I’m a child of the 80s; I grew up on “Saved by the Bell”, “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “Family Matters.”  When my family got cable in the late 80s, one of the channels we often watched (along with Nickelodeon, of course) was TBS.    Every now and again, between innings of a Braves’ game or an episode of Andy Griffith, I’d catch an ad for “Revenge of the Nerds”; ads came out for the sequels in later years (save the fourth, which by many accounts should never have been made).  And when, in 1995, I got to high school, I saw “Angus” and “Revenge of the Nerds” and its three sequels.  I continued to watch “Fresh Prince” and “Saved by the Bell” even after the latter became really bad (“The College Years,” in particular).  Family Matters wasn’t on Fox or TBS when I could get to it, and what I was accustomed to knowing as Channel 20 and the WB were different things in Rhode Island, where I went to high school.

 When I was a child (in terms of age, not maturity), I remember thinking to myself, while watching “Saved by the Bell,” “Why can’t those geeky dorky people be like the cool kids?  Why don’t they just take the tape off their glasses, wear expensive clothing, be attractive, and stop being such dorky doofuses?”  The same applied, in general, to Steve Urkel (played by the incredibly talented Jaleel White) of “Family Matters,” with added emphasis on his godawful pants, which looked worse than I can describe.  If you’ve seen them, you know what I mean.  Carlton Banks (played by Alfonso Ribiera of “Silver Spoons” fame) of “Fresh Prince” made me want to punch him, he was so geeky.  I mean, come on . . . why couldn’t he be more like cool Will Smith?  I mean, here was a guy who could play classical music to prove a point to his sometimes-overbearing uncle, and who could dunk to win the girls.  He was smart, but not too smart.  He was athletic, but not to the point of being a jock.  And he was cool, but not to the point where he got in trouble (violent trouble, that is).

 So here I was, a 13-year-old freshman, a boy among . . . well, bigger boys and a few men.  And as the days turned into weeks, and then months, and then a year, I realized something: those geeks I’d seen on TV, so heavily stereotyped that they weighed an extra 20 pounds for the effort, were me.  I didn’t have glasses or wear diamond-pattern tennis sweaters or have buckteeth or spend my spare time playing with Einsteinium in the chemistry lab.  I didn’t have a high, squeaky voice (anymore) or a band of calculator-carrying cohorts.  I didn’t wear my pants high like Urkel and Fred Mertz (William Frawley, and of “I Love Lucy” stardom), and I can’t remember wearing suspenders unless my pants would literally have fallen down otherwise.  No pocket protectors for me or my fellow geeks, nor did we go around the school as a collective rather than separate people, one of us saying things like “Let us retire . . . to the Nerd Cave!”, as the nerds did in “Saved by the Bell” at least once.  I didn’t start to play chess until my junior year of high school, when a lineman on the football team taught me.  And Cribbage, which is one of the more unknown “geek” games, was something I learned from a tailback on the team.

 I was shy around girls, and I was decently intelligent (smart enough to get a 1350 on the SAT and a perfect score on my Chemistry final exam), and I had absolutely no clue about fashion.  I hadn’t realized for so long that I was a geek because the stereotypes, no matter what people tell you, just weren’t true.  I’ve been around geeks of such a high caliber that I feel like an actual cool person (I return to reality shortly thereafter), and let me tell you: they/we just aren’t like that.  Yes, I know people who look like geeks.  These people are more socially inept than anything else, and there are as many of them who are otherwise not geeky than who are.  My friend Nate is a geek, and he lives in a 19th century house on an acre of land about an hour or so west from here.  He writes for an online computer magazine.  If you took a look at what he wears and examine him in a social situation, you’d never have a clue that he’s a geek.
 

 During my senior year of high school I began to get annoyed with the portrayal of geeks, nerds, and otherwise intelligent/socially outcast people (geeks, nerds and dorks are essentially names for the same thing, in my opinion).  The stereotypes were almost everywhere I looked; even those who were unaware of their geek status were mocking others for it.  One guy I knew made a list of the people who spent the most time in the computer lab (or crackhouse, as we called it because it was just so damned addictive).  He thought it was riotously amusing, except for the fact that someone had managed to sneak his name onto the list while his back was turned.  It wasn’t funny to him after that (until he took his name off in a revision halfway through the year).

 And one movie cemented in my mind that something was really, truly not right, and it needed to be changed.  That movie was on TBS on a Sunday night when most of my classmates were off-campus with their friends.  This was my junior year, when my best friends were solitude, my radio (tuned, of course, to Oldies 100), and the peaceful existence that was life away from my tormentors.  At least I think it was junior year; most of high school is one big faint blur, contrary to what you might have previously thought as indicated by this essay.  For my memory it might have been senior year.  But it was one of the two and I caught the first ten minutes or so and the last half hour.  I’m pretty sure that in between those snippets I was in the computer lab.

