Transcript for Episode 110: Boy Meets World Accidentally Does a Gay Episode

This is the transcript for the installment of the show in which we discuss the Boy Meets World episode “Chick Like Me.” If you’d rather listen to Glen and Drew than read what they say, click here. The transcript was provided by Sarah Neal, whose skills we recommend wholeheartedly.

Topanga:  So, Shawn, how does it feel to be wearing pantyhose? 

Shawn:  Not Shawn. 

Cory:  No. You're right. 

Topanga:  Yeah. He needs a girl's name. 

Cory:  Okay. This is easy. How about Janet? 

Shawn:  No, no, no, no. Not Janet. 

Cory:  What possible difference could it make? 

Topanga:  Cory! You've thought about this before, haven't you? 

Shawn:  A little. 

[audience giggles]

Topanga:  And what name have you thought about? 

Shawn:  Well—[quietly] Veronica. 

[audience giggles intensify]

Topanga:  Veronica is a lovely name. 

Mr. Feeny:  Good morning Ms. Lawrence, Mr. Matthews, Mr. Hunter—

[audience laughs]

Mr. Feeny:  [quietly] If there's anything you need to talk about, my door is always open. I'm not here to judge. 

Shawn:  It's for an article we're writing, Mr. Feeny. 

Mr. Feeny:  I am not here to judge. 

[Boy Meets World theme music plays]

Drew:  Hello, and welcome to Gayest Episode Ever, the podcast where we discuss the LBGT-focused episodes of classic sitcoms. I'm Drew Mackie. 

Glen:  I'm Glen Lakin. 

Drew:  And in case that intro did not tip you off, today we are discussing Boy Meets World, specifically the Season 4 episode "Chick Like Me," which originally aired January 31, 1997. Here to discuss it with us is a special guest, FaatiTheStreet. Faati, hello. 

Faati:  Hi there. I'm Faati—FaatiTheStreet—and I'm a media person. I write media criticism, and I also cosplay everything. I am currently cosplaying a dinosaur because Jurassic Park (the animated series), which exists—it's on Netflix. It's amazing. Season 2 just came out. I'm known for writing very long media threads on Twitter and them somehow taking off. It's great. People actually care what I have to say about stuff that I watch now. It's dope. I made this thread last year called "The Silencing of the Shrew," which is a Shakespeare reference, and it's about this phenomena that happens in media where women of color are for some reason the only character in a piece that doesn't get lines or doesn't get many lines as the other people in the same piece. When I started the thread, I got a shout-out from Gail Simone. She was like, "This is on. You are about it," and I got into a brief disagreement with Neil Gaiman, which was the coolest thing ever. I was like, "I was being sassy with Neil Gaiman!" 

Drew:  That is major cool-nerd points right there. 

Faati:  Yes! And the thread has about half a million views now, and it's come up in a lot of podcasts, and someone told me that their Asian media course incorporated it into the lesson in a college class, which is the height of acclaim for me. That is it. I reached it. I'm in a class. That's dope [laughs].

Drew:  One class so far, more to come, surely. 

Faati:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  Your handle online, FaatiTheStreet, is a reference that Glen and I both appreciate a lot. Can you please tell our audience why you picked that? 

Faati:  Absolutely. Okay. So I'm a huge nerd, and I'm also neurodiverse, and I'm also-also queer and Black, so I'm an extremely marginalized person, and as many marginalized people do, I love comic books. You get to escape into a place where you are invincible—invincible is really good, by the way—and Doom Patrol is something that one of my friends has been trying to get me to watch for a while because we both had DC Universe back when it was on that, and I never watched it. I kept telling him that I was going to watch it, and then I never did it. Then last year, I was like, "Let me actually do this now," and it was—it is my favorite of any live-action-comic book rendition. It's my favorite one. 

I know Watchmen is really, really good—the most recent one that came out on HBO Max—but I still favor Doom Patrol because Doom Patrol explained C-PTSD, which is one of the things that I have that makes me neurodiverse. C-PTSD, every single character in it has it, and it manifests in different ways, and it's just so beautiful. And there's a character named "Danny the Street." Danny the Street is a non-binary, sentient street and basically the home for anybody who is a misfit. 

I'm also autistic. I'm very layered in my neurodiversity, and I'm also autistic, and autistic people—we either really, really, really love Sesame Street or we're terrified by it, and I was lucky enough to be one of those loving-it ones, and Sesame Street is also my favorite thing because of the accessibility of it. It was literally created so that inner-city kids could go to preschool. And I felt like Danny the Street was a reference to Sesame Street, and seeing that I, like many queer kids do, was like, "That's me now," and I took that [laughs]. So I'm Faati the Street because I stand for being a place of accountability and a place where I'm always learning, and I want to be someone that people feel comfortable being their full, 100 percent selves around. 

Drew:  That is an amazing thing to put out there and also a great way to bring Danny into the real world in a way that he probably deserves to be. 

Glen:  And it makes me want the Muppets to appear in Danny's universe in Season 3. 

Faati:  Yeah. Imagine if they had the Muppets on them—like Danny the Street has the Muppets. That's—yeah. That has to happen. It has to happen. 

Glen:  That's what I want. 

Faati:  We put it out there. 

Glen:  Manifest it. 

Faati:  Manifest it! Yes!

Drew:  Stuff has actually manifested on this podcast before, so it is actually worth putting out there. But it is also nice to remind everyone that we think Doom Patrol is an amazing show, and even if you think you're tired of superhero stuff I think you might like it. It is a very queer, very beautiful, very weird show, and we are also very excited for Season 3. 

Faati:  Yes. I can't wait. It's so beautifully done. Oh—however, massive trigger warnings for the show. Massive trigger warnings all over the place. I'll make a thread on my Twitter and explain all of the trigger warnings if anyone wants to watch the show so that you can know what you're going into—because I didn't [laughs].

Drew:  Right. Well, tell us when that is live, and we'll link to it in the show notes so anyone can check on it if they're listening to the episode now. 

Faati:  All right. Excellent. 

Drew:  So we brought you here to talk about Boy Meets World, and I think it is great to have you here for two reasons: 1) You're the one who actually suggested we should cover this episode in the first place because there is an interesting gender reading of this particular Boy Meets World adventure, but also 2) you are younger than both of us, and we are at the cut-off point where we didn't latch on to Boy Meets World like people just a few years younger did. Like, people younger than us have very big feelings about Boy Meets World—especially a lot of queer kids got very big feelings about Boy Meets World. I like to think we could wing it if we had to, but it's nice to bring in someone who actually can appreciate the entire series, you know what I'm saying? 

Faati:  Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Actually, it makes sense, based on this specific episode and the way that the entire series is layered with a kind of homo-philia that queer kids would latch onto. All of the male relationships within this show are so loving and caring, and as a queer kid watching that, it feels so good. Even if it still has the issues that a lot of '90s sitcoms have where there is some transphobia and some sexism and light racism every once in a while, it still was a good thing to see—especially if you live in a place where you can't explore being queer. 

Drew:  True. 

Glen:  I definitely had crushes on multiple boys on the show, and they triggered much body dysmorphia with me as a teenager. 

Drew:  For me, specifically hair dysmorphia. There's a lot of amazing—

Glen:  Mm-hmm. Floppy hair. 

Drew:  Topanga also has an amazing head of hair, but Eric and Shawn have just amazing heads of hair that you couldn't really replicate in real life unless you had access to a professional stylist. 

Faati:  You know, what's really funny about that is that's exactly how I felt when I first watched the show—so in love with Shawn and Eric's hair. And then when I rewatched it this season for this episode—I last watched that season back in college, so many years ago or whatever. I'm 30 [laughs], and I rewatched it as a 30-year-old trans person who uses they/them pronouns now and has a whole different relationship with myself as a Black person, too. Rewatching the season—in Season 4 there's an episode where Cory is freaking out about the fact that he's got short, curly hair and everybody talks about how great everyone else's hair is. He literally says, "My nose is so wide and big," and I was just like, "Is that bad?" When I was a kid and I watched it, I just internalized it. 

Drew:  Oh, no!

Faati:  But watching it as an adult, I was like, "Wow." Imagine being a Jewish kid watching this show. 

Glen:  Oh! Yeah. Yep. Yep. I was more of a Cory than a Shawn. 

Faati:  See? Imagine being a Black kid watching this show. He's literally describing Black features and saying that they're ugly on him, and it's just like, "No! What? You don't like how you look?" I never thought Cory was ugly. 

Drew:  No. 

Faati:  And I always thought that was weird in the show when they would frame it—because Shawn and Cory don't have the same kind of look. They're apples and oranges. You couldn't say one is better-looking than the other because they have completely different looks. But yeah, about that body dysmorphia—it was all over the place in Season 4. I think it's because they're teenagers? 

Glen:  Yeah, the testosterone is hitting in weird ways for both of them. 

Faati:  Yeah. 

Drew:  Teenager shows make for a lot of body dysmorphia but also so do superhero comics and cartoons. 

Faati:  [laughs]

Drew:  You're kind of screwed no matter where you look, unfortunately. Where did you first encounter the show? 

Faati:  Oh, I watched it when it came out—like when it was airing. I had watched it since I was really little, and I remember seeing the episode where—spoilers!—Cory and Topanga get married and they invite everybody. Like ABC, the network, invited everyone to come to their wedding, and it was filmed on a little hand-held camera. It was the corniest thing ever, but I can't find it anywhere. Maybe it's in the Disney+. Maybe I'll get there when I get to that point in the seasons. 

Glen:  Didn't they get married in Disney World—or somewhere? 

Faati:  No, they had a date in Disney World in one of the earlier seasons, but they got married at this place. It was a random hotel or something, but they made it so that the audience—we were guests at Cory and Topanga's wedding. I think I was like nine when it happened. 

Drew:  That would check out. That would have been 2000 when that aired, I think. Right? 

Faati:  Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And they also used to play the episodes really late at night. I have serious insomnia ever since I was little, so I used to watch all of these old sitcoms—old—all of these sitcoms that had been running. I was watching them after the syndication, so I've seen all of The Nanny and Frasier, and I watched those when I was in elementary school. 

Drew:  That's how you get a good imprint on your brain and force yourself to remember those plotlines for the rest of your life, and eventually you start a podcast or something. 

Glen:  Or something. 

Faati:  Yes!

Drew:  Yeah. What was it about this particular episode that spoke to you? 

Faati:  This is the most trans-narrative episode I've ever seen in anything from that era because of the way that Rider Strong plays it. Ben Savage plays it like a joke the whole time. The whole way through, he plays it like a joke. You could tell he wasn't super comfortable with the idea of being a girl. For him it was like, "I'm in drag. This is funny. I'm just putting on a performance." But Rider Strong, the way he plays it—and I can't speak to this man as a person. I'm just talking about his acting in this episode. The way he plays it is with such sincerity that, for queer kids, that episode was this, like, "Oh!" moment because there's a sequence when he first appears in the outfit walking down the stairs at school—which seems so terrifying. 

Watching it back, this whole episode I was getting chills, and it was not funny the way that it was when I watched it when I was younger. It was so unsettling. But Rider Strong was like this beacon throughout the episode because he cared, and you could tell he cared. There's a sequence where they're talking about what to name him, and Cory just throws out a name, and Shawn's like, "No. That's not what I was wanting." And Cory is like, "What does it matter? Who cares?" and Topanga notices how Shawn is reacting, and she goes, "No, no. Let him talk. You've thought about this before, haven't you?" And that line shook me. Wait—can I curse? 

Glen:  Oh, yeah. Yeah. 

Drew:  Go for it. 

Faati:  Yeah. That line fucking shook me. That line shook me. I was just like, "Oh, shit. Why would a cis boy have thought about this before?" I'm not saying that cis people can't experiment with their gender. They absolutely can and should. I'm not saying that you can't have these thoughts and still be cis. I'm saying that the way that this sequence was played—I don't think Shawn is cis. Like, I'm interpreting that episode—and that's why it was the one that I was like, "We got to talk about this," because talking about it back then was just about learning about sexism. Talking about it now, these are the things that let you know within yourself that you might not be cis. 

Glen:  Yeah. Shawn played it with a ton of sensitivity. If anything, it made me—because he's such a "ladies' man." He plays up the macho angle so much in this episode at the beginning, and in other episodes he's in. He's so defined by him dating and the girls that he's with that in this episode it felt like that was the performance and that Shawn as Veronica was more true to who this character was. 

