290. Song No. 4,479: “Hey Sandy,” Polaris
Music from The Adventures of Pete & Pete, 1999

God, the ’90s were such a wonderfully weird time for children’s television, even for a kid who preferred reading to watching television but still absorbed a healthy dose of the latter’s influence through cultural osmosis (I do, however, distinctly remember the disappointment of a solar flare scrambling the much-hyped debut of Nicktoons’ original trio of widely disparate offerings). Somewhere between the hallucinogens fueling fare for young viewers a generation earlier and the far more grounded menu offered to younger millennials and Gen Z were the esoteric oddities filling out entire swaths of uncharted territory comprising TV channels dedicated to children and adolescents, a batshit suite of fever-dream animations and child actors doing kid things in some off-kilter version of the everyday.

The Adventures of Pete & Pete, a sitcom centered around two same-named brothers navigating surreal scenarios while beset with kooky, endearingly flawed adults, hailed from the latter category. More than 30 years later, my prevailing memories of it include: Little Pete’s “dancing” Jessica Rabbit-esque tattoo; a grown man in a striped bodysuit named Artie, The Strongest Man in the World, whose purity and childlike enthusiasm negated any off-putting weirdness usually reserved for an adult with kids for friends; some hellaciously interminable trek between Big Pete’s job at a freestanding film-developing shack and the closest anchor store that still leaves me with a sinking dread anytime I park in a dying strip mall’s asphalt sea of empty spots; and a mom with a metal plate in her head that picked up radio frequencies with… uh, an alarming frequency. Honestly, I think Nickelodeon’s early days being chock-full of stuff that made this show feel comparatively normal probably explains a lot about why I am the way I turned out and my deep affinity for the casually bizarre.

The theme song to The Adventures of Pete & Pete was a legend unto itself, an actual band playing an actual song with an actual hook and everything. An earworm before society had the collective colloquialism to give it a name, it was (and still is) a tune that bored directly into the center of your brain and dug in its heels, utterly indecipherable lyrics and all. But most importantly, it’s something with obviously impressive production quality that implicitly legitimized the kids’ show it accompanied. And it did so even with ardently debated lyrics that still make you wonder if you’re bobbing your head along a little too enthusiastically to a song that miiiiiight actually be about domestic violence.

Despite being around since the early days of my cultural consciousness and finally being pinned down in record form right before the turn of the millennium, it’s not really a song I regarded with anything beyond a passive appreciation until college, when scouring a new friend’s CD rack yielded this throwback discovery. In my head, I’d thought this trophy I’d scurried back to my dorm to rip to my hand-me-down laptop’s rapidly growing music library was transferred in its entirety; nope, “Hey Sandy” is the only Polaris ditty in my collection. I think that’s been one of the sadder discoveries of this project, those times when I’m expecting an album’s worth of offerings but had forgotten about Past Me’s lack of interest in preserving a whole album. I mean, yeah, streaming music and the internet that’s abetted so much of my principled hoarding of comparatively obscure music handily obliterates that disappointment most of the time, but something about nostalgia on devices more modern than a 12-year-old desktop Mac and even older iPod feels a little off.

Still, the confluence of suddenly unlocked childhood memories, any opportunity to revisit college’s indelible impact on both my music taste and my music library, and one mighty catchy lightning-in-a-bottle song is a joy to splash around in for a little while. And in this era of everything old being new again, it’s simply just a lot of fun to be reminded that the best parts of the past are not only never really that out of reach but also just one pop-culture deep-dive from an immersive revisit away.