 “Angus” is about a geek/dork/nerd-type person (played by Charlie Talbert) who gets voted Winter Ball (basically prom) King as a joke before the prom.  The joke is that he has to dance with the Winter Ball Queen, who’s the girlfriend of the—do I need to tell you, really?
 For those of you who didn’t pay attention in the 80s, the Prom King (Winter Ball King, in this case) is always the Varsity Football starting quarterback, and he always dates the head cheerleader.  In most cases at least one is blond.  James Van Der Beek plays quarterback Rick Sanford and Ariana Richards plays Melissa, the Winter Ball Queen (WBQ).

 Anyway.  The last half hour of the movie is all you really need to watch because the beginning is the same painful stuff you see in any geek-sympathetic movie (and if you’re looking for examples, rent the friggin’ movie).  So Angus goes up to dance with WBQ, who by this point is looking absolutely horrified, and Angus is in a purple tux.

 That’s right, a purple tuxedo.  Fortunately it fits decently enough, and we don’t get any pants splitting (big laffs) or buttons flying off (more laffs).  So Angus is attempting to dance with WBQ, who really doesn’t need to be acting so scared, or so we think, and suddenly a video comes on of Angus dancing with what I’ll charitably call a rubber woman.  Turns out that QB (Sanford) and friends had videotaped a session of Angus’ fellow geek (and his main friend) trying to teach him how to dance, and Angus had been talking about how he respected WBQ and didn’t want to do anything wrong, how he didn’t want to mess up and was so worried about stepping on her toes.

 So Angus runs out of the dance room (which of course doubles as a gymnasium, conforming to our stereotypical ideas about public schools) and WBQ comes with him.  They have a not-terribly-long conversation and we learn that WBQ isn’t a glittery, “Duh-uh!” girly girl for whom “Math class is hard.”  Turns out she’s bulimic.  And Angus, being a geek and knowing what bulimia is, understands.  He even tried it once (he’s fat, of course), but “I was so hungry I almost ate my finger.”  This scores a partly-nervous, partly-relieved WBQ, who seems to have calmed down a bit and might pass solid waste before the night is up.  She and Angus walk back into the gym/dance area.

 From there my memory is hazy.  I know they start dancing again and I remember vividly Sanford starting a fight with Angus.  The former seems to think that he is the embodiment of what a male high-schooler should want—nay pray—to be.  He continually pushes Angus back and back and back until the only place Angus can go is the cake.  So he punches Angus.

 Angus goes down, of course, but thence comes retribution; he comes back up.  He goes into a long diatribe about how he doesn’t want to be normal, and so many people don’t want to be normal, they (we) just want to be left alone, goddamnit.  “You think I want to be normal?  You think I want to be like you?”
 “You see all these people here?  They all want to be like me.  They all want to be cool.  Everyone wants to be normal.  Everyone wants to be like me except you, you big fat disgusting slob.”

 “Take a look around you, Rick.  Do you see a single person here who looks like you?  A single person here who acts like you?  No.  Everyone here’s like me, unpopular, awkward.  Some people are fat; some are skinny.  Some people are really tall, and some are really short.  Some of us have glasses, or freckles, or braces, or pimples.  Maybe some of us, our clothes don’t fit right, or we aren’t rich.  But nobody here is like you.  You’re not normal, we’re normal.”

 At this Sanford takes a sort of  “I’m trying to look like I think you’re crazy, but I’m afraid because my entire life schema has been irrefutably challenged” look at him and then a briefer one around the room, and he and his fellow coolguys run out of the place, followed by the principal, who by this time has been told about the tape and how it was made.

 That isn’t, of course, the exact dialogue that occurs.  I’m summarizing from having seen the movie twice.  But you get the point.  This movie was huge for me.  I wanted to kick Sanford’s ass.  I thought I had any shot whatsoever at any of the girls I dreamed about who went to my school.  And I began to realize that normal really doesn’t exist except in pointless things like “All humans have skin.”
 

 Some time between the “geek” shown on “Saved by the Bell” and “Family Matters” and what inspired “Angus” and Columbine, a transformation occurred; scriptwriters realized they were way, way wrong.  Or maybe someone who’d been there gave a collective “enough” and things began to change.  Somehow we got past the traditional “Geeks have no feelings; let’s just use them as characters who’ll do Zack’s homework and have them conveniently enter the room and be scared off by AC Slater and his biceps” and got to the “Geeks are actually pretty smart, decent people and maybe we should portray them as actual people instead of frontal lobe-less peons,” which is where we are now, with shows such as “Boston Public” and “Freaks and Geeks,” the latter of which was at times so seemingly biographical that I had to turn it off or I’d start remembering things I’d suppressed in the back of my mind, far from where I could remember it easily.

