Beakman's World

Beakman started on the comics page. Jok Church's "You Can with Beakman and Jax," a text-heavy science feature that answered readers' questions, first appeared on July 14, 1991 in the Marin Independent Journal, which got it for free, and went national through Universal Press Syndicate; its hero was named after Beekman Place. A year later he was on television. Beakman's World premiered on TLC on September 16, 1992, and three days later began running in weekly syndication on 220 stations through Columbia Pictures Television Distribution, with the puppeteer Paul Zaloom, a veteran of the Bread and Puppet Theater, as the eccentric scientist who answered viewer mail with experiments and shouted "Zaloom!" when one worked.

The show was as loud as its host. Beakman went through three assistants, Josie (Alanna Ubach) in the first season, Liza (Eliza Schneider) in the second and third, Phoebe (Senta Moses) in the fourth, but after a puppet in the pilot, Lester stayed the same: Mark Ritts in a tattered rat suit, often bribed into helping with food. The Beakman Challenge leaned so hard on air pressure and Bernoulli's principle in the first season that the show had Lester scream "AIR PRESSURE! IT'S ALWAYS AIR PRESSURE!" Two puppet penguins, Don and Herb, watched the show from the South Pole, named after Don Herbert, TV's Mr. Wizard. Jean Stapleton turned up as Beakman's mother, Zaloom doubled as Edison, Henry Ford and Professor I. M. Boring, and the zydeco-and-synthpop theme with its accordion riff was by Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo and Denis M. Hannigan. Mothersbaugh and the production designer Wayne White had done the same jobs on Pee-wee's Playhouse.

On September 18, 1993, the show moved from syndication to CBS's Saturday-morning lineup, eight days after Bill Nye the Science Guy premiered, and for the next four years the two science shows ran side by side. At its peak Beakman's World was seen in nearly ninety countries. It ended in December 1997 after 91 episodes over four seasons, and in 1998 the Cincinnati Museum Center opened a 4,000-square-foot exhibit, Beakman's World On Tour, that traveled to dozens of American cities. Reruns came back in syndication in 2006, streamed on Netflix until 2014 and returned to TV on MeTV in 2016. Zaloom still performs as Beakman live. Church died in April 2016, and the comic ran until July 17, 2016, three days past its 25th anniversary.