Whiz Kids

It's a perfect time capsule from 1983 and 1984 - the music, the clothes, and the naive fascination of what computers were capable of. As for the computer content - it's all fairly plausible, but much like War Games, the temptation of what a person with a modem could get away with in 1983 was way too intimidating to try for most people, which kept it rare. Whiz Kids may have stoked the imagination a little too much, but it would be another 10 long years before the rest of the world caught up. There's no other reason for this show to go off the air after only one season. It practically showed a person how to hack, but in 1983, you had to be both a genius and rich to afford the kind of set up Ritchie has in Whiz Kids.

For the time capsule part, if you're a fan of Stranger Things, Whiz Kids is a pretty good example of life back then from a style perspective. It was still a mixture of 70's and 80's because not everybody could afford the newest and shiniest.

I wish this show could've lasted throughout the 80's. It would've been interesting to see the different directions it might've gone. But it wasn't meant to be. Sadly, it's not even possible to get a good DVD of it, just third rate bootlegs and YouTube.

I probably haven't seen this show since 1983, but I still remember it. I don't recall when I started watching. I think possibly some summer friends whose father owned a small electronics equipment chain recommended it. I seem to recall also that Matthew Laborteaux was on the cover of an early children's computer magazine called K-Power I initially learned about, I think, from scholastic book fairs at my elementary school. I recall the magazine had a BASIC program you could type into your computer to have it simulate the exchange between Richie and his talking computer during the opening of the show. K-Power later got absorbed into Family Computer just as a small section, and then Family Computing changed its name to something else and dropped the K-Power section at which I stopped subscribing.

Incredibly, I can still replay the instrumental theme song to this show in my head. But apart from these bits of trivia, I don't remember the show itself too well!

Search for "Whiz Kids" on YouTube.com and you'll find 8 full episodes (broken into 5 parts each). Don't know if they've entered the public domain or if the powers that be haven't found them yet.

Seeing this show brought back some great memories. This show also cemented my computer interest and headed me towards to a Computer Science degree for me as well.

Yeah it's cheesy but very little of what was being described in the show was possible in the early to mid 80's. Today it's pretty common place and the security is nearly as bad.

I'd love to see this come out on DVD. I'd like to have a decent quality copy.

The theme music for the series was Gioachino Rossini's La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie)Overture.

I remember scenes of a floppy disc drive spinning up, the head loading and then doing a seek - all very tech and enjoyable.

I recall plot holes even though I was just post teenage at the time. Blowing up (zooming in) on a photograph to extract detail below pixel size gains was one.

It deserved repeating a few times but I felt that it was ignored as the powers that control TV programming seldom (at that time) understood that tech series had a following, as we have seen with the Star trek and Stargate spinoffs.

I was 13 when this show aired, and remember really liking it. It was well written (at least to a mature 13 year old), and I looked forward to it every week. The problem was, the programming geniuses at CBS blew it. It was on one week, preempted the next 2, moved to a different night, preempted again. It never stayed in a location long enough to gain any audience following. Here I was TRYING to watch the thing and they made it quite difficult. I remember being quite frustrated and ticked off when it was cancelled.

It would be interesting to see it again today, 20 years later, and see how it compared to other shows of its day.