Friday Fun: Kevium

Kids, come closer, so ol' Uncle See Arr Oh can tell you about life in the '90s. See, back then, a postage stamp only cost $0.29, and "the Net" was still something you connected to with a modem!

Kevin French, from Mission Hill
(Warner Bros, Oakley / Weinstein)

I recently came across my Amazon dream sale: the entire Mission Hill series - all 13 episodes - for only $9.00. You may remember Mission Hill as the quirky, colorful cartoon show that was part of the [cough] original Adult Swim lineup on Cartoon Network, almost 15 years ago.

I had completely forgotten about the wacky uber-geek younger brother, Kevin French. He's the foil to cool older brother Andy, a struggling cartoonist in Boston. But, as the series progresses, you learn that Kevin's pretty cool, especially by today's standards: he loves science and math, plays online computer games, and gets into hilarious scrapes by trying to view the world through a rational lens. Kind of like The Big Bang Theory...but animated.

I also forgot that Kevin has a huge poster in his bedroom of "Kevium," supposedly element 108; this really shows the show's age, since 108 wasn't officially Hassium (Hs) until 1997! (I'll assume the producers did enough background research to notice Fr was already taken). As for those numbers on the bottom? Beats me. I guess they're supposed to be ionization energies or isotopic masses, but I think they just scribbled 'em in.