!

But yeah, I ended up watching it with my little boy. Suffice to say, he definitely enjoys it. I’m not sure how much of the overall message he’s receiving, but he definitely cackles like a mad man whenever Robby is on screen. And… I must admit, when I went out of my way to actually watch a few episodes from start to finish… Dude.

I seriously miss cannabis right about now, because this looks like the perfect show to watch while you’re high as a kite. It kind of feels like a space alien wrote it, but compared to most of the times I use that analogy, this particular space alien has been on Earth long enough to mask MOST of his alienisms. The key word being MOST. There are a few moments of weirdness here and there that kind of give something away. And it wasn’t until I started researching the show a little more till I found out it came from Iceland. So, yeah, guess that explains that.

It’s colorful, it’s simple to follow, and it’s very low stakes. It’s also very apparent that a lot of the voice cast don’t speak English as their first language, but that’s okay.

Each episode begins with this guy.

This is Sportacus. I confess, trying to get a screenshot of this guy was nigh impossible. He bounces all over the place, he does flips, he does gestures… Are we sure all he’s eating is sports candy?

That’s another thing: fruits and vegetables are referred to in this series as “sports candy.” It’s cute, and it might or might not be an effective way to convince kids to eat apple slices. It gets a little clunky much later in the series, what with the likes of Johnny Sportscandyseed, but considering the demographic, I find I’m looking the other way on a lot of things that’d normally drive me up the wall with questions.

At the beginning of each episode, Sportacus does something ridiculously, and perhaps unnecessarily athletic at times. I mean good on the guy for training on a daily basis, but the lengths this guy goes to make a smoothy? I’d have just walked over to the blender and hit puray. But I’m not Sportacus.

We get the theme song, which tells us everything we need to know. Normally, I’d point out how one of my pet pieves is a theme song that spoils everything in the first episode. But once again, kid show.

So as the theme song explains, Stephanie is new in town. Who’s Stephanie, you ask?

This pink-haired girly girl is the daughter of ironically named Mayor Meanswell.

SIDE NOTE: I swear to god, Mayor Meanswell is voiced by The Mad Hatter. Hell, he seems to be spending a lot of his free time making cake for him and his secretary who he’s totally not railroading when the cameras are off. Probably having themselves a few hundred very merry unbirthdays, if you know what I mean.

I got to say, being the mayor of a town like this, where the population has got to be somewhere in the high double digits at BEST, is probably the cushiest job ever. Especially in a town with a reputation for being… Well, you know.

Stephanie meets up with the children of LazyTown. Specifically…

This is Ziggy. In the early seasons, he’s a candy addict that puts MY sweet tooth to shame. In later seasons, he seems to be more like that little brother type who wants to be cool like all the big kids, but keeps fumbling the ball, as it were.

Ziggy takes Stephanie to meet the rest of the crew.

In no particular order:

• Pixel: the hikikomori of the group. He’d much rather spend time on his computer, playing video games, etc.
• Stingy: the character I would like to punch the most. He’s a hoarder, and he’s a greedy little piggy with the most annoying voice out of the lot.
• Trixy: the token girl friend. Like, you ever notice how shows have a group of guy friends, and there’s always that one girl who somehow managed to find her way into the group. That’s pretty much Trixy in a nutshell, near as I can tell. Or at least, that was the case before Stephanie showed up. Then, she became the rule breaker and the practical joker.

These kids initially have no interest in playing sports with Stephanie, but they get talked into it pretty quickly. Unfortunately, Stephanie’s impromptu soccer lesson ends up awaking this guy.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Robby Rotten. He is, without a shadow of a doubt, the single best part of this entire series. Seriously, the metric ton of teeth marks on the scenary!

He’s described by Trixy as the laziest, most do-nothingest man in all of LazyTown.” To prove the point, he gives Pixel a new video game, Ziggy candy, gives Trixy the opportunity to smash a window, and… I forgot what he did to Stingy, but he convinced him to buzz off.

Defeated, Stephanie’s super happy song about playing outside and finding new friends transforms into a sad song about nobody wanting to be her friend. Her uncle admits that, while he has the power to get the town cleaned up and the parks reopened, even HE can’t convince kids to go outside and play. But that’s when he tells Stephanie about a hero whose name has been lost to time. All that’s remembered of him was that he had a big number 9 on his chest.

Intrigued, Stephanie writes a letter, and puts it in the little cannon mechanism that shoots her letter directly into Sportacus’s airship’s mailbox. I don’t even know where to begin with this. That had to be the luckiest shot in the universe, and only PARTLY because Mayor Meanswell admits it’s been a while since it’s been used. Also, remember when people used to handwrite letters? Hell, at this point, I’m still nostalgic for talking to E-pals via my Yahoo mail account. I guess everybody just DMs each other on Twitter, or Bluesky, or Facebook, or Minds, or whatever we all use now.

Sportacus arrives in LazyTown, and becomes friends with the kids. And thus, the infinite, unwinnable game of cat and other cat between Sportacus and Robby Rotten truly begins.

Each episode features a plot by Robby Rotten to get Sportacus kicked out of LazyTown, and make the town lazy again. Too bad/Thank god this came out before 2015, or else there’d probably be a “Make LazyTown Lazy Again” meme floating around. Ah hell, there probably already is.

Ninety percent of the plots Robby hatches tend to involve terrible disguises that everybody falls for. Sometimes, he tries to convince the kids to become lazy. Other times, he tries to feed Sportacus a “sugar apple”.

Yeah, they mention very early in the series that Sportacus can’t handle sugar. Where as stuff like apple slices, grapes, berries, etc., AKA: sports candy, gives him energy, sugar actually DRAINS his energy down to zero. It’s like Superman and cryptonite, or the dude from the Adventure Island games and eggplant.

Frankly, you’d think by now people would pick up on the fact Robby is in disguise more often than they do. You’d also think Sportacus would have a lot more reservations about taking sports candy from strangers. I guess ol’ Sportty Boy lives by the Amy Wong phillosophy: “fool me fifteen times, shame on you. Fool me sixteen times, shame on me.”

But, once again, I got to remind myself that this is for the littlies.

Robby’s plan eventually falls apart, his disguise gets removed, and the kids all do that thing where they announce his real name out loud in unison like the fucking Scooby Gang. Robby makes a hasty retreat, we get the lesson for the day… And then, we get Bing Bang.

Bing Bang is basically the show’s little curtain call. All the characters drop everything they’re doing while Stephanie sings and dances in the foreground.

We then get about ten or fifteen last seconds to watch Robby cope with defeat, lather, rinse, repeat for seventy-plus episodes.

It sounds like I’m ragging on this show, but for all my snarkiness, LazyTown is actually not half bad. True, there are days when I wish the two-year-old would ask to watch something else, but frankly, I’m just glad I got him away from those god-forsaken Teletubbies. Now if I can just keep him away from The Minions for a few more years…

For its demographic, LazyTown is fine. For the grown-ups… Well, I personally found Robby Rotten to be the most entertaining thing about the show. Which gets me to wondering if that may have been the point?

I can definitely see why so many internet dwellers spoke very highly of this show, and went out of their way to make memes. While it’s probably nothing I myself would willingly watch while sober, I could see the toddlers getting some laughs, and some valuable life lessons out of it.