Faati:  Right, and it felt like a more sincere display of—I'm just going to say "Veronica" while talking about who Shawn was in that place. Yeah. Veronica felt like a nicer, happier Shawn, and watching it—I don't know. I'm a little bit sad for this fictional character person because knowing the show and having seen Girl Meets World, they're probably not going to get that, like, "Whoa," that moment until they're in their 50s. And that's okay. It's okay to get it then. It's beautiful to get it anytime. It's awesome. But I just feel sad because this moment was when it clicked, and then that means that that character would have had to be like, "Okay. Now we've finished writing the article, so I've got to put this away. Cory said that I was a babe, but I guess it doesn't really matter. We were just doing a thing." 

Drew:  My next question was actually going to be if you thought that there's an alternate dimension of Boy Meets World where from this point forward Shawn was on the path to becoming Veronica.

Faati:  So here's the thing about queer kids in media. We make everybody gay and everybody trans, and we just queer everybody. I just did a cosplay yesterday with my best friend where we did Inuyasha and Kagome, and I made a TikTok with her. She's @SailorMarseline on TikTok. We have this whole thing where we do nerdy shit together. We made this TikTok where I was like, "Do you know how you can tell when somebody is sapphic?" and she's sitting behind me, and she's like, "No. How?" and I'm like, "What does yonic mean?" And then she goes, "Oh! Shaped or similar to a vagina," and I'm like, "Yep," and that's the whole TikTok, and I was like, "Inuyasha and Kagome are confirmed lesbians." 

Drew:  Wait. Were you Inuyasha or Kagome?

Faati:  Oh. I was Inuyasha. Well, Inuyasha's got white hair and I've got really long, white hair right now. 

Drew:  That makes sense. 

Faati:  But yeah. We queerify everything. We make everything trans and non-binary and gay—yeah. And this is my read of the show from now on: Shawn is more than likely non-binary and legitimately seemed pleased to be in a dress and to be addressed as a girl. That means something. 

Drew:  I agree. 

Faati:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  Glen, what is your relationship with Boy Meets World?

Glen:  I think we discussed this in the lead-up to the episode. I remember kind of watching it, and I didn't understand why I wouldn't have watched it until Drew pointed out that it was competing with X-Files, and so I think that's just where my teenage brain was at at the time. So I'd probably tune in for some of TGIF and then duck out. I remember people in my high school talking about the show and having a deep connection with Mr. Feeny that I just didn't have. But I know that during some summer—perhaps in college or after—I binged some episodes, and I had seen this episode before. So I have a casual familiarity with it. And my crushes, of course. 

Faati:  Right. 

Drew:  I watched for sure the first season when it was on, and then as the seasons went on I think I was getting more towards junior-high age, and I got it into my head that this was something that teenagers didn't watch. I think that's why I distanced myself from it. But also, I misremember a lot of it. I didn't realize that Minkus is only in the first season until he's disappeared to the other side of the school and doesn't come back, which was a weird thing to re-remember. In my head, I actually classify this a lot like Pokémon because Pokémon got really popular right when I was just basically too old to get super obsessed with Pokémon. Similar to how kids a little bit younger than me have an encyclopedic knowledge of Boy Meets World, they also have an encyclopedic knowledge of Pokémon, and I have the gist of it. I have it in broad strokes, but I don't know the specifics of it like someone three years younger than me would have because they've loved it their entire life, from childhood to adulthood. That's my analogy for it. The only other relation I really have to this show is that during my freshman year in the dorms, there was a girl on my floor who went to high school with Topanga and a girl on my floor who went to high school with Shawn, and I remember learning that and being like, "Oh. Some people had a really different high school experience than I did. That was not my experience." But I thought they were very, very fancy and metropolitan for that. 

Faati:  [laughs]

Glen:  I think your Pokémon comparison would be Power Rangers for me. I just missed the cutoff for being really into Power Rangers, although I had crushes on those boys too. 

Drew:  That's fair. 

Faati:  You know what's interesting? You guys are mentioning the age cutoff for shows and stuff, and I remember the first time that I hear anybody say that. When I was in college, I was talking to somebody about this cartoon that I was watching, and the girl was like, "You still watch cartoons?" Then I was like, "Ye—what do you mean?" I didn't understand the question. I'm like, "Why wouldn't I still? What do you watch?" 

Drew:  [laughs]

Faati:  And she's like, "Well, I used to watch cartoons, but now I mostly just watch reality TV and VH1 and people interviewing people," and her voice started to die, and you could tell she was so tired of that shit, and I was like, "Yeah, you should just go watch Regular Show, man. Those dudes are stoners." The people that make cartoons are hilarious, and cartoons get better the older you get because there are all these references in it that you would never have noticed as a kid, before you became metropolitan. Let's bring that word back. 

Drew:  I don't think I ever became metropolitan. I just moved to a city. But I did surround myself with people who watch cartoons regularly, so that counts for something. 

Faati:  Yeah. They're amazing. They're one of the best forms of storytelling that we have today, and it's wild how the West doesn't care. Like, Invincible is incredible. 

Glen:  Oh, yeah. I held on to cartoons, obviously, to this day—well into the "cutoff point"—and still try and find people who watched Road Rovers and Captain Simian when they were airing for the first time and don't often find them. 

Faati:  It's so hard. 

Drew:  It's probably worth pointing out, we can just tell people now that we are nearing closer to a summer hiatus where we're going to take a little bit of time off, but we're also going to start a new bonus Patreon podcast that is about gay episodes of cartoons—or episodes of cartoons that we can read queerness into. So if you are like us and you enjoy cartoons, that is something that will be coming to you in the relatively near future, so please look forward to that. 

Boy Meets World, if you somehow don't know, is a sitcom that ran on ABC for seven seasons and 158 episodes. It follows the adventures of Cory Matthews as he meets the world. In the first season, Cory and his best friend Shawn are sixth graders and not particularly good students, despite the fact that their teacher (Mr. Feeny) is Cory's next-door neighbor. Cory's mother, father, brother, and sister are main characters from the get-go, but less so as the show goes on—poor Morgan (who disappears). 

As the show moves on into high school and then college, it has an expanding cast of young people, and this big group of young people who hang out together becomes an increasingly bigger part of the show. And, as Faati mentioned, it ends with Cory marrying Topanga, his love interest since the first season. There are some bonus characters—some who actually won't show up in the episode we're talking about because they haven't joined the show yet—that I'm going to discuss at the end of our intro, before we get into the actual episode. So we'll talk about some of them at the end of this segment. 

This show was co-created by Michael Jacobs and April Kelly. Michael Jacobs co-created a bunch of shows, the most remembered being My Two Dads, which seems like a show we should have done at this point but we're not sure if there's an actual gay episode; Charles in Charge, which probably does not have a gay episode; Dinosaurs, which did have a gay episode and we covered it; Where I'm From—is that right? I wrote Where I Lived, but it might have been Where I’m From. It was a sitcom that starred Doug E. Doug, and it was on TGIF. He was a Trinidadian American living in Harlem, and it aired for two seasons. The last show is Maybe This Time, which was a sitcom that only lasted one season, but it starred Betty White, Marie Osmond, and Ashley Johnson, and it was not bad. 

Glen:  Okay!

Faati:  That sounds great. Whoa. 

Drew:  He also worked on and developed but did not create The Torkelsons, which was a sitcom that lasted for two seasons and which starred Lee Norris before he became Minkus on Boy Meets World.

Faati:  Ooh!

Glen:  I remember that one. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. They changed it halfway through, and Brittany Murphy was on the show when it became the rebooted version, but I can't remember what that second version was. No one ever talks about The Torkelsons. I'm glad I got to mention it. April Kelly was a writer for Happy Days and Mork & Mindy and was a producer for Nine to Five and also Love, Sydney—which is the episode we just covered last week on our show. She was a supervising producer for Where I Live, that show I just mentioned, and also Webster. According to an oral history of the show collected by Chloe Schildhause for Uproxx in 2017, Jacobs had just wrapped work on Dinosaurs when an executive at ABC pulled him aside and stressed to him how important the 12- to 14-year-old market was to the network and said, "You seem like you're good at this. You should make a show that appeals specifically to this age group," and he did. He decided that he was going to differentiate it from shows like Family Ties and Growing Pains, which were about the entire family but the episodes tended to focus on the oldest child, which would be Kirk Cameron or Michael J. Fox, depending on the show. 

He decided he wanted to make a show that was focused on the middle child because it was about being stuck in the middle—Eric is moving off and getting interested in girls, and he has this kid sister, and he's trying to figure out who he is within the confines of his family. He looked at all the actors who were under contract at ABC, and one of them was Ben Savage, who was the brother of Fred Savage, who'd already proven to be a successful lead on The Wonder Years. He didn't necessarily think that they were going to hit it off but they met up, and they did, and from that point on the show was called "The Ben Savage Project." It was always meant to star Ben Savage. He was always the central glue that held everything together, which I'm kind of surprised by—but I guess it makes sense. He was a very appealing kid actor. 

Glen:  Yeah. He's talented. 

Drew:  Oh, he's very—yeah. 

Faati:  Yes. He's great. He's great. A lot of the earlier stuff, he was very funny and cute, and in the middle stuff he gets weird. I wish they had gone a specific kind of direction with his character, but that's not his acting abilities. I still enjoyed all of his acting in the show. 

Drew:  Yeah. I think being Fred's little brother also, he probably had a lot to prove. But he's his own person. He's not just Fred Savage's little brother. 

Glen:  I think he has some Lucille Ball energy to him. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. In this episode he kind of does, actually. 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Faati:  I wanted to say something about the middle child thing. With the show being based around a middle child, I feel like that was something that was really important back then, too, because with Gen Xers there's something relating to those two things that happened. I learned about middle-child syndrome in college in psychology and how it started being really popular for people to talk about as where your alignment is in terms of when you were born. Gen Xers, the middle children of them have made such really cool shows, like Malcolm in the Middle. 

Drew:  That's a good point. Yeah. I also think that the Gen X connection to middle children also has something to do with Jan Brady, since Gen Xers watched a ton of Brady Bunch reruns, and they latched onto Jan in a big way, which is probably why she's such a big deal in the movies. 

Glen:  Right. 

Faati:  Yeah. 

Drew:  When this joined the TGIF block, it was the only new show on it in September of 1993, and it aired alongside Family Matters, Step by Step, and Hangin' with Mr. Cooper which was in its second season—and it's first season was not a TGIF show. The first season, it was sexy, young adults living together, and then they brought in Raven-Symoné and it became more like a family show. And then Sister Sister would debut later that season as another new TGIF show. 

It did well, and from right off the bat it had a loyal following, but it never was really a huge hit, which I was kind of surprised by. It did not quite as well as Sabrina the Teenage Witch overall. It did not as good as Full House did. I think Family Matters always did a little bit better than it, so it was a solid Friday-night ratings getter but never anything spectacular. It was the 37th most-watched show the first season and the 36th most-watched show the second, and that was its best season. After that, it always went down a little bit. It went down to around 41, and then the last season it didn't do very well. I was surprised by—I guess it's interesting to think about how this may not have been a huge ratings getter at the time it was on TV, but it has more than made up for that with a legacy that has outlasted and has more of a legacy than a lot of shows that were on TGIF that did better. It's more of a legacy than Step by Step, for example. 

Glen:  What?! I mean, probably true. 

Drew:  Yeah [laughs].

Faati:  Mm-hmm. It does for sure, even though Step by Step has a way better intro. 

Drew:  That is a very catchy intro. This show never really figured out what its intro was, did it? 

Faati:  It did not, and it was all over the place, and I want to be super into the theme song but I can't be. It just feels so out of sorts with the actual show. Each theme song always feels like, "What are you doing? Why is this—"

Glen:  This one is them driving, and you see a bunch of things in reflections. 

Drew:  You see all their loved ones projected in the sky as hallucinations [laughs].

Faati:  In the sky—yeah. 

Glen:  I think they were just trying to be younger and hipper and like, "We don't need a classic sitcom intro." Yes, you do. 

Drew:  Right. 

Glen:  You absolutely do, and maybe that's why I never qualify it in my head as a classic sitcom. 

Faati:  Ooh!

Glen:  It always feels a little different to me. 

Drew:  Because it almost feels like—I mean, a few years later we'd be like, "Oh. That's a WB sitcom," because it was so focused on young people learning life lessons and stuff. It also felt edgier in a lot of ways than everything else on TGIF, which was a fairly sanitized programming block, as we'll talk about. So for example, this went into syndication in 1997, before it actually finished up its run. It's been in syndication ever since, but from 2000 on it was a Disney Channel exclusive, and even though it was a TGIF show on ABC, there are several episodes that Disney did not let be in the syndicated package on Disney Channel because they were too edgy for Disney—which is sort of crazy because TGIF is not a place where you expect anything edgy, but there's an episode about underage drinking, there's an episode where Cory and Topanga talk about losing their virginity, and there's one more that I guess I didn't—

Faati:  There's an episode where Shawn gets recruited into a cult, or the one where the teacher mysteriously either dies or—I don't know what happens to him. No one knows what happens to him, but Shawn's favorite teacher—crap, what's his name? 

