Whiz Kids

I am really trying to remember 20 years ago to this show. It was very much a spin-off of the success of War Games. Richie had a computer that could do almost anything. It was built from a lot of spare parts that must have been around the studio. If it could flash, it went in the computer.

At the time I loved the show because I was young and though computers were neat. I would like to see the show again just to see what I think now.

The thing that I remember most about the show is that EVERYTHING seemed to be run by computers. In one episode they were locked in some room. In that room was some discarded terminal that they were able to connect to the building sprinkler system and set it off. Deus ex Machina situations like this happened way too often...and Richie was always like MacGuyver with a keyboard.

Still...I remember liking the show back then.

Hello,

I've been following the discussion with interest - Whiz Kids was my favourite show on British TV when I was growing up. This and Tron left a big impression!

Just a quick note: the music isn't Rossini, it's adapted from Mozart's 'Elvira Madigan' (Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major). It's an amalgam of highlights from Part I of the concerto.

My favourite theme of all time :)

I do love Whiz Kids. I wish they'd release the DVD already!

• Dave

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!

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.