 “Freaks and Geeks,” you see, centered around people just like me; they were skinny, or they had curly hair, or they had buck teeth, or something.  And they were (shocker here; wait for it) real, actual people with real characteristics, not just socially inept junior scientists who have no idea they’re being made fun of left and right.  The show lasted all of a season, maybe two.  America needs it back because we’re forgetting that yes, the treatment of the unaesthetic person, the one who isn’t good at sports or attractive but who is still a person and doesn’t deserve the crap they get, is important to this society as a whole if we don’t want another Columbine.

 “Boston Public” tries to address issues facing (I swore I would never use the phrase “young people”) high school students.  One of its biggest geeks (the guy who gets picked on by almost everyone) is the guy who was key in “Freaks”; John Francis Daley (Sam Weir on “Freaks,” Anthony Ward on “Boston Public”).  In one episode (one of five or six I’ve seen), it is made apparent that Ward made a list of people he wanted to kill.  He says he had no intention of killing any of the people on the list, that he made it just to release anger.  And he ends up being expelled for, in his words, “my thoughts.”  That’s right; he writes down a name and gets expelled.

 I think one of the reasons it was such a realistic portrayal to me is that I’ve seen in so many times before.  That sort of thing’s been in the news many times, albeit in different forms.  The arguments made by school systems around the country are echoed by the faculty in the episode, and the Ward makes a compelling case for the absurdity of the entire thing, though it’s pretty easy to see that the board had already made up its mind.  And I know I’m not alone among those who pay attention to the news and were at all ostracized in high school (and who happen to know their First Amendment rights), because the reactions I got from friends was “Yeah, that was realistic.”
 

 “Revenge of the Nerds” is another example of a TV show or movie that didn’t treat nerds/geeks/dorks as a faceless collective.  Lewis Skolnick, played by Robert Carradine (“Kung Fu“ fans will know him as the half-brother of David Carradine), is more or less the leader of the group.  He and his best friend Gilbert Lowell (played by Anthony Edwards) are freshmen at Adams College and soon meet fellow geeks such as Arnold Poindexter (Poindexter is one of those names that can actually be used as an insult) and Toshiro Takashi, who later makes the audience cheer when he wins the “chug beer and ride on a tricycle” competition.  The nerds, I should mention, also win the very manly burping competition (Booger, if you must know) and the javelin throw (won by Lamar using a floppy, colorful javelin designed specifically to accentuate his throwing motion).  Here’s a sample of the dialogue and treatment the nerds got; the excerpt is from right before the “chug and bike” competition started:

Danny Burke: You don't have a fu**ing chance nerd.
Takashi Toshiro: Oh, thank you. Good luck to you too, Burke.

 Now, here I feel it prudent to tell you that Toshiro’s understanding of American culture was presented as being rather . . . movie-ized.  And his understanding of idioms such as “having a [insert epither of choice] chance” isn’t very good.  Lewis or Gilbert undoubtedly would have responded differently.

 “Revenge of the Nerds” is one of the first examples I ever saw of diversity among nerds (the main other one was the lone black nerd in “Saved by the Bell,” who had a moderately sour voice), and it was one of the main steps in my path from “Why can’t they just be like everyone else,” which I got from “Saved by the Bell” and “Family Matters” to “That’s an entirely inaccurate portrayal of nerds and geeks,” which I got in pieces after watching “Revenge” and “Angus” and then went back to watch episodes of the two TV shows.

 The basic premise of “Revenge of the Nerds” is that nerds fight back (thus the title, obviously).  Gilbert Lowe’s comment “Their action tonight demands an immediate retaliation. And, if we don't, we're nothing but the nerds they say we are.” illustrates that perfectly.  They’re tired of being stepped on, ostracized, made to feel as unwelcome as a third eye (unsightly, useless, annoying, and sometimes downright harmful), and they stand up for themselves.  It doesn’t come easy; they’re going up against a bunch of jocks (who, in fairness, are portrayed rather stereotypically) and their cheerleader girlfriends (likewise).  Near the end of the movie the nerd house is ransacked by the ABs, and there’s a pep rally and bonfire for the football team (thus why the ABs are there).  Gilbert goes up to grab the microphone and he gets stopped by the football coach, who had been announcing the football players. A scuffle ensues, and the coach is about to punch the dean when UN Jefferson, the head of the Tri Lamb Fraternity, brings his boys around the raised platform to stop the coach.  Gilbert makes a speech about how the jocks trashed his house and he's a nerd, at which point Lewis comes up and says that he's a nerd too. Then Betty the cheerleader (who had not been terribly nice to Lewis) goes to hug Lewis, and Lewis makes a great big speech basically asking everyone who’s ever been stepped on, made fun of, felt ostracized or alone, verbally taunted, assaulted, made to feel inadequate, etc. to raise their hands, come forward and join him and his fellow nerds.  And all those outcasts who had been there for the pep rally come forward and unite with Lewis and Gilbert.

