Looking back on it, Clarissa didn’t explain shit

LOS ANGELES – A local man has come to the difficult realization that Clarissa Darling, star of the 90s Nickelodeon comedy, Clarissa Explains it All, didn’t actually explain anything that would help him get through the hardships of modern adulthood.

Pheonix Singeltary, 37, has begun the exploratory phase of filing a lawsuit against the children’s programming network for spreading disinformation, claiming the entertainment industry has purposely mislead the public about how much life in the 21st century would suck.

“Growing up, I was led to believe that life’s most difficult decisions would revolve around high school drama, boys, and pimples,” said Singletary. “I was also told the biggest dangers in life involve quicksand, the Bermuda Triangle, and razorblades in my Halloween candy. Instead, we’ve been hit with one unprecedented life changing event after another. Did Clarissa explain how to cope with being in lockdown for a global pandemic? Nope. Did she explain how to understand why a group of radicalized foreigners would crash airplanes into the World Trade Center? Absolutely not. Clarissa doesn’t explain it all. Clarissa doesn’t explain shit.”

Despite the harsh criticism, Singletary did admit there was one episode that attempted to foreshadow life in 2024. In the episode “Punch the Clocks”, Clarissa discovers that it’s unmanageable to try and work four different jobs just to make the money she needs to survive—an unfortunate reality for many Americans today.

Critics of Singletary’s attempt to sue Melissa Joan Hart and Nickelodeon say that it’s unfair to assume a television program, written as a comedy for teenagers, would be able to accurately predict what life’s challenges would look like thirty years after it first aired.

“Clarissa Explains it All was an allegory for life in the 90s,” said Franklin Tuttle, a Nickelodeon historian. “It circled around a 13-year-old girl navigating the drama of her life in a pre-9/11 world. If you’re trying to read into it any deeper than that, you’re reading into it too far. It wasn’t The Simpsons.“

Singletary said he understands a lawsuit over a thirty-year-old show is relatively fruitless from a money standpoint, but said his bigger aim is to raise awareness about providing content to kids that will allow them to understand that the world is at a literal and figurative boiling point and isn’t all “sunshine and unicorns.”

“We don’t need more shows like Bluey that sugarcoats the reality of the world we live in,” said Singletary, who has apparently never seen an episode of Bluey. “If we teach our children to be soft, they’re going to be physically, mentally, and emotionally destroyed by the trolls, bots, and domestic terrorists lurking out there. We need strong kids. Non-woke kids. We need our kids to be ready to march on Stalingrad when the real iron curtain falls, and the world is thrust into an endless hellish war where the weak will be culled, and the strong will survive.”

Darrell Furguson, a professor at Bangkok University of Transmissive Technology (BUTT), isn’t convinced that altering children’s programming to become some kind of (whatever Singletary said) propaganda machine is the right answer but does warn us that disinformation and misinformation is a real threat.

“I think we need to let kids be kids for as long as possible,” said Furguson. “We see kids in places like Ukraine, Gaza, and Afghanistan growing up way, too fast. Let kids be kids. That said, let’s talk about our parents and how susceptible they are to the rampant waves of disinformation out there. These are the people who told us not to believe everything we heard on TV or read online, and now they’re sharing articles to their newsfeed that read like they were written for Coast to Coast.“

Furguson also said that today’s warzones aren’t just on the battlefield and the biggest weapons our adversaries have are being using in the information war online.

To help you better understand what Furguson is talking about, we brought in Clarissa from Clarissa Explains it All, to help explain it.

“Bullets do a great job at dropping bodies,” said Darling, sitting on the bed in her childhood home. “But if you paid any kind of attention to America’s war in Afghanistan, you know that people are killed easily but thoughts are much harder to destroy. Those who control the narrative, control the facts—even when those facts are made up. It’s kind of like the episode “Brain Drain”, when my brother convinces himself that he’s a genius after taking an IQ test. Where did that test come from? Was it a legitimate test? It’s imperative that you ask questions about the information you’re getting, regardless of where it comes from. A healthy skepticism is good. Just don’t allow it to cross over to paranoia or else you may find yourself on the wrong side of a disinformation campaign.”

Darling also said she sympathizes with people like Singletary and that she also misses the “good ol’ days” where her biggest problems were about pimples, how annoying her little brother was, or whether or not she should let Sam out of the friendzone. However, until science can develop a way to travel back in time, we need to focus less on the past and more about making the future one where our troubles are less about life-and-death and more about coming together as the human race to make life better for everyone.