"Out, Darn Spotlight." By Keith Alcorn and John A. Davis. Perf. Debi Derryberry, Jeffrey Garcia, Rob Paulsen, Mark DeCarlo, Carolyn Lawrence, Frank Welker, Andrea Martin, Kath Soucie, and Phil LaMarr. Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius. Season 2, episode 12. Nickelodeon. 11 March 2004. While the combination of Macbeth and animation is fresh in our minds, a segue to Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius seems strangely inevitable.
One of the greatest things about being a teacher is being able to see the world through myriad eyeballs. I'm not confined to the decade in which I grew up; I can see the world through those who grew up in the 1990s, the 2000s, or (not far from now) the 2010s—and that doesn't even count whatever decade(s) I grew up in.
The last time I taught Shakespeare and Film, one of my students mentioned a Macbeth-related episode of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius. I didn't know it. In fact, I didn't know anything about the show. In fact, I still don't know anything about the show—except what I gleaned from this episode and the tiny bit of research I did for this post.
But I do know that I appreciate the way the Shakespeare is presented in this episode. The show assumes that kids will know enough about Shakespeare to get the jokes—that Macbeth isn't "some guy with a girl's last name" and that William Shakespeare isn't the custodian.
And I admire the character of Bolbi Stroganofsky (variously spelled "Stroganovsky"), who seems to be the show's "stereotypical foreign exchange student" character. He speaks with an odd accent, but he has genuine passion for Shakespeare, as revealed in the quotes he utters near the beginning and near the end of this clip.
The school is holding auditions for a play called Macbeth in Space and, well, the rest of the clip (which, I'm afraid, jerks a bit—like an old projector—due to some oddities about video transfer) speaks for itself.
You can watch more of the episode on the Nickelodeon website, or you can buy the entire episode at amazon.com (see link below)—but the episode doesn't seem to have been released on DVD at all. Enjoy!
Links: The Episode at IMDB.
Click below to purchase the complete series of the show from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
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