Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, I will be reviewing the Canadian sitcom, Check it Out, which ran in syndication from 1985 to 1988.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

This week, I finally get a chance to review the episode that I should have reviewed last week.  Nature is healing.

Episode 1.17 “Banzai”

(Dir by John Bell, originally aired on February 8th, 1986)

Mrs. Cobb (Barbara Hamilton) has decided that it would be a good idea to send someone over to Japan to study how the Japanese have become such efficient employers and employees.  That is an idea that actually isn’t bad and totally makes sense.  Give some points to the show for having a good idea for once.

However, for some reason, Mrs. Cobb wants to send over not an executive and not a store manager but an assistant store manager.  That makes no sense.  If you want to make changes, why wouldn’t you send someone over who has the authority to do so?  As usual, Mrs. Cobb wants it to be someone from Howard’s store.  The show has always implied that Mrs. Cobb is the richest woman in Canada and that she actually owns several businesses across the North American continent.  It’s odd that the only one she ever seems to care about is Howard’s store.

Assistant Store Manager Jack Christian is on vacation in Fiji so Howard has to pick a temporary replacement who can go to Japan.  Mrs. Cobb tells him to pick a woman and since Marlene has a criminal record and Jennifer is not in this episode, the job falls to Edna.

Edna goes to Japan and then returns with a lot of ideas for how to make Cobb’s better.  Cue Howard’s comic exasperation as Edna demands informality in the workplace, a lack of walls, and a mandatory exercise period.  Also cue the two Japanese workers that Edna brought back with her, who proceed to tear down the walls of Howard’s office.

Watching all of this, I had to wonder just how long Christian’s Fiji vacation lasted.  This episode seemed to take place over the course of a month, maybe even longer.  It lasted long enough for the staff to rebel against Edna and for Mrs. Cobb to change her mind about using Japanese methods in her business.  And it lasted long enough for Edna to decide that she would rather go back to being Howard’s administrative assistant.  Jack Christian did return by the end of the episode, which is good since Jeff Pustil (who played Christian) and Kathleen Laskey (who played Marlene) were the show’s two most consistent comedic performers.  (Interestingly enough, they’re married in real life.)

This was actually not a bad episode.  I always cringe a bit whenever I see any 80s or 90s sitcom attempting to deal with cultural differences, especially when the other culture is Japanese.  Just judging from a lot of the shows that I’ve seen, it would appear that many Americans (and I guess Canadians) in the 80s felt like the only way to deal with Japan’s competitive economy was to make often juvenile jokes about Japanese tourists with cameras and the poor dubbing that most Japanese films suffered on their way to American screens.  This episode of Check It Out! is actually respectful of Japanese business culture, even if the show’s message seems to be that it ultimately isn’t right for the more laid back culture of Canada.

As for what happens in next week’s episode — who knows?  We’ll find out.