Drew:  Mr. Turner? 

Faati:  Mr. Turner! Mr. Turner gets into a motorcycle accident, and then you never know what happened to him. They make a joke about it in Girl Meets World because of how much the fans were like, "What happened to Mr. Turner?! We loved him! He had his great accent—" 

Drew:  But he shows up on Girl Meets World at some point, right? Do they just not say what happened to him? 

Faati:  No, I think that's the joke is that someone's like, "Something, something, Mr. Turner died," and then he's just there. 

Drew:  Oh. 

Faati:  I don't—it's weird. It's Boy Meets World [laughs].

Drew:  So I ended up doing some research into Girl Meets World, and I ended up seeing a scene from what I think is the last episode of the show where it's the first time you see Morgan, the little sister, come back—but it's both Morgans. So Morgan gets recast halfway through Boy Meets World, and they have Morgan in one scene, and then the other one comes up and tags her out and then just finishes the scene, and no one comments on it except for one character who is a child himself, and he's worried that there's another double of himself of him out there and he's going to get replaced, and then it just moves on. That's not terrible [laughs].

Faati:  That's so meta and weird. Whoa. 

Glen:  It's very us.

Drew:  Yeah. It's very us, and it's also nice that they didn't exclude either of the Morgans. That was a nice way to have them both be involved. 

Faati:  Yeah. Yeah, that is nice. 

Drew:  I was realizing, watching this, that it kind of functions as a Saved by the Bell but better in that it is a show about—Saved by the Bell started out as a show about middle school, and then it time-jumped ahead to everyone being in high school. It was always about the kids but also involved Mr. Belding being weirdly insinuated in these kids' personal lives, even when stuff wasn't happening at school, and this show is very much that. It starts out as more of a family show and the kids sort of take over with Mr. Feeny very insinuated into everyone's personal life, but they explain it because he's the next-door neighbor and there's a reason why he's there at all the holidays and stuff. 

Faati:  I would argue that it's a more wholesome—that. 

Drew:  [laughs] Yeah. 

Faati:  Because Mr. Belding's relationship with the demon, main-character boy—what's his name? Zack? 

Glen:  Yeah, it's Zack. 

Faati:  Zack Morris? 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. 

Faati:  There was this great YouTube a while ago that was called Zack Morris is Trash and they just went over each episode of how terrifyingly over the top and cruel this kid was. Anyway, yeah. Boy Meets World is a more wholesome of that dynamic of the teacher that follows you everywhere. 

Drew:  Yeah, and also the kids spend less time lying to get into and out of all their trouble. 

Glen:  Well, I mean, Boy Meets World has context. It's grounded in the real world. You see that they have families and a community, and Saved by the Bell sort of seems like it takes place in a universe where all the parents were turned into dust like [inaudible 00:33:32] the comet style. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. However, both shows also end with their central couple getting married, which is very unrealistic, and we're led to believe in sequel series that even though they both got married when they were like, 19, they stuck it out and are still married today. That's another weird thing that they force the characters to—because it has to end with a wedding, I guess that means these characters have probably only ever had sex with each other and have only ever been with each other. They're the only relationship they know. 

Glen:  I don't know if that's necessarily weird, given the time it came out. It's not weird for the suburbs in the '80s and '90s. I think there are plenty of people in America who end up continuing to date and marry people that they dated in high school. 

Drew:  Really? 

Faati:  I think I'm going to split the thing between the two of you. I agree with both of you. On the one hand, I do think that it's a little weird because they let all the other characters in the show date multiple people, but Cory and Topanga have to be with each other because it's implied that they can't have sex with anybody. They're the virginal, main couple. Shawn has sex, Eric has sex, but Cory and Topanga can't because they are "the ones that are going to get married at the end" couple. But then on the other hand, in suburbs and small towns, even today people get married to the person that they were dating in high school and then have kids and then literally spend 30 years together and have never had sex with anybody else. I don't know how they do that, but it happens, and it's real [laughs].

Glen:  Yep. 

Drew:  So I guess maybe I'm biased based on the fact that most of the people I know are still not married, and I'm—38? I'm 38. Yeah. 

Glen:  Not for long!

Drew:  Not for long. It is not my experience, though. But you're right. That is something that does exist out in the world, and I shouldn't just wash over that as being something that doesn't happen. It just doesn't happen to me. Speaking of characters who do or do not end up together, I did want to talk about Angela, who does not appear in this episode at all because she doesn't join the show until—I think the next season? Is that right—Season 5? 

Faati:  It might be the end of this season, beginning of next season because I know that she and Shawn have this on again/off again thing that starts really early in the series. I remember noting that it started really early the last time around that I watched this because I didn't realize she was in the show for so long. And yes, let's talk about the fact that she and Shawn don't end up together in Girl Meets World and about the actress in general real quick. Do you guys know about the drama with Trina McGee and Boy Meets World? 

Drew:  Yeah. So there wasn't that much about the history of the show, really, but in just doing a basic search a ton of stuff about Trina McGee came up, and it was all really interesting. And I figured since we probably won't ever do another Boy Meets World, I want to talk about it now. 

Faati:  Okay. Yeah, that's great. So the stuff that happened was very—ugh. It was so upsetting when I found out about it last year because I'm a huge Boy Meets World fan and I'm also Black, and the stuff that happened was related to both of those things. So she talked about—she openly spoke about the fact that she was treated differently when she came back and that during the show she was bullied, basically. Like everybody in the cast except for the main cast of kids—she didn't speak about the adults. But Danielle Fishel and Ben Savage and Will Friedle all said micro-aggressive, low-key/high-key racist stuff to her, and it was very upsetting for her, and the only person that was cool was Rider Strong. He was actually nice to her and stuff. 

It's messed up, thinking about someone experiencing that in a setting like that because when it's happening when you're in school, maybe you'll graduate or maybe you'll change schools or maybe somebody will stop it—like you could ask a teacher or something, maybe. Maybe. But when you're in a fake school and everybody's a teenager or young adult and all of the people who are bullying you are the stars of the show, what can you do? What could she have done? Basically nothing. And so she talked about it because when she went to go be on Girl Meets World—which I have personal feelings about the way they used her character. I'm going to get into that after explaining this. When she went there, she was treated like a stranger despite the fact that she had spent years—formative years—with these people acting in the same show, making the same show a better show. 

She also talked about how Will Friedle apologized to her later. He messaged her on Instagram and said, "I was an asshole when I was a kid, and the way that I treated you wasn't great. It was terrible," and he apologized. I think Danielle Fishel apologized sometime this year, but the Black community don't care [laughter]. No, I'm kidding. I don't speak for us [laughs]. I speak for me. I don't care. I mean, look. I appreciate that she recognized that it was bad after everybody was talking about it on the internet, which can't have been fun. I'm empathetic to the fact that you got blown up on the internet, and that's not great. I've experienced a lower version of that, and it's terrifying. But if that's what it takes for you to be introspective about your past experiences with people of color, then you're not sorry. 

Drew:  Right. 

Faati:  Right. Like, I know you've been in therapy because you're an actor. So it never came up in therapy? All right. You need to go do another round real quick of that because you should be sorry. You should be able to reflect on the things you did when you were a younger person and be able to say, "Wow. That wasn't great. Let me say something to the person that I harmed." I've got to tell you, doing that feels really good. I've been doing that since I was in my earlier 20s when I started going to therapy. I was like, "I should probably apologize to the people that keep coming up." Not all of them wanted anything to do with me, but some of them were appreciative. And you don't have to get a thanks for the apology for the apology to matter, you know?  

Drew:  Right. 

Glen:  Yeah. Like, if it takes a national movement for you to apologize to someone—it's great that you apologized to someone, but we are not going to ignore that it took a national movement for that to happen. 

Faati:  Exactly. Yeah. 

Drew:  She's very diplomatic, and in doing further research I found something I actually hadn't ever seen before, which was a column she wrote for the L.A. Times about what it was like to be in a very high-profile, mixed-race couple on a popular TV show. It's called "TV Can Help the World Erase Color Lines." I'll link to it in the show notes if anyone wants to read it. It is interesting because when you think about what it was like to be part of Angela and Shawn—when you think about what TGIF meant—like, did Eddie or Laura Winslow ever date a white kids? I don't think they did. Did any of the Step by Step kids ever date anyone who was not white? I don't think they did. So it was very meaningful that there was an interracial couple on the show. Not having seen every episode of the show, I was curious how this was addressed, and she actually explains in her own words, so I'm going to quote her right now: 

As a result of my own experience as half of a cross-race romance on a major television show, I have conducted, quite involuntarily, a public opinion poll on the issue. People are not shy about giving me their candid reaction to my mixed-race romance on Boy Meets World. And I’m happy to report that the reactions are not at all reactionary... My character, Angela, has intimately kissed Shawn (Rider Strong) a number of times, and the show’s creators have never made an issue of our race. As our executive producer, Michael Jacobs, explained to us at the start: It’s obvious what color we are. The Los Angeles Times apparently didn’t think our kisses were of any threat to society, since no editorial or reportorial comment was ever offered, and no viewer response letter was ever printed. I, for one, saw that silence as very golden. The demographics of “Boy Meets World” lean toward young people, so the absence of expressed concern is all the more significant. I get lots of positive reactions from both black and white teenagers wanting to know when Shawn and I are getting back together. 

I think this was written right at the beginning of the last season, by the way. 

The black kids are not asking, “Why are you with that white boy?” When I attended the NAACP Image Awards, a black girl lamented to me that Shawn and Angela are a perfect couple and should be back together. The next day, a white girl in a mall begged to know if Shawn and Angela are still in love. One was 9, one preteen. They are the new face of tolerance. These kids are not looking at race; they’re absorbing the love story.

None of that is disqualified by her experiences with the actors, and in reading any interviews with her I read, she does not have any fault with the writers or the producers or the directors of the show. It seems to be that he had a good working relationship with them. I like that this is something she put out into the world, and I like that it's still very true. 

Faati:  Yes, and I'm going to jump off of saying what we like about it before I get into what I disliked in Girl Meets World. What I really liked about Shawn and Angela was that Angela just was a girl in that show, and in my life I never got to just be a whatever gender. I always had all these expectations on me, and she's just this dope girl in their friend group. I will say that I haven't rewatched the seasons where Angela is in it since college (since 2013 or 2012), so I would potentially have a very different view. I don't know. But from my childhood remembrance and my youth, I think that Angela's portrayal was beautiful and meaningful, and it impacted an entire generation of people to—what's the word? It like brainwashed us into thinking that it's okay to mix races, and that's why our parents are mad. 

No, I'm kidding! That's not what it did! [laughter] Miscegenation laws and whatnot. No, it was great. It was awesome. You could tell that Rider Strong was nice to her. That's why everybody was responding to that. When she first made the post, everyone was wondering how he was to her, and she was like, "Oh, he was an angel," and everyone's like, "Yeah, of course he was." You could see it. You could see the chemistry between these two people within the entirety of the show, and it was just so compelling and nice. 

Now let's say some things I don't like. 

Drew:  [laughs]

Faati:  Angela doesn't have any Black friends, and it's really weird because I've been the only one or whatever, and that's not a real thing, though. You're not always the only-one only one. That's only on TV. Like, the dude in the Power Rangers, he's the only Black guy, and he's the only Black guy they know, and he's the only Black guy he knows. You never see his parents. And in real life, you've got Black parents. You've got family members. You've got people who live across the street from you or people that you see in the mall, or you could have friends that go to different schools. The fact that they never put that into the show with Angela's character just felt like such a disservice to the entire series. I think that's a part of why it went down—because they kept trying to do all of these progressive things, but they would do it at kind of a half measure. 

And I'm not trying to—I know what a big deal it was to even have a Black girl on that show in a relationship with a white guy at the time. Despite how insane that sounds, it really was a huge, huge deal when it happened. Like, the first animated interracial kiss didn't happen for 20-something years after that on As Told By Ginger. So it's a big deal. But as a Black person watching it, I was so excited when Angela joined the cast, and I've rooted for her since I was a little kid. On reflection, why didn't she have any Black friends? 

Drew:  Like there could have been just one episode where you see what she's doing when she's not hanging out with Cory and Shawn and Topanga all the time. 

Faati:  Right, like they started introducing Topanga's parents in the series once they realized that she was a main character. Angela's dad—Angela's family doesn't come into the series until the very end to take her away. So that's just odd to me. They could have done more to develop that. But I will say that they probably didn't know what the heck they were doing in terms of writing more Black people than just one Black person, and they would have had to hire Black writers and stuff, and that's a whole thing. So maybe that's a part of why it didn't happen that way, but it was unfortunate. 

