Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Mondays, I will be reviewing Hang Time, which ran on NBC from 1995 to 2000.  The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

This week, we have one decent episode and one episode that …. well, just read the review.

Episode 4.9 “Love Triangle”

(Dir by Patrick Maloney, originally aired on October 10th, 1998)

Finally, a decent episode!

At the start of this episode, Kristy informs Mary Beth that she has a crush on Hammer but she’s too shy to talk to him.  Not surprisingly, Mary Beth takes it upon herself to set them up.  She tells Hammer to be at the Stadium at a certain time so that he can meet his blind date.  Hammer agrees but is shocked when the blind date turns out to be Kristy.  After the date, he approaches Mary Beth and tells her that, while he thinks Kristy is great, she’s not the girl that he’s interested in.  He’s interested in …. MARY BETH!

Now, you can probably guess that this leads to Mary Beth dating Hammer in secret.  And you can probably also guess that Kristy eventually figures out what’s happening while they’re all at the latest school dance.  Mary Beth and Kristy argue and then they make up and then everything’s fine.  Mary Beth has a boyfriend, Hammer has a girlfriend, and Kristy …. well, okay.  It kind of sucks for Kristy.  That said, Mary Beth and Hammer are a cute couple.

This was a pretty simple episode and it almost felt like a throwback to the type of episodes that dominated the show’s first season.  (Remember when Danny tried to date Julie before eventually realizing that Sam was perfect for him?)  But it was kind of nice to take a break from all the basketball stuff and Megan Parlen and Amber Barretto did a good job with both the dramatic and the comedic moments of the episode.  And, after a rough few episodes, Mark Famiglietti finally got to display some bad boy charm in the role of Hammer.

All in all, this wasn’t a bad episode.

Episode 4.10 “Texas Rose”

(Dir by Patrick Maloney, originally aired on October 10th, 1998)

*sigh*

This episode finds the team going to a basketball tournament in San Antonio, Texas so, of course, it opens up with stock footage of an oil derrick.  From the minute I saw that cliché, I knew this would be a difficult episode for me.  As a Texan, I’m very sensitive to all the silly stereotypes and clichés that television shows tend to fall back on whenever they try to tell a story about my part of the world.

The oil derricks were followed by a shot of the Alamo.  That was good.  The Alamo is a huge part of Texas culture.  This was followed by the Tornadoes checking into their San Antonio hotel and, of course, everyone in the lobby is wearing a cowboy hat.  I rolled my eyes so hard that I gave myself a headache.  “Is it me or does everyone around here look like Garth Brooks?” Mary Beth says.

Oh c’mon, I muttered for neither the first nor the last time.

“I can’t wait to get on the court and kick some cowboy butt!” Michael declares.

So, I guess the point of this episode was to make sure no one in Texas ever watched another episode of Hang Time.  I mean, we’ve got enough confidence down here to take a joke but that doesn’t mean we want to spend 30 minutes being made fun of by a bunch of people who think Indianapolis is a real city.

At the local restaurant, the boys go crazy watching some fat dude try to ride an electric bull while Kristy sees a handsome Latino and automatically assumes that he can’t speak English.  She speaks to him in Spanish and, as we can see from the subtitles, her Spanish sucks.  Still, Antonio (Jay Hernandez, of Crazy/Beautiful and Hostel fame) is so attracted to her that he doesn’t mention that he was born in America and he can speak English.  Myself, I just find it interesting that Kristy and her friends assume that just because someone has brown skin in San Antonio, they must have been born in Mexico or Latin America and that they must not be able to speak English.  I mean, did they not notice that the town itself is called San Antonio but it’s full of people who speak and understand both English and Spanish?  Did they somehow never learn that Texas has a strong and politically active Latino community?  Seriously, the whole world isn’t freaking Indiana.

(And they wonder why we dislike Yankee tourists down here….)

Meanwhile, Silk meets a girl named Rose and falls for her.  However, Silk thinks that Rose is rich so he pretends to be rich in order to impress her.  When Silk takes Rose to Coach K’s suite and tries to pretend that it’s actually his hotel room, it works until Coach K shows up.  Oh well, Silk — that’s what you get!

The next day, as the team gets ready for their first game, Kristy is shocked to discover that Antonio is on the rival team and he can speak English!  Kristy yells at him for not telling her that he could speak English.  You know, Kristy, maybe you should have given him a chance to speak English before assuming that he couldn’t.

Things work out in the end.  Silk discovers that Rose isn’t actually rich and then he commandeers the stage of the local country-western bar and sings her a country song.  Wow, that’s stupid.  The episode ends without any word as to whether or not The Tornadoes won their tournament.  I really hope this doesn’t mean that I’m going to have sit through four more episodes about the Tornadoes in San Antonio.

*shudder*