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 and Peacock!

This week features some adorable kittens!

Episode 3.16 “My Hero, Mr. Bannister”

(Dir by Jayne Schipper, originally aired on January 3rd, 1988)

Stockboy Derek (Andrew Miller) admires Howard and decides that, in order to be like his idol, he’s going to drop out of high school and devote himself to becoming manager of a grocery store.  Howard has to show Derek has stupid that would be.  Fortunately, Derek comes to his senses by the end of the episode.  No one wants to grow up to be Howard.

This was a weird episode, largely because everyone acted as if Derek was a regular member of the cast despite the fact that this was only his second appearance on the show.  (He appeared earlier in the season, in yet another episode that was devoted to his character.)  One of the oddest things about this season is that it keeps introducing characters who seem like they’re going to be regulars — Howard’s brother, the executive from the company that bought Cobb’s — but who then never show up again.  Or in Derek’s case, they showed up on more time.  Seen today, all of these episodes feel like backdoor pilots for shows that were never actually put into production.  That doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily bad episodes, of course.  While Derek’s storyline was a bit forgettable, the third season has still been a marked improvement over the first two.

This episode featured a B-plot about an adorable cat named Marvin who decided to live in the store with “Mrs. Marvin.”  They had kittens!  And the kittens were adorable.  I’m a cat person so I enjoyed that.  Otherwise, this episode was fairly forgettable.