Drew:  Right. 

Faati:  And it made a lot of people feel even more sour when Angela didn't get the same treatment that Cory and Topanga did in Girl Meets World, and I don't know why they didn't do that. When I found out that Girl Meets World was coming out, I was so freaking psyched because Boy Meets World is one of my favorite television shows of all time. Then I watched it, and I saw what they did with Angela, and I was like, "Why does there need to be a romance here between Shawn and the mother of this girl? What is that for? Why is that happening? Why couldn't they just have Angela in the show and make them have a biracial daughter and have that—have what is it like to be a Black mom/white dad with a biracial daughter in this day and age? What does that feel like? What's it like?" And it's just—ugh. They chickened out, like they keep doing with this progressive stuff that they want to do. They keep doing a half measure of it, and I just wish that they would just be like, "I know we work for Disney, but maybe they'll let us do it anyway," and just throw it out there like Gravity Falls did. 

Glen:  Do you think they were just concerned that had Angela and Shawn stayed together they obviously would have been a more compelling and likeable couple than Cory and Topanga? And so to make Cory and Topanga a more engaging, interesting thing, the only thing they have is their longevity and their high school romance that stayed strong throughout the years? 

Faati:  I will counter that with saying this: Then why didn't they just make the show about Angela and Shawn once they realized that they were the more compelling couple in the '90s, back when they became the more compelling couple? People way more favored Angela and Shawn because they felt like real people. But that's not to discredit Danielle or Ben's acting. It was the way their characters were written. Topanga isn't written like an actual girl. Sometimes they give her things to make her more complex, but for the most part she's their Hermione. 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  Oh, that's a good point. 

Faati:  Right, and the real couple is the Harry and Ron (which is Cory and Shawn), and it's like—I don't know. Angela is just a more compelling character. She just seemed like someone that you want to hang out with versus Topanga, who feels like somebody that you wouldn't want to be around when you hang out because she's going to tell on you. 

Drew:  She's very tightly wound once they realize she's not a hippie anymore, which is another weird thing when you think about how she was like earth child initially, and then they were like, "We're not going to do that anymore. We're going to make her a Type A grade grubber, basically. 

Faati:  Yes! I didn't even realize that until you just said that, but yeah. Why did they do that to her? 

Drew:  I don't know. That's actually going to come up later when we get into the actual episode. There's a weird reference that reminded me of something from her past that is one of the few bits of Boy Meets World trivia I can actually offer, and I don't know why it stayed in my head all this time. 

Glen:  I mean, my first note about her in this episode is "What season did she stop dressing like an earth child and start dressing like a recently divorced mother?" 

Drew:  It was the '90s. People dressed different back then. But yeah, she looks like she wants to be—she wants to get into college, which is what she does. 

Faati:  I don't think it's explained, though, in the show. I'm trying to think, and I don't think it is. I think she just gradually gets older. I think that's what they want to imply there—but no! I agree with both of you. That's not how it happens because I was a nerdy, hippie earth child, and look at me now! Look at this! Does this look conservative?!

Glen:  Cosplaying a dinosaur. 

Faati:  Exactly! [laughs]

Drew:  On that note—unless there's anything we need to say about Angela before we move on to the actual episode? 

Faati:  Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to say real quick that I think that the thing that they do with her dad in the last season is so weird. It's so weird, and it felt so contrived, and maybe that's because I don't have a dad so I was like, "Dad stories? That don't make sense to me. No!" But maybe it's not. Maybe it's because it was contrived. Her and Shawn had just gotten back together and decided they love each other. Like, literally, that is what happens in the storyline right before her dad shows up. A couple episodes before her dad shows up, they just commit to each other again, and they get back together, and then her dad shows up and says, "Hey, I'm in the military, and we never get to spend any time together. I'm moving to another country. Do you want to come with me so you can spend time with me, college-aged daughter who's about to graduate from college but hasn't gotten there yet?" That just seem so weird and random. Like, who is this guy? We've never even seen him before, and he just shows up and takes her away. It was just so odd. 

Drew:  I guess they didn't want to do a double wedding to end the series because that would have taken away from the Cory-Topanga relationship, which became the center of the show—I guess? I didn't watch it. But—yeah. 

Faati:  But they didn't have to get married. They wouldn't have, either. Shawn and Angela would have gone and traveled around the world and been an unwed couple—like a partnership or whatever—because of the way that they're both so independent. 

Drew:  Right. 

Faati:  But I think it's like what Glen said. They wanted to split them apart because they want the main focus to be on Cory and Topanga—because Shawn and Angela were just too compelling. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. Ugh. Goodbye, Angela. You don't appear in this episode, unfortunately, so we're going to have to focus on other female characters who may or may not be actual alternate personas of characters we know on the show. But before we get to that, we're going to take a quick commercial break. 

[Drew and Glen promote their upcoming bonus podcast and thank their Patreon patrons]

Drew:  And we're back. The episode we are discussing today, "Chick Like Me," was directed by Jeff McCracken, who directed every single episode of the show's fourth season and a lot of them from other seasons. He has directed a ton of TV as well. He's also a former actor who is the male lead in a movie that's either called Summer of Fear or Stranger In Our House, which is an adaptation of a Lois Duncan YA novel that stars Linda Blair and Fran Drescher—in-the-early-'80s Fran Drescher—about a family that has their orphan cousin move in and things don't go well. It's a very, very good, trashy YA movie. If you ever want to see a light B thriller, that's on Amazon Prime, and I think it's free. 

Glen:  Oh! I do want to watch that. 

Faati:  Yes, I absolutely do. 

Drew:  Young Fran Drescher in a nurse's costume, also. She's a nurse. It was written by a man named Stephen Hibbert, who has mostly written for cartoons. He wrote for Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, Darkwing Duck. He was also an actor. He's the gimp in Pulp Fiction, which is surprising, and there's a very interesting Simpsons connection here. He used to be married to Julia Sweeney, who was on Saturday Night Live. When Julia was married to him, her name was Julia Sweeney-Hibbert, and back in the day when they were first making The Simpsons (I think around the time they were getting Season 2 together), they had this idea for a family doctor who would be a woman. That character would have been voiced by Julia Sweeney, and her name would have been Julia Hibbert, and that's because it was her actual name in real life. It was a weird in-joke that Julia Sweeney was voicing herself, I guess. That did not happen. Julia Sweeney never ended up voicing a character for The Simpsons. When they did give The Simpsons a family doctor, they ended up making him a parody of Dr. Huxtable from The Cosby Show, but they retained the name. So that the reason why the doctor on The Simpsons is named Julius Hibbert was Julia Hibbert—Julius Hibbert. So this man who wrote this episode is the source of Dr. Hibbert's last name on The Simpsons. Isn't that weird? 

Glen:  Yes. 

Faati:  Yes! Also, I had no idea that was a parody of Dr. Huxtable, and that makes so much sense! It never even—okay. Anyway. 

Drew:  So they just talked about this on Talking Simpsons, which is a Simpsons podcast that I listen to and have been on a few episodes of. They were talking about the very first appearance of Dr. Hibbert, and they hadn't figured out why he was funny yet, and he did not laugh, and the whole thing was Dr. Huxtable was the doctor who was always joking and doing funny stuff, and Dr. Hibbert was the opposite of that. He was very serious and nothing made him laugh, and then they changed the character. But that was the parody. I think because the second season of The Simpsons is also when they were on Thursday night, opposite The Cosby Show. 

Faati:  Mmm, okay. 

Glen:  Mmm. I remember having to make that choice. 

Drew:  Yeah. Yeah. It was an easy choice to make, it turns out. Okay. So we have our opening with our driving through visions of their family, and then Scene 1 Cory is doing observational humor in the campus newspaper. 

Shawn:  "Is It Just Me?" 

Cory:  By??

Shawn:  Cory Matthews. Do I have to? 

Cory:  Enjoy!

Shawn:  Is it just me, or does paste just not taste as good as it used to? 

Cory:  [chuckles]

[audience laughs] 

Shawn:  Is it just me, or is Homer Simpson getting a little too old to be on the show? 

Cory:  [chuckles emphatically]

Drew:  I can't tell if this is actually a good joke or a bad joke, or good bad joke—or not. I can't tell. 

Glen:  I mean, it's definitely a bad joke. If it crosses over the line to good, I don't know if that's intentional. 

Faati:  I laughed at it though [laughs].

Glen:  Yeah, because it's been on another 30 years. 

Drew:  Yeah. That is funny. 

Faati:  Yeah! [laughter] I guess it's funny looking back on the joke, but at the time the joke was probably really corny, and that's why Shawn responds the way he does. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. 

Glen:  Because now Ben Savage is older than Homer is on the show. 

Drew:  True—as soon I will be. Very quickly, Ben Savage is of course Fred's brother. He made his film debut in Little Monsters.

Glen:  Perfect. 

Faati:  Love it.

Drew:  Which is a movie I did not see, except I saw part of it in a video store—you know how they'd have a movie just playing in the video store? 

Faati:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  And for some reason, it gave me nightmares. I don't remember what gave me nightmares, but it scared me. 

Glen:  I mean, it's a very scary movie. Sunlight turns monsters into, like, a pile of clothes. 

Faati:  Yeah. Yeah, it was very disturbing, and it's fused with this other monster movie that came out on Disney Channel for me. I think it's called Don't Look Under Your Bed or something like that? 

Drew:  Yes! I just looked this up last week. I don't know how I ended up there. I had never heard of that. That is a very freaky movie. I saw some of the images of it, and it's very scary looking. 

Faati:  Yes. But the thing that I remember most about it is that we were all in love with the monster when he turns into what he actually looks like. He was this really cute Black guy. I remember all of the kids, we would all talk about how cute he was and how we wanted an imaginary friend/monster or whatever, and that's not how they wanted the movie to be viewed by kids and for us to be like, "I want a girlfriend monster under my bed!" 

Drew:  [laughs]

Faati:  Like, "No, wait! That's the wrong—it's about friendship!" [laughs]

Glen:  Yeah. ABC ran an anti-drug PSA commercial with a drug dealer named Snake, who between people walking in front of the camera and smoke everything got more and more snakelike, but he was also kind of hot [laughter]. 

Glen:  So you're supposed to be scared of this man, but he's really hot and cool, and then he turns into a really cool snake man and it's like, "Okay. I guess I don't want drugs, but maybe I do." 

Faati:  What we've discovered here is that all of what they tried to get us to do in terms of not doing drugs and having better friendships just made us all into people that lust after monsters and furries, and that makes sense. Now it all comes together. 

Drew:  Yep. Also, it doesn't matter whatever the creators thought. You just do what you want with it, which is what we do on this show all the time. 

Faati:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  Ben Savage, still acting. He was on a Bones. He was on a Chuck. He's played a young version of Mandy Patinkin on both Criminal Minds and Homeland, and I'm sort of surprised that someone thinks that he looks like a young version of Mandy Patinkin. 

Glen:  No, I get it. 

Drew:  Okay. Still acting. Rider Strong, also still acting. He was on a ton of sitcoms before this, and I have to say other than Boy Meets World his biggest role is Cabin Fever, which I forgot he was in—that Eli Roth horror movie. We have already talked about Shawn's hair, so that's out of the way. 

Faati:  Rider Strong also directed some of the episodes of Girl Meets World. 

Drew:  I like that. 

Faati:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  Actually, I do have another Rider Strong thing to bring up. Apparently on set, he is very not like Shawn in real life. He's very sensitive. Like, he was reading a book of poetry between scenes. I think that might be the reason that when we see this actor as Veronica it seems like a more genuine, real, thought-out moment. 

Faati:  Ohh. 

Drew:  Because Veronica being so different from Shawn might actually be closer to real-life Rider Strong. I don't know the guy. I'm just guessing. But possibly—that's my guess. 

Faati:  I like that. I like that as a guess because they probably didn't give him a whole lot of direction in terms of being a girl. It felt very improvisational. It felt like they were like, "All right, Rider. What do you think Shawn would think a girl would walk like, and then do that," versus someone like showing him how to do it. I don't know. It just all seems so natural, watching him, that I feel like he probably was like, "Oh, great. I can just be me," because that's what I used to do when I was younger and I had a role and they were like, "Just be improvisational." I would just be like a tuned-up version of whatever myself is, so more excited and extroverted and sillier, and he's just a more sensitive—I like that. Yeah. There's a joke that's made right at the beginning that sets up the premise of the episode. 

Shawn:  Cory, I know you really believe in your little humor column, but don't you think you should be writing about something a little more important, like the girls' swim team and why they don't wear high heels? 

Faati:  And I remember watching that and being like, "Whoa. Okay." They wanted us to really understand that Shawn had no idea what girls were going through. The thing he said was just like, "Okay, dude. Seriously?" 

