Starstuff

Format

The show followed two twelve-year-olds: Chris, played by Todd Porter, and Ingrid, played by Johanna Hickey. Chris lived in a house in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the present day of 1980, and had built his own computer with a video terminal in his bedroom. Ingrid lived in the year 2010 on Alpha, Earth’s first space colony, and was the first child born there. For her twelfth birthday, she received an Earth Study Center, a computer system meant to teach her about life on Earth. The two met when their computers managed to establish a two-way video transmission, and the series centered on their secret conversations through their screens. These talks were interrupted by segments where they watched short films together, such as clips from Laurel and Hardy’s Laughtunes and snippets of the educational children’s news show Kidsworld. Episodes often dealt with topics like divorce, loneliness, and crushes. About halfway through each episode, a sub-show called The Edge Of Space appeared. This ten-minute puppet segment featured Krikles, Zornad, and their robot assistant Giz, who explored the universe in their spaceship searching for life. Puppeteer Mark Ritts recorded the puppet bits separately, often doing half a dozen at a time on days when the main cast was off learning their lines. He said he did not remember even meeting them. Krikles’s voice was a simple, light character voice Ritts had used for years, later adapted for characters like Kino on PBS’s Storytime. Zornad’s voice was partly borrowed from Dayton Allen, a comic who had been a regular on the old Steve Allen Show and was known for his line “Whyyyyy not??”