How To Have “The Talk” With Your Child About Weinerville
Sooner or later, they’ll find out if you were weinerized.
When your child reaches a certain age, they’re bound to come to you with certain questions that might shock or unnerve you as a parent. These questions might be about race, sex, class, religion, or the existence of Nickelodeon’s 1993 after-school television program, Weinerville.
That’s right, eventually your child will discover through YouTube that when you were a child you might have watched a one-man variety show with puppets called “weiners” that were actually the heads of actual people fitted with tiny puppet hands. And yes, children from the audience would be selected to go behind a curtain with the host and be “weinerized,” so they could have a chance to win a “golden hot dog” and be doused in green slime. You may need explain to your child how this considered acceptable television programming.
No doubt your child will have certain questions on their mind, questions like:
“How did this show run for sixty-eight episodes?”
and “You mean to tell me that no public scandal that came out of this whatsoever?”
and “Wait…so the host’s real-life name was Marc Weiner? And he got into puppeteering so he could poke his head out from behind a curtain and tell a live audience that they were now in Weinerville? Really, Dad? Really?”
You need to have this talk without snickering, because you are a grownup. Even when you tell them about how Mr. Weiner took kids to the magic cave to show them Boney, you need to keep a cool head and a straight face.
It’s important to explain to your child that this was a different time. A surreal time. Back then, a TV channel whose chief demographic was children under the age of fifteen could air a weiner-themed television show without facing public ridicule and moral panic from pro-family watchdogs. And it could be cancelled by the network for — that’s right — not being edgy enough.
At this point your child may feel some apprehension. With worry in their eyes, they may turn and ask you, “were you ever asked to be an audience participant in Marc Weiner’s Weinerville?”
There is no reason to be anxious about your response. Statistically, most children back then were never weinerized by Marc Weiner. But if you were, be honest about the experience. Tell them that Marc Weiner took you behind the curtain, an assistant helped fit you into the puppetry contraption and gave you a tutorial, and after a commercial break you engaged in a contest with other weinerized children wherein your tiny puppet hands had to scoop Marc’s meatballs into a tube.
If your child still has a problem processing that you were a Weinerville viewer when you were their age, bring to their attention how progressive the show was for its time. The Mayor of Weinerville was a woman, after all. An entire Weinerville special was Chanukah-themed, and not even at the expensive of a cheap circumcision joke. And the show was ahead of its time for speaking out against Donald Rump, a character who wanted to buy Weinerville and replace it with a casino.
It may help for you to find a segment of Weinerville and plan for a time to sit down and watch it with your child. Help them understand what it is they are seeing, whether it’s Zip the weiner getting stuck in the VCR, Dottie the weiner dealing with a Coke addiction (the soda, not the powder — far as we know), or Professor Phosphate releasing a toxic gas that makes all the weiners act a little Boney.
You can have this conversation with your children. They’re ready. You’re ready. Don’t be a total weenie about it.
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