Drew:  But yeah, that does set up the entry of the two girls who are talking about Debbie having been on a date. 

Debbie:  It was great. We were talking and laughing and having such a great time, and then—

Topanga:  At the end of the night—

Debbie:  Parked two blocks from my house

Topanga:  Octopus time. 

Gary:  Hey. I had a nice night the other night [chuckles].

Debbie:  All over me. I mean, what happened to the nice guy I had dinner with? It's like, the night's almost over, so he's all over me? [sighs with the newfound knowledge of what dating entails for women] Why are guys such jerks on dates? 

Drew:  So Topanga Canyon is a location here in Southern California that I don't think is well-known if you don't spend time in Southern California. You'll see freeway signs for it. It's something you drive by, but it's not the kind of glamorous place that you would normally name a child after. It's not like an aspirational name, and I think the joke is that—they introduce Topanga as a hippie, an earth child, and the idea is her parents were wanting to give her an earth name, but they sort of missed the mark and named her after a not-so-remarkable location in Southern California. Does that make sense? 

Faati:  Yeah! I never knew that. Literally, I've always been like, "Okay. So her name is Topanga and she's got big hair. Is she mixed with something?" Since I was a kid I've always been like, "Is there something else going on there?" And then they showed her parents in the show, and as a kid you're like, "The actor is this. This is them." You don't really notice that it's a part they're playing. 

Drew:  Right. 

Faati:  So I was like, "Oh! Well, she's all white." I know Danielle Fishel is white, though. 

Drew:  She is, but I feel like it is just a weird, small joke that goes over the heads of anyone who has not lived in this part of the world and isn't aware that that's just not where you'd ever name a kid after. 

Faati:  I need to go to there [laughs].

Glen:  Meh—there's not much there. 

Drew:  There are better places you should go that are near there. [You might pass it 01:05:55] and be like, "There's the offramp. Good," and just keep going. 

Faati:  Okay [laughs]. 

Drew:  It is interesting, though that she's there with this character named Debbie (Debbie is the friend that we only meet in this one episode) because I do have this vivid memory of the episode where Topanga has a sister, and there's one episode early on in the show—maybe second season?—where Topanga has a sister named Nebula, but they call her "Nebby." That's another thing—she has a hippie name. She has a nature, space name, and I don't know if it's Eric or Shawn, but someone's reaction when they find out that her sister is named "Nebby" is like, "Oh, did your parents think Debbie was taken?" because, like, that's a weird word. And it is interesting then that now we actually have another character named Debbie because in the '90s there were not that many teenagers named Debbie. It's not a '90s teenager name at all. That is just the one bit of weird Boy Meets World trivia I can actually give. I don't know why that stuck in my head all this time. After that one episode, Topanga became an only child and we never saw Nebby again." 

Glen:  Oh, no!

Faati:  Yeah. 

Glen:  What—what happened to Nebby? 

Drew:  Yeah, she was blinked out of existence. Apparently Shawn also has a sister in one episode that gets blinked out of existence. 

Glen:  Oh. 

Faati:  Yes. 

Drew:  Yeah. The show plays fast and loose with continuity, at least at the beginning. Topanga is—is it Danielle "Fish-elle" or Danielle "Fish-ull"? Do you know? 

Faati:  You know what—I thought it was "Fisher," and I've been saying "Fish-elle," and I'm not clear on it. I'm low-key being disrespectful. I could just look it up real quick. 

Drew:  I have it in my head as "Fish-elle" because I feel like that's what the girl in my hall freshman year said, but that could be misremembering. I didn't actually look that up either. 

Faati:  But we might be saying "Fish-elle" because her first name is Danielle. 

Drew:  Yeah. 

Faati:  So it might be like, Danielle "Fish-elle," and it could be "Fish-ull," because it's spelled like "Fish-ull."

Glen:  We're doing her a favor then. 

Faati:  [laughs] I mean, Danielle "Fish-elle" is a strong name. I can't see any pronunciation things on here. It just tells me how it's spelled. 

Drew:  We will say—we'll say "Fish-ull," and we will say that if we are wrong we will apologize after the fact. Also, now her name is Danielle Fishel Karp, which is extra weird. 

Faati:  No!

Drew:  So the weird thing about her is she actually made the news very, very recently because she's married to Jensen Karp, who is that guy who said that he found shrimp tails in the box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. 

Glen:  Yep. 

Faati:  Mm-hmm! 

Drew:  Which is a whole weird thing. It was like, for three days we kept learning other weird things about this guy—and not all positive. If you want to google it, just google it. You can read the entire thing. I don't think anything ever really came of it. I think everyone just got tired of talking about it and dropped the matter altogether.

Glen:  I was just disappointed that there wasn't an extreme sale on Cinnamon Toast Crunch because I would have bought several boxes. 

Drew:  [laughs]

Faati:  Seriously, right? He's a—there's a phrase on Twitter that they use. 

Drew:  Milkshake duck. 

Faati:  Yeah. He was the milkshake duck of the week. 

Drew:  "Milkshake duck" is always something that I forget what it means, and I always have to look it up and be like, "That's what it is," because there's nothing about it necessarily that will tell you what it means. 

Faati:  It's not intuitive. 

Glen:  Well, why don't you tell us then?

Drew:  A milkshake duck is something or someone that becomes very, very popular all of a sudden, and then after that brief burst of everyone loving it you uncover something from their past—usually racist—and everyone is like, "Oh, no." The joke is there's a viral sensation called "Milkshake Duck" for some reason, and then everyone finds out that the duck was racist. That's the example [laughter]. So he was that. I don't think it actually was necessarily racism, but a lot of people had negative things to say about it. 

Glen:  It wasn't racist. He has a history of—of lying. 

Faati:  Stuff with women—bad stuff with women. 

Drew:  So that's why Danielle got in the news. Debbie is Katie Wright, who was on Melrose Place, actually. She played the nephew of the gay guy who becomes an orphan and then has to move in with her gay uncle in Melrose Place. 

Glen:  She played the nephew of the gay guy? 

Drew:  Niece. Niece of the gay guy. 

Glen:  Okay. I was like—

Faati:  We're being loose with gender this episode. It's okay. Nephew, niece—drop them all in there [laughs].

Drew:  There should be a word that means nephew or niece, like a catchall for both of them. 

Faati:  Nibling. 

Drew:  Nibling. Thank you. I like that. She's also in Idle Hands, that movie with Devon Sawa. 

Glen:  Oh, I'm familiar. 

Faati:  No way! 

Drew:  She plays the girl who's not Jessica Alba. She plays the one who dressed up in a devil costume. That's her. She has done stuff. I believe she has now retired. 

Faati:  That's cool. 

Drew:  The girls ask the guys what the hell is wrong with guys, and what follows is actually a fairly simple but for-its-time accurate explanation of consent. 

Shawn:  Don't you think that guys and girls are looking for the same things on dates? 

Debbie:  Well, girls are looking for an evening of good conversation, and the sense that you've made a genuine connection with another human being. 

Shawn:  You're not interested in making out? 

Debbie:  Well, maybe I am, and maybe I'm not, but it shouldn't be expected because I went on a date with you. 

Shawn:  So how are we supposed to know it's okay? 

Debbie:  We'll let you know. 

Shawn:  Well, you don't let us know very clearly. 

Debbie:  Yes, we do. You just don't listen. You're too busy planning your next move to hear us say no. 

Shawn:  What? 

[audience laughs] 

Drew:  I don't think I actually saw this episode when it was first on, but had I watched it, I don't think consent was a thing I had in my head at all. This might have been the place where I first learned of that concept, and I'm sure it put the seed in a lot of kids' heads about what consent means as far as sex and physical affection. 

Faati:  Mm-hmm. Yes. I also felt that, watching it. I thought that it was really fascinating, seeing how immediately he rebuffed the things that she was saying, and when you have conversations with people about consent and that person has never thought about consent they tend to either get upset, or they ignore you. They're like, "This isn't anything. You're not saying anything that's actually real. Nobody really does these things. It's just something people say happens." The people who get mad, those people are very interesting to me because it's like there's a part of them that's realizing that there's this thing they had this whole time that they never got to utilize. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. 

Glen:  Yeah. In those instances, it feels like an admission of guilt and then quickly cataloging a history of perhaps-problematic behavior on their part. 

Faati:  That too. 

Glen:  Yeah. People are made uncomfortable when they realize they're the villain in their own story, so there's a gut reaction, and we all just have to get better at, uh—

Faati:  Receiving information that's uncomfortable? 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Faati:  For sure, especially in America. We're all very uncomfortable receiving information that makes us uncomfortable. 

Drew:  Yeah. 

Glen:  Yeah. Just watch Fox News. 

Drew:  [laughs]

Faati:  Yeah. As time moves on, each generation is getting more comfortable being uncomfortable, and I appreciated that conversation from this lens—from the future—seeing it. And also, I liked how they let him say those things that he said. They didn't want to Disneyfy him and make him into not a typical teenage guy. Like, a lot of teenage dudes back then, they were like, "That's how I learned. That's what I was taught. You just make a move on a girl, and then if she's not into it you just wait, and then you make a move later when she will be into it," and Shawn directly communicates that that's what he thinks, and she's like, "No. Mm-mmm." 

Drew:  And it's extra wounding for Shawn to hear this because his whole character is that he's the smooth one who knows how to talk to women, and this girl that he could take on a date one day is saying, "You actually are very bad at the thing you think you're really good at, and here's why," and that is extra hard for him to hear. 

Glen:  Well, what I appreciate is that Shawn is basically like, "Well, then maybe you don't want to date men," and she was like, "Well maybe I don't!" I really just wanted a journey for Debbie to be bisexual, to explore. 

Faati:  Like in the background of the episode, like Abed delivering the baby in Community—just in the background Debbie is slowly getting more sapphic, and then at the end she just has a girlfriend in the distance. They're holding hands or something. 

Glen:  Yes!

Drew:  Yeah. 

Faati:  Yeah. That would have been great [laughs].

Drew:  That's another alternate dimension for this show. Debbie's gay now. Debbie goes away. We don't see her until the end of the episode. Scene 2, we are in the classroom with Mr. Feeny, and they are discussing the novel Black Like Me, a 1961 non-fictional novel by John Howard Griffin about how he darkened his skin to live life as a Black man in the segregated South and report on his experiences. I have not read this book. 

Faati:  I read it when I was a kid. I read it in like, middle school, but I haven't re-read it, so I don't remember everything about it. But right now I'm like, face in hands because in the episode Cory says something that they play as a joke. 

Mr. Feeny:  To research his book, Black Like Me, author John Griffin—a white man—had his skin pigment temporarily darkened so that he could experience life through the perspective of a Black man. 

Cory:  Wouldn't it have been easier to just—ask? 

[audience laughs] 

Faati:  It's literally what my husband said when I explained the plot of Black Like Me to him, so when I told him I was going to do this episode he was like, "Oh, what is that?" because I was like, "It references something." He was like, "What's Black Like Me?" I was like, "Oh. Well, it was an autobiographical story from a journalist who did blackface and then went to the South during the Civil Rights Movement to experience racism firsthand." And then my husband—who is white, mind you. My husband, he goes, "Why didn't he just—ask a Black person?" And Cory literally says that exact thing, and then everybody laughs, and it's played as a joke. But the joke there is that you could talk to Black people and then believe them. This is not hilarious. What Feeny says in response, though, was very '90s and very American understanding of the thing. Feeny says that at the time Black people and white people didn't trust each other, and so he needed to prove it by—they don't even say blackface in the show. 

Drew:  They actually seem to be going around. They say, "He temporarily darkened his skin." 

Glen:  But how?!

Drew:  I was like, "What does that mean?" I think I know what that means. It's weird that even then they seemed to be wary of using—

Faati:  Skirting around it. It's funny that they skirt around it, but then they also used it in this show. So it's like—it's the thing I said about the half measures. If you're going to do an allegory of marginalization using a book about a white dude who did blackface and got his ass kicked, which proved that racism was real—which is the most hilarious effing thing, when you say it like that. This dude—no one asked him to do this!

Drew:  [laughs] No. 

Faati:  He was not compelled or paid. He literally upon himself was like, "I'm going to do blackface, full body, and then go down South," and then he got his ass kicked by white people. And it's not even like he got his ass kicked by Black people. They were just like, "You are so dumb right now. What are you doing here? You're going to get your ass kicked," and then whoop—he got his ass kicked. It's like, at what point did you think—I just don't understand. How did he not know that was going to—he didn't have to do that, though. 

Glen:  Nope. 

Drew:  There could have been a better way that he could have got white readers to believe what the Black experience in the segregated South was. We can talk about why it sounds weird today, but Feeny's right. He was very successful as a result of this. 

