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!

I’ll always remember, me and my friends at Hang Time….

Episode 5.5 “Too Good To Be True”

(Dir by Miguel Higuera, originally aired on October 16th, 1999)

Michael’s father is out of town and — oh no! — Michael has damaged the family car.  Michael has to raise the money to fix the car before his father comes home so Michael gets a job delivering pizzas.  Since this is a Peter Engel-produced show, this means that Michael has to dress up and talk like a pirate.

Fortunately, Michael meets a real estate agent who happens to be a fan of Deering basketball.  The agent gives Michael a job and even loans him the money to pay for the car repairs!  Yay!

Unfortunately, Michael is dating Julie again and, as usual, Julie just can’t let anyone else be happy.  She decides that the real estate agent is trying to recruit Michael to play basketball at Indiana Tech.  Apparently, it’s against the rules for recruiters to offer gifts to students.  Julie tells Michael that he has to quit his job and then she gets the rest of the team to tell Michael the same thing.  Michael’s first instinct is to tell everyone to mind their own business.  And really, Michael has a point here.  It’s his life and seriously, I’m sure everyone bends the rules.  If he’s a good enough player and if he goes to a school with enough rich benefactors, no one will ever care.  But, eventually, Michael quits his new job and refuses to take the money.  By the end of the episode, he is once again dressed as a pirate and delivering pizzas.

“I’m proud of you,” Julie says, “you followed the rules.”

(Rules are for suckers.)

Meanwhile, Coach K is totally excited because he’s bought a new telescope so he can watch a comet fly by the Earth.  Yay!  I’ve been critical of Coach K in the past but he’s actually pretty likable in this episode and Dick Butkus does a good job of playing up his almost childlike excitement over seeing the comet.  Of course, Julie pops up to say that the comet is no big deal because Julie has to ruin everything.

Let’s move on.

Episode 5.6 “Shall We Dance?”

(Dir by Miguel Higuera, originally aired on October 23rd, 1999)

At the start of this episode, the audience goes crazy as Michael asks Julie out on a date.

“You two are so getting back together!” Mary Beth tells Julie.

Uhmmm …. last episode, they were back together and Julie was going out of her way to ruin Michael’s future.  Once again, we have another example of NBC deciding to show these episodes out of order and allowing continuity to be damned.

Anyway, Michael and Julie start dating again.  However, Julie also discovers that she and Antonio love to swing dance!  (Over the past five seasons, there’s been absolutely nothing about Julie that suggested she would be into swing dancing but whatever….)  Julie and Antonio decide to enter a swing dancing contest and soon, they’re spending all of their time together.  Always a force of chaos, Mary Beth subtly suggests to Michael and Kristy that their respective significant others may be falling for each other.  Even a bizarre cameo from Dr. Drew Pinsky (who apparently lives in Deering and shops at the local mall) can’t keep Michael and Kristy from getting jealous.

This was actually a fun episode, just because of all of the dancing.  Jay Hernandez and Daniella Deutscher did get married after co-starring on Hang Time so Mary Beth wasn’t totally wrong about there being chemistry between Julie and Antonio.  If I really wanted to be critical, I would point out that this is yet another episode where Julie is actually pretty self-centered (she abandons Michael in the middle of a date so that she can go practice a new dance move with Antonio) but …. eh.  There was too much dancing for me to be overly critical.

There was also a pretty stupid B-plot, where Silk and Eugene tried to film Coach K. losing his temper so that they could send it into America’s Funniest Home Videos.  Didn’t the same thing happen on California Dreams and City Guys?  It might have happened on One World, too.  All of these shows blend together after a while.  Still, despite the dumb B-plot, I enjoyed this episode.