 That scene made me cry.  Seriously (at this point, if you doubt me stop reading the essay and go watch television or something).  There are several hundred people gathered at that bonfire, including all of the ABs and nearly every member of Tri-Lambda.  And there are a lot of people who don’t quite fit the stereotypes set forth by the 80s sitcoms. And they all look very uncomfortable.  And one by one so many of them raise their hands and come forward.  And some of them are cheerleaders.  If I remember correctly one or two are from Alpha Beta.  There are also several members of the faculty who come to join Lewis.  But most of them are your average person who isn’t exceptionally attractive or incredibly bright, but who maybe has glasses or doesn’t have a varsity jacket or doesn’t have piles of money for clothes or a car.  A lot of them are a little pudgy or a little too short or too skinny.

 Some of the stereotypes from the 80s sitcoms are prevalent; Lewis and his buddies do wear the “typical” geek clothing, complete with glasses and pocket protectors.  But they aren’t nearly as obviously bumbling as the nerds in “Saved by the Bell,” and they aren’t as obviously deliberate as Urkel.  And they mostly don’t have incredibly annoying voices (though that is my perception).  This was a movie that really started to break from the crowd in terms of portrayal of the unpopular.
 

 Since “Revenge of the Nerds” came out in 1984, sitcoms have gradually started to pay attention (with previous noted exceptions).  Darlene Connor (played by the inestimable Sara Gilbert) of “Roseanne” develops, over the course of several seasons,  into a vegan Wiccan who writes and draws comic books with her boyfriend David.  She gets ostracized something fierce for that by her parents (initially) and friends, not to mention her prissy older sister Becky (played by two actresses: Alicia “Lecy” Goranson and Sarah Chalke), who transfers the lack of life she has into a hatred of her younger sister’s active attempts to make something of herself and assume some “abnormal” moral standpoint.  The interesting thing is that in the first few seasons, Becky was the dorky one, and when she goes off to be with Mark, Darlene’s character shifts slowly but steadily to one that more closely resembles how she was at the end of the show.

 “Growing Pains”’ Tracey Gold, who played Carol Seaver, was by all accounts a geek; smart, burdened with glasses (which, if I recall correctly, were changed to contacts much later in the show’s running), conservative clothing (long skirts, loose-fitting shirts and long socks), and unattractive (this is how she was portrayed, not how she actually was).  Her brothers weren’t nice to her at all, especially Mike (her older brother), who thought it his mission in life to belittle her lack of popularity while not noticing the fact that he was sometimes unable to rub two brain cells together.

 A few years into the show, some transformation occurred in the storyline and she got a boyfriend.  Then in one episode we discovered how deep a character she was, and how amazingly beautiful she looked.  Her boyfriend, who by all accounts was also a loser (poor family, which showed in his grades and his clothing), and she wanted to go to a dance with him, but he couldn’t go.  So the night of this dance the Seavers convinced Carol to put on the dress she’d gotten in the hope that her boyfriend would ask her to the dance, and they went to a tower with a particularly high lookout point on the top.  Lo and behold, we found out why her boyfriend couldn’t go to the dance: he was working as a janitor in that tower.

 So Jason Seaver (Carol’s father) gets the stereo he’d brought along and takes it out so Carol and her boyfriend can dance.  And then Carol, who’d been wearing a coat and some white dress-type-thing, takes the coat off.

 I will now pause so you can pick up your jaw, if you saw and/or remember the episode.

 See, Carol looked so unbelievably ungeeky she was almost an anti-geek.  She had taken off her glasses and was showing off the body she’d hidden; later on in her life we’d find out she was anorexic, but at this point she wore strange clothes on-screen to fulfill the geeky persona she’d been given by the writers.

 Now, I would be remiss if I stopped here, because there are some counter-examples to my point, which is that in audiovisual media (TV/film), geeks have often been badly stereotyped and downright mistreated.  The examples I’ve given you show how stereotypes shape our view of those characters.  And in some movies (“Clueless,” “Ten Things I Hate about You”), those stereotypes serve to shape our perception in one way, then have it come back and punish us.  When that’s the case I don’t find fault with the stereotypes because they serve a useful purpose.  But in the cases of needless promulgation (the “nerd cave,” Steve Urkel’s pants, a “nightmare” Will Smith has where his three sons are all uber-dorky), it only serves to offend and separate those of us who know the truth from those of us who either don’t care or are unaware of the fallacies.