Faati:  Absolutely. Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  People read the hell out of this book. So as bad as it seems now, it worked. It was a bad idea that worked and proved to be very beneficial for him—I don't know. 

Glen:  Yeah. Life is full of instances where a minority experience can only be understood and made sympathetic through the lens of a cis white man—experiencing it for a short time—and the most interesting part being that anytime you are trying to live in someone else's shoes, the fact that you can escape by taking a shower is not really an accurate representation of what it might be like to experience hardship. 

Faati:  It's true, and I have been—since this episode—this was my favorite episode of Boy Meets World. Since seeing it when I was a teenager and then again in my 20s, I have experienced what it looks like to see somebody being you to understand what the marginalization feels like. There was this article that was written where white women wore, like hijabs so that they could be hijabis and understand what it feels like to have a head covering and be a Muslim woman. And firstly, it's not the same experience when you're white because your skin tone means people aren't going to do the racism on top of the Islamophobia that happens with dark-skinned women and femmes that wear the hijab. And then secondly, you could just ask one! You could just interview! Literally, go to France, interview one of the hijabis there, and ask them how they feel about the fact that there's a law that says that you can't wear it past the age of 16—or underneath that age or whatever. Did you guys hear about that law? 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. 

Faati:  It's wild. Anyway, yeah. It's weird when people wear your culture as a costume to try to understand your experience when you're literally right there and you speak the same language. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. 

Glen:  Yeah. Cory thinks he's going to be an amazing journalist—spoiler alert—by going undercover as a girl in this high school as opposed to doing what an actual journalist would do, which is interview the girls about their experiences dating in this high school. 

Drew:  Interview Debbie!

Faati:  Literally Debbie, right? She's doing an interview right there in the beginning of the episode [laughs]. 

Drew:  Nope. We don't see her again for a long time. Mr. Feeny is, of course, William Daniels, a great actor who was in stuff like The Graduate and The Parallax View and who also won two Emmys for a starring role on the medical drama St. Elsewhere. He is 94 years old and, as of the recording of this episode, still alive and kicking. He reprised his role on Girl Meets World. He is married in real life to Bonnie Bartlett, who played the dean on the college seasons of Boy Meets World, who is also still alive. She is 91. They have been married for 60 years. 

Glen:  That's nice. Isn't he also KITT? 

Drew:  Yes. Yes, he is the car on Knight Rider. 

Faati:  What?! He's KITT?!

Drew:  Yeah. I knew there was something I was forgetting about William Daniels. He's the voice of the car. Bonnie and William Daniels also won their Emmys the same year. There was a year where husband and wife got Emmys for playing husband and wife on the same—

Glen:  Oh, wow. That must have been quite a night at home [laughter].

Drew:  I'm sure. They seem like a lovely couple, and they've played onscreen spouses many times. They must really fucking like each other if they can work with each other that much and still be married 60 years later. 

Faati:  I really liked their dynamic in the last season of the series, so when you said that they were married, that makes sense. That totally—yeah. They feel like it. 

Drew:  I like when actor couples manage to stay together despite the fact that I think acting in Hollywood must be very hard on most marriages. Is there anything else in this scene? 

Glen:  I mean, other than Shawn telling Cory to dress like a girl for a story. 

Faati:  Oh, yes! Yes. Hold on. Yeah. I wanted to go into that. 

Shawn:  Cory, that's your next story. 

Cory:  What? 

Shawn:  To understand what girls are talking about, you experience the world from a girl's point of view. 

[audience laughs] 

Shawn:  By becoming a girl. 

[audience laughs] 

Cory:  That's crazy talk!

Shawn:  No, no, no. You dress up like a girl and write about it—"Chick Like Me." 

[audience laughs] 

Shawn:  That's meaningful. Then you're writing a real article, not just some—silly column. 

Cory:  It is not a silly column!

Mr. Feeny:  Yes, it is. 

Faati:  Shawn is the one that Cory proposes that Cory becomes a girl, and he also is the one that pitches "Chick Like Me," and he literally says, "Chick Like Me." And honestly, that in combination with him being like, "I've thought about it before," about the name thing, that's a part of why this episode—the reason why it hit queer kids in my age range so hard is because it's sprinkled with all of these little indicators. Shawn was so about that story, but he didn't want to do it himself. He was like—right? 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  He's like, "I have this idea! I have this great idea I just came up with! Here's what you do. Here's what you call it. It's a great idea!" 

Glen:  "And here's my notebook. Bye. You can do it." [laughter]

Faati:  With swatches—fabric swatches of what colors would be together for the season of the year. He literally steals the show the second he does the walk. He steals the show that second. But yeah, he pitches this whole idea to Cory with such vigor and passion that it's very clear he has been thinking about this well before they ever heard of Black Like Me and doing blackface for civil rights and stuff [laughs].

Drew:  Now is his chance. 

Faati:  Now is his chance!

Glen:  I mean, I question the title. But—

Drew:  Next scene. We are at the—camping store where Eric works? Is this something that's an ongoing thing for the show? 

Faati:  Yes. Yes. I made a tiny thread about it earlier—last week or something like that. So Alan Matthews is the father in the series, and at the beginning of Season 4 he realizes that he hates his job as a grocery store manager. He hates it, and I was like, "Wait. You work as a grocery store manager?" Like, watching it, I was like, "That's what you do? Because you guys have a house with three bedrooms and two floors—"

Glen:  Beautiful. 

Faati:  Yeah, and it's gorgeous. And as far as I'm understanding, I'm pretty sure his wife, whose character name just disappeared from my head—

Glen:  Mom. I think it's Mom. 

Faati:  [laughs] I'm just remembering, she doesn't work. So on a grocer's salary—I mean manager. I looked into it, and I looked it up, and I made this thread of what that house would cost today and what that position would pay and how much it would cost to do it, and it's impossible. 

Drew:  So for the record, they live in suburban Philadelphia. Is that correct? 

Faati:  Mm-hmm. That's correct. 

Drew:  Yeah. Just talking about the media that you take in when you're a preteen and teenager can give you body dysmorphia, it can also give you economic dysmorphia because a lot of the people that you see in sitcoms are not necessarily supposed to be upper class. They're supposed to be middle class, and sometimes they live in houses that are much, much nicer than they would be in real life, and that can be very confusing for a kid because you're like, "Well, I must be poorer than these people are because I look around at what my house looks like and I look at what they live in—and they're supposed to be what we are, but we aren't living up to that." It can be very hard for kids to work through. 

Faati:  I would say about that, there's this weird thing with class in a lot of sitcoms where the show runners want to make a story about people that are recognizable and real and familiar, but the producers or whoever the money people are involved, they want it to be pretty so that people will keep coming back to watch it. However, that's not what people want to see. That's why Malcolm in the Middle is one of the most popular sitcoms about a family of all time, and that's also why It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is way-better received than Friends. I mean, honestly. 

Drew:  [laughs]

Faati:  Friends is contentious. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia literally has actual human monsters in the show, and you love them. They're your favorite character. Dennis is my favorite character in that show and he is the worst human being ever and Ross, who is his opposite in Friends—

Drew:  [laughs] Right. 

Faati:  But yeah, I think that it's funny that they make it so that it's more compelling or whatever because it's prettier, but in reality Cory and Shawn would be in the same class, and Cory and his siblings would be living in an apartment or they'd be renting the house that they live in, and that would have made a more compelling story, honestly. That's part of why everybody liked Shawn is because Shawn was relatable. Cory didn't make any sense. But—[laughs].

Drew:  We should point out, Shawn comes from a lower economic bracket than Cory's family did. His mom's gone, and everything's just kind of rougher for him. 

Faati:  Yeah. Shawn lives in a trailer park, and there's a lot of jokes that Shawn makes about being poor throughout the show that I always thought was really funny because I was poor and so I understood the jokes. But I watched in college with people that actually lived in a house their whole lives, and they were like, "Oh. That's so sad," and I was like, "It is?! Oh! Oh-ho! Okay. I didn't know that." 

Drew:  So in the scene with Eric, he is interacting with this coworker named Lonnie, who I guess we've been introduced to before. She's in three episodes; this is the third and last episode she shows up in, apparently. 

Glen:  Oh!

Faati:  Yes. Oh, I meant to say—okay. So he doesn't want to be a grocer anymore—okay. I got off on a tangent. 

Drew:  This happens. 

Faati:  He doesn't want to be a grocer anymore, and so he has decided unanimously to quit, and his wife—whose name is gone. His wife, she is saying, "If you can make a unanimous decision for the family, I'm going to make one one day," and he's scared. And then at the end of the episode, she decides to buy this camping store that this old dude is about to sell, and then they take over the store. That's the decision she made, and he's happy, and everybody's happy, and now they're running their store, and I'm like, "How can they afford to do this?" Apparently, they cut into Eric's college fund to do it. 

Drew:  Oh. 

Glen:  That's fine. I don't think he would do well—in college. 

Faati:  [laughs]

Drew:  He goes to college at some point. 

Glen:  I don't think he does well. 

Faati:  He does. He does go to college. I actually have a lot to say about Eric in the show, but let's do the show first [laughs].

Drew:  We can bring it up here anyway. Eric is played by Will—I think it's—

Faati:  "Fre-dell."

Drew:  Friedle. I think that's why I thought "Fish-elle." "Fre-dell." I think that's what was throwing me off. I think that's why I screwed it up. Will Friedle, who at the start of the show is, like, the hunky brother. He's supposed to be another cute boy like Rider Strong. He actually kind of looks not dissimilar to Rider Strong. 

Glen:  That was always my reaction with the show was like, "I feel like this is [off, Casting/off casting/awful casting 01:28:54] casting." But go ahead. 

Drew:  They look more brotherish. Yeah. It's weird watching the evolution of his character because they make him into a cartoon, sort of—and he's very successful at that, and he becomes a much more interesting character as he goes broader and zanier and funnier. And I think maybe that actor didn't realize what he had in him until they started leaning in that direction, and then they just kept leaning into it. But a very, very interesting character and performance, right? 

Faati:  I would say yes, absolutely. And Will Friedle, he's done so much voice work. I feel like he discovered his ability to do that kind of improvisational, zany, out-there stuff in this show. He's Ron Stoppable on Kim Possible. That came on the Disney Channel. For people that don't know what Kim Possible is—because we have people that probably don't watch cartoons as much as I do—it's like a spy show. Ron Stoppable is Kim Possible's best friend, and they have a love-kind-of thing in it—a little bit. 

Glen:  He should have been gay, though. 

Faati:  Oh, everything should have been gay. Absolutely [laughter]. But yes, they did a disservice to him, and they also did a service to him at the same time. I love the direction that his character goes in, and honestly, he was my favorite part of the show towards the end of the series. But I dislike that in order to do that they decided to make these other decisions with his character. So there's this thing that people do in TV where they write a character who is eccentric, and then they also make that character really, really dumb, like they're not intelligent, and instead of just making them spacey, they make it so that they just aren't able to reason at all in any way. And as a neurodiverse person who is really smart or whatever but also really spacey, it always made me uncomfortable that they didn't just balance act that and just make the character weird and also have these other parts of them. Intelligence isn't just one thing, right? 

Drew:  Right. 

Faati:  So I just think that they should have done what they did with Reese with him, where Reese in Malcolm in the Middle develops this cooking acumen and he's just amazing. He's an amazing chef, and it's beautiful, but he's also this terror at the same time. Like, they balance him so that he has these things that he does really well and he has these things that he does poorly, but with Eric they just make him a cut-up and he just can't figure out his way and he barely has any plots—and then randomly, towards the end, they have this very deep conversation that Eric and Cory have. Cory's getting married, and he's asked Shawn to be his best man, because of course he did. Shawn and him have been best friends since the beginning of the series, but Eric has been losing story for Shawn and Cory to have more story throughout the series despite the fact that they started the show with him as a main character. 

So they have this conversation where Eric says to Cory, "Why am I not your best man? Why am I not your best friend? Why do you always choose your friends over me? What happened to our relationship?" And it's just like—for me watching it, like, why didn't they just give him these things instead of retroactively writing this speech where him and his brother have this conversation of "I wish that we were closer"? Why didn't they just make them closer? 

Glen:  I don't know. But I will say as someone who has a brother who is not my best friend, I remember watching that episode, and I think I like that conversation because I do think siblings don't always get along. Having it that the two brothers aren't friends—but they're not enemies, either. It's not like Wonder Years where there is that animosity. I think it is nice to have siblings who don't dislike each other, don't fight all the time, and are sort of in each other's orbits. It just doesn't click. 

Faati:  It was a beautiful episode. I will say that. The conversation was very progressive for TV. For two men characters—like two male characters who are familial—having a conversation about their relationship was a big deal. I just feel like they could have had him have more things. Make him gay! [laughs]

Drew:  Mm-hmm. 

Glen:  I would have loved that!

Faati:  Yeah. 

Drew:  This is my next question. It could be that I just don't really remember. I know he has an attraction for—is it Rachel? Is that the name of the character? 

Faati:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  So he has an attraction for Rachel, but he doesn't ever end up dating Rachel. Does he ever have a recurring love interest on the show? 

Faati:  So he dates in the earlier seasons when they were making him the hunk character. But when they started making him the zany, outsider, weird guy, and especially after he started gaining weight—the actor—they stopped playing into him being the hottie hottie guy, which also bothers me because I know dudes that gained weight and were still the hottie hottie, girls-are-talking-to-him guy, and it's weird how TV does that with people. If a character gains weight, they'll change the character—if the actor gains weight or something happens, they'll write the character around that thing, and it's like, why? They're still that person! They literally just weigh a little bit more. It bothered me so much. But yeah, he doesn't really date, and I think that him and Jack had such amazing chemistry that when I talk about my queer reading of the show and who's my favorite queer couple, it's not Cory and Shawn. And it's not the throuple Cory, Shawn, and Topanga either, though that is a reading people have. No. It's Jack and Eric who, literally, when they first met, had all of the same interests but then were like, "I don't like that guy." Then they have this dynamic where Eric is the fool and Jack is the straight man, and all their adventures are so fun. I just wish they'd just leaned into it. It was so clearly—they already lived together. 

Drew:  It is weird, also, when you think about the fact that Jack is Shawn's half-brother. So basically, they give Eric his own Shawn and then they give them a Topanga, which is a girl they timeshare together, and there's tension between the three of them. They just mirrored the original core trio. That's an odd decision to make. 

Faati:  You just blew my mind because I never picked up on that. 

Drew:  I didn't think about that until right now!

Faati:  Okay, great [laughs].

Glen:  I'm very proud of you. 

Drew:  Okay. So—yeah. 

Faati:  Eric's in the camping store. 

Drew:  Eric's in the camping store. 

Glen:  Yeah. There's a B-plot. 

Drew:  There's a B-plot. So Lonnie is this girl who's from—the country?—somewhere, and she doesn't know how to talk to men, and he seems like he wants to coach her into how to talk to men. But I wanted to ask about his love interests because it's kind of weird that he doesn't seem that interested in her, really, especially—

Glen:  That one scene he is. 

Faati:  Oh, no. He is. He is. It's played throughout. I think their dynamic is that he's trying to be nice to her and be friendly and stuff. Also, they're doing—is it Eliza Doolittle? Is that the—

Glen:  Yeah. It's a little bit like that. 

Faati:  Yeah. They're doing Eliza Doolittle, which I think is a funny thing to play as a B-plot to Black Like Me/"Chick Like Me," to have it be a man teaching this woman how to be more femininely or whatever. It was fun. That B-plot was fun to me. I do think it's weird that they don't try to make that a thing, though, like you were saying. Like why isn't he—

Drew:  Especially because you don't see her. She leaves the show after this.

Glen:  Yeah. I assumed that she was at least going to be a love interest for him for the season. 

Drew:  Yeah. Nope. She left to be on Baywatch. She replaced Gena Lee Nolan as Neely on Baywatch. She was Neely #3 on Baywatch. That's what happened to her. 

Glen:  I feel like that might be a better fit. 

Drew:  Probably. 

Faati:  Honestly, I don't blame her. I would have made the exact same choice—but I'm very gay [laughter], so working on Baywatch as a hot teenager sounds amazing. 

Drew:  I agree. Will Friedle, by the way, also the voice of Deadpool, Star-Lord, Lion-O, Blue Beetle, Bumblebee from Transformers, and Seifer from Kingdom Hearts, and I just wanted to put that last one in there because I did not expect when we made this show that I would ever get a chance to mention Seifer from Final Fantasy in our gay sitcom show—and now I have, and that counts for a point. That's the end of that scene. 

Scene 4, we're in the Matthews Family kitchen. Mom is making dinner. It is the most '90s kitchen in the world. There's floral print everywhere. It almost made me feel claustrophobic. But that's what we thought kitchens should look like in the '90s, I guess. Very quickly, Mrs. Matthews is Betsy Randle. Other than this, she is knowns for playing Jill's friend on Home Improvement. That's where she was before she got this role. Mr. Randle is William Russ, and he is sexier than I remember him. I did not recall that. He's on that show 911 that's on right now. He has been acting this whole time. He is in legit stuff like American History X and The Right Stuff. He's also in a movie called Deathbed: The Bed that Eats. 

Glen:  Ooh!

Faati:  [laughs with joy at this newfound knowledge]

Drew:  Which if you have not seen that movie, you should watch it right now. I think it's on YouTube for free. It is a good 90 minutes of a very bad horror movie, but it's about—

Glen:  I enjoy that they thought they needed the second part of that title. 

Drew:  I do as well, like just in case you're not clear as you're looking at the box cover in the VHS rental store and need to be sold on it right away—and I would have been. He's also in Cruising. 

Glen:  Oh!

Faati:  Oh, man. 

Drew:  I couldn't tell who he was. 

Glen:  Hopefully in the bar scene. 

Faati:  Sorry—I love horror movies, and I love that actor. I'm going to watch the heck out of that. Did you say Cruisin'? 

Drew:  Cruising, with a G. Cruising is something you need a warning for. It is about Al Pacino—not dissimilar to this. Al Pacino goes undercover as a gay man to try to stop the serial killer who's murdering gay men in leather bars in New York in the '70s. 

Faati:  Al Pacino?!

Drew:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  It is a movie I think is very interesting, but it was very controversial when it came out, and it is definitely not for everyone. But if you can watch it for the time that it came out, you'll probably be fine with it. 

Faati:  Yeah. I'll look up the trigger warnings for it and stuff before I watch it. But I freaking love Al Pacino in everything that he's in. 

Drew:  Well, you get to see him in many gay bars in that movie. 

Faati:  Wonderful. 

Drew:  Mr. Matthews seizes on Cory and Shawn when they come in. He wants to know what his son did today, and it comes out that his son decided he wants to be a girl and bought a bunch of outfits so he can become a girl. 

Mr. Matthews:  You know, every day I ask you, "What did you do?" and every day you tell me, "Nothing." Well, I'm tired of nothing. I mean, we both know something happened today, and I want to know what it is!

Cory:  I decided to be a girl. 

[audience laughs] 

Mr. Matthews:  Well, you taught me a very valuable lesson there, son. 

Shawn:  You know the book Black Like Me? 

Mrs. Matthews:  Sure. Is that what you guys are reading and school? 

Mr. Matthews:  Don't ask questions, honey. 

Shawn:  Cory's going to write "Chick Like Me" for the school newspaper. He's going to experience life from a girl's point of view by dressing up like a girl. 

[audience laughs] 

Mr. Matthews:  No. Don't want you to. 

Mrs. Matthews:  Oh, come on. I think it would be a wonderful learning experience. It could serve him well for the rest of his life. 

[audience laughter intensifies]

Cory:  It's a Miracle Bra. 

Mr. Matthews:  It's a Miracle Bra, honey. Get a camera. 

Glen:  Yeah. He does a lot of rubbing of the temples, like he's about to have a heart attack. 

Faati:  I noted it in my notes as "Transphobic Joke #1." But yeah, I thought it was interesting the way the mom reacted, though. 

Drew:  Yeah. I thought the mom and Mr. Feeny have mostly really good reactions to this, and I like that she immediately saw the academic benefits to this little adventure. 

Faati:  Yeah. She also was just pretty chill about it before she even knew what the point was yet. She was just like, "I'm going to reserve comment and see where this is going before I say anything," and I liked that. I appreciated the split in the dynamic of the dad and the mom's reaction to gender play. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. Topanga comes over, and Cory asks Topanga to help make him a girl. Then it takes us to the next scene—unless there's anything else? 

Glen:  Well, I do like Cory saying, "Make Cory pretty." I thought he had a very cute delivery of that line. 

Faati:  Oh, that was great. Also, I love that she was like, "Okay." She was so cool with it. It was like the old Topanga. 

Drew:  I think Mrs. Matthews and Topanga know Cory well enough to know that this is not a thing, that this is exactly what he says it is. But Dad, who does not know his son probably as well because dads tend to not know their families as well as the mom does, that's why he's worried—because he's disconnected because dads are weird like that. 

Faati:  Mm-hmm.

Drew:  Okay. So the next scene, Cory is in the closet. He does not want to come out because he's not comfortable with the way he looks. 

Glen:  I get it! 

Drew:  You get it. 

Faati:  [laughs] He's in the bathroom. 

Glen:  Yeah. I think it's the bathroom. 

Faati:  It is the bathroom. 

Drew:  Oh. It's the bathroom? That makes more sense. 

Glen:  Yeah, because he's also putting on makeup. 

Drew:  Yeah, you need—okay. Okay. Whatever. 

Glen:  But the joke was good, Drew. 

Faati:  It was. 

Drew:  I literally just assumed. I didn't even—my brain wasn't even working for that. So not having seen this before, I was very worried about what we were going to see when Cory comes out, and I had an idea that it would just be the messiest version of a woman that a cis-gender straight man would ever try to assemble for himself. When he comes out, are we supposed to think he looks terrible? Because that's the way Shawn and Topanga react, and I think he looks good. I don't necessarily—I don't understand the reaction the show's giving. What was your take on how we're supposed to take this? 

Faati:  Okay. So here is what happens in that scene and why it's different for us—because we're all in the LGBTQ spectrum, right? We've seen people transition. We've seen people experiment with gender, and we know that prowess at eyeliner and lipstick and all that stuff is things that you learn. Some people are naturally skilled, and some people are naturally incapable of doing a straight line or whatever. So we all have a perspective that's far more open in terms of how femininity can look on someone that is a man—assigned male at birth—and our perspective is very open. So that's why when you saw Cory he doesn't look bad. He looks like he's learning. The outfit fits him, and his nails are done well. This is pretty good for the first time he's ever trying this. 

Glen:  His mascara was great. The hair was great. 

Faati:  Yeah. The wig wasn't placed badly. So we're seeing it from the perspective of knowing people who have tried this, or trying it ourselves and effing up—wait, I can curse—fucking up and realizing how hard it is to do different types of gender expression. But when the show aired, the majority of people who were watching the show had never seen anybody do that who wasn't a drag queen. Back then, being trans was like being an undesirable or the kind of person that people don't make eye contact with. So there weren't a lot of people that actually looked long enough to have noticed any kind of similarity or anything like that. To them, Cory is doing drag poorly. 

Glen:  I mean, the only thing that was poor about it was that Cory missed a few buttons on her dress. 

Drew:  I noticed that. I think that was a realistic choice of not getting it completely together. 

Faati:  I regularly do that. That's why I don't like buttons [laughter]. The way that Cory reacts to the way he looks and the way that they react to the way that he looks, I thought it was funny. I know that the whole scene is charged with energy of transphobia. It really is. Watching it as someone who is gender queer or gender non-conforming who uses they/them pronouns, watching it from this place and not from my past, it's like, "Wow. This is uncomfortable." But also, I liked how Ben Savage played it. 

Shawn:  Come on, buddy. You're going to write an article that means something! You're going to make a difference not only in our lives but in the lives of guys and girls everywhere. 

Cory:  You're not seeing what I'm seeing!

[audience laughs] 

Shawn:  Come on, Cor. How bad a girl could you be? 

[door opens]

[audience laughs and applauds uproariously]

Shawn:  Okay, bad. 

Cory:  Oh, god. 

Shawn:  Bad bad. 

Cory:  I knew it. I look—I look fat. 

[audience laughs] 

Faati:  He was funny. He was silly. He was like, "I knew it. I look fat in this outfit," and that was a real thing that I could really imagine a teenager saying the first time that they see themselves in an outfit because he's thinking about how he sees women. Cory's thinking about how he thinks of teenage girls, and he sees himself, and he's feeling this kind of dysmorphia that he's never had to even conceive of before. It just—I don't know. It was really funny to me to hear him say that and his friends are just uncomfortable. But me, I'm like, damn—like that's such a—wow. 

Drew:  Having that be the joke also takes some of the—when we hear that Cory is uncomfortable with the way he looks in a dress, we are led to believe that it might be because he's uncomfortable wearing women's clothes, or he thinks he's not doing it right, or it's just not fitting him. And the joke is that that does not bother him at all. He is just concerned about his weight and everything else he might not actually be okay with. 

Glen:  I think if you take into consideration Cora, who he becomes in the episode (who is a better fit for him as a woman both in personality and looks) and you consider how comfortable he is playing Cora versus this is his first attempt at more or less doing what he sees as Generic Teenage Girl #1 and that he didn't pick a personality for her that is expressed through how she dresses or how she does her hair and makeup—

Faati:  Or talks. 

Glen:  Yeah. There's a discomfort in how Cory carries himself and tries to act because he doesn't know who this person is, and so if you just do a cookie-cutter "I'm female now" and don't do the calculations of "What does that mean for me," which is a calculation that we see Shawn make instantly because, as we discuss, Shawn put the thought into who Veronica is. So that's why I think Cory's attempt at it is interesting because Cory gets two tries. 

Drew:  The scene ends with Cory attempting to walk like a woman and not getting it right. Shawn is saying women kind of glide, and Topanga is like, "That's well-observed of you," and Shawn does a walk, and everyone agrees that he's much better at this. Then there's a cut to the next scene in the high school hallway and it is Cory, Topanga, and Shawn wearing a dress as Veronica. This is where we have the conversation about names that we've already talked about and which I think is also going to be the intro to this episode, so the first thing we're going to hear is him telling them that he wants to be Veronica, which is telling for all the reasons we said earlier. 

Faati:  I mean, is he her in this—is he low-key Veronica a little bit? 

Glen:  A little bit, because there's the feistiness, there is the style—

Faati:  The hair, too, I think. The style of the hair?   

Glen:  Yeah. Both of her outfits in this episode are great, and they also feel like they belong to the same woman, or the same girl, so it's not just random choices. 

Faati:  So when the scene begins, Veronica looks out at the hallway and looks out at all these people, and you can see the fear of it, like, "This is a really scary thing that I'm doing right now." 

Shawn:  What are they looking at? 

Cory:  Well, Shawn. I don't want you to take this the wrong way but—you're kind of a babe. 

[audience laughs] 

Shawn:  Really? 

Cory:  Yeah [chuckles]. You want me to like, carry your books for you? 

Shawn:  I get that? Yeah, thanks!

[audience laughs] 

Topanga:  Why are you carrying his books? 

Cory:  Well, we're trying to create the illusion that Shawn's a girl, so I thought this would help. 

Topanga:  You never carry my books. 

Cory:  Well, look at him!

[audience laughter intensifies]

Cory:  But look at you! You are just radiant today. 

Faati:  When I watched it before when I was younger, I didn't really understand the fact that it was scary. I just thought, "Oh, it's funny because Shawn's in a dress now." But watching it now, this is low-key scary because I can remember the first time that I wore a dress versus wearing pants. So gender expressions, it's literally pants versus skirts when you're a kid, and if you're the kind of tomboy kind of girl who's always worn pants, the first time you wear a skirt to school—you remember that because everybody says something and everyone's looking at you, and it just changes everything. And Shawn is going down the stairs and notices everybody's looking at him as Veronica. So Veronica is saying to Cory, "Why is everyone staring at me?" and then Cory says, "Well, because you're a babe." And the mirth, the happiness in Veronica's face hearing that and saying, "Really?" and blushing and stuff—ugh, that scene is just so queer and cute!

Glen:  Yeah. Veronica is feeling seen for the first time, which is translating to Shawn feeling seen. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. Then we see Gary, the guy Debbie had gone on the bad date with. He's played by Ryan Bittle who was on Sweet Valley High and 7th Heaven. He's in the episode of Buffy where Clea DuVall plays the invisible girl who beats up all the popular kids. He is Cordelia's boyfriend. And he's on Dawson's Creek as a closeted frat brother of the gay guy Jack. Gary is instantly enchanted with this new student. 

Gary:  Hi there. Um—I'm Gary. 

Cory:  Gary, this is Veronica. Veronica—Wasboyski. 

[audience laughs] 

Gary:  You know, I have never seen you before. Are you new in school? 

Shawn:  Yep. Um, just a whole new person. 

Gary:  Listen. Uh, if you want, you know, I'd be happy to uh—you know, take you to Chubbie's and tell you what teachers to avoid, that kind of stuff. You know, unless your boyfriend already did that. 

Cory:  Oh no, Gary. This one is definitely available. 

Shawn:  Cory, I can speak for myself. 

Cory:  Well then, you just do that—Ver-on-ic-a. 

Shawn:  That'd be great. 

Topanga:  So Saturday. Is that good for both of you? 

Shawn:  Saturday's my date night. 

Cory:  And it still is. 

Faati:  There was a lot of body language happening in this scene that is also part of why it gets read so queerly. I mean initially it's like split—like Shawn is struggling with Veronica in this scene. Shawn's like, "It's my date night," but Veronica is like, "Someone's asking me out?" [laughs] I absolutely don't think that Veronica wants to date this guy in particular; it's just being chosen as the girl version of himself, like being chosen and sought-after like that had to have felt really good. 

Drew:  Because she's accepted. She's not questioned. 

Faati:  Yes. Well—okay. Okay, hold on. Let me expand on that. So I'm gender queer, and I explore all these different spectrums of gender, right? But for some years, I didn't do anything to masc in public because of the responses that I got. I'm from Atlanta, and the first time that I went out completely masc, I wore basketball shorts and a muscle shirt—people also call them wifebeaters. I do not—a muscle shirt, and my head was shaved because I tried to go blonde and ended up my pigtail came off on the brush. I effed it up. And so I wasn't blonde. I just had this this tiny, little fro-hawk. I basically looked like a 14-year-old gay guy, and I'm about 90 lbs. 

So I'm walking down the street because I'm trying to go get yarn to put in my hair to do this, and I got—women crossed the street. Like, this white lady crossed the street. She saw me walking down the street towards her and she crossed the street and then kept walking up the street the same way—the way that I've done many times before when I see people walking down towards me that I don't want to be next to. But it was so alarming for me to have that experience because I'm like, 90 lbs. and 5'3" and I looked like you could knock me over with a feather, but this lady saw a real threat in me and that made it so that I didn't want to do that anymore. 

I didn't want to be masc in public anymore because that was scary. And there were other people, like there were men that looked at me like they wanted to beat me up, which I had never known. Like, you have gay friends. You have gay male friends, and they talk about those experiences, and for you it's a story that you're hearing. This is still a person. It's still a real thing that happened, and of course you can empathize, but there isn't anything like literally being perceived as a gay man and seeing that someone literally looks like they want to kick your ass. I'd never had that before that moment. 

So the way that Shawn is treated as Veronica with this acceptance and also "You're attractive and I want to spend time with you," and the way that Gary was talking to her was so nice—for gender queer people, it feels good when you're accepted as a guy. When Shawn is Shawn, girls like him and he's popular, but he's also accepted as a girl. As Veronica, people like him. They're nice to him. Cory carried his books. He's never done that before. 

Glen:  Yeah. Just like we said, Veronica has put thought into who Veronica is, and to see Veronica be fully realized and is a success—you want to see the things you care about work out. 

Faati:  Yeah. There's a whole conversation about passing that happens in this episode because Shawn passes and Cory doesn't pass. That's why Shawn is playing a teenage girl and Cory is playing a middle-aged woman, because they're trying to indicate that Cory and Cory's features isn't what a teenage girl looks like, and that's a whole messed up thing about passing and passing privilege and stuff that's layered in the episode. There is this idea that a teenage girl has this kind of figure versus the figure that Cory has and this idea that Cory "doesn't look good" the first time that he comes out of the bathroom because he's got straight hair. Cory's features don't look good with straight hair. Some of us, we just can't pull it off. Straight hair isn't for everybody. When Cory had curly hair, which is the kind of hair he has as Cora, he passed. 

Drew:  Hmm. Right. That's a good point. I did not think about that. 

Faati:  That's part of why it's good to have a trans person on this show picking up on those kinds of cues because it's not stuff that everybody notices. I really love where we are in terms of media criticism today because people like me are actually listened to as opposed to what it used to be like where everyone would shout you down. I got into an actual argument with my actual friends about whether or not Samus (from Metroid Prime) is trans. Do you remember when that was a thing that was debated on the internet some years back? It was like five or six years ago. 

Drew:  It did happen five or six years ago, and it comes up again when someone either finds that little bit of background info either as something they want to assert as proof of one thing or say that it somehow doesn't count. It is something that comes up a lot, actually. But yeah. 

Faati:  Yeah. It's a huge part of the internet queer community that when it's announced in canon that somebody is whatever—you know what, it's not just the queer community. It's marginalized people in general. So if it's announced in canon even as a joke that this person is this thing, we're just going to take them. That means that's ours. That character belongs to us now. We read characters as Black when they're not said that they're Black in the show. We'll read characters as queer. We'll read characters as neurodiverse. There are tons of characters that are like Abed in TV shows, sitcoms, and cartoons and everything, but Abed was one of the first ones to actually be declaratively autistic. So now, the reading of the Boy Meets World "Chick Like Me" episode, I'm like yeah, Shawn's non-binary or gender queer. It's just the way that it's played. It's not a joke, and it's not something that's just this part-time thing—it's just the story writes it that way. But in terms of the character—

Drew:  Even if it's not picked up again in later episodes—and I am not the one to say if it is or not. But just focusing on this one piece of media as its own thing, if this were a stand-alone thing we'd be like yes, obviously this is how we're supposed to read this character—or at least obviously it's an acceptable reading of this character. The evidence is there; we're not just pulling something out of nowhere. 

Faati:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  Right. Is there anything left in this scene before we go back to the camping store? 

Glen:  I didn't have anything. 

Drew:  Okay. So the camping store. We go back. It is very, very short. I think we talked about why this is an interesting thing, to pair with the A-plot. 

Eric:  Let's say we're at a club, okay? Let's say that I'm Dave, and I'm standing here at the bar and you see me from across the room, and you say to yourself—

Lonnie:  I want that one! [laughs]

Eric:  [laughs] No, no, no. Remember hunting. Remember the boy bunnies. You don't want to scare them away. There'll be nothing left to hunt. 

Lonnie:  Yeah. That's no fun. 

Eric:  No, it's not. So here's what you got to do. You got to approach me without being detected. 

[audience laughs] 

Eric:  Now you stand next to me, but not close enough to make me realize that I'm your prey. Now turn to me. Make eye contact. Smile—and then say? 

Lonnie:  I want that one!

Drew:  The only point I have here is that Lonnie comes on too strong because she doesn't understand how women are expected to approach men in the city, and her "problem" is that she sees a guy she likes and she's like, "You're the one!" and Eric's like, "No. You can't do that." It is interesting to compare this to the conversation between Shawn and Debbie because in that scene Shawn says, "Girls are not clear," and Debbie is like, "Yes we are," and he's like, "No. You're not clear enough for me." So here on the flipside, Eric is telling her, "You are being too clear. You have to be less clear." So it's kind of a weird opposite. You don't necessarily think he's giving her the right lessons, but also we never see this character again, so who knows, I guess. 

Faati:  And the analogy that he uses of hunting to try to get her to understand dating—that was very dark. I don't think they were intending for that to be as dark of a joke as it was, but good lord. That is unsettling to have the hot dude that always had girls teach her how to date by explaining that it's like hunting. Ugh. 

Glen:  It's also not unusual for a cis, white, heterosexual white man to also tell a woman or anyone who is not like him a very complicated set of information. I think a lot of us have experienced being told one thing and then being told the opposite, and it results in a very difficult line to walk so that women in this world have to be clear—but not be too clear. 

Faati:  Oh, yeah. It's like, "Be clear, but don't be too clear. Be demure, but also be sexy. But also, don't be too sexy. You can be hot, but don't be too hot that he won't take you home to where his mom is—and don't wear that dress. If you wear that dress, then it's too long—but that one might not be long enough." It's just like, "What? What do I do?" So I just dress like this [laughter].

Drew:  That is as perfect of a segue into getting towards the end of this episode when we go to Chubbie's, the restaurant Gary is taking Veronica to for their date. How would you describe Veronica's outfit in this scene? How is she dressed to you guys? 

Faati:  Oh, I owned this dress. I literally remember getting it. We were at Burlington Coat Factory. Do you guys remember Burlington Coat Factory? 

Glen:  Oh, yeah. We love Burlington. 

Faati:  It still exists. I thought that it went away, but nope. It's still around. I was at Burlington Coat Factory, and I was getting a dress for this tiny version of a dance we were having in my sixth grade or something like that, and there was this velvet dress that was long sleeved. And I remember being like, "Oh, it's that one. I need that one." I guess it's because this episode imprinted on me—because looking at this, I'm like, "That's the dress that I owned." That's so funny. 

Glen:  Yeah. It's like the '90s version of a shirt dress. 

Faati:  Mm-hmm, and it's velvet, and it's a great color for Veronica. 

Glen:  Yeah. It's like a French gray. It's not too blue, it's not too red, and there's a purplish hue to it. 

Faati:  It's not the kind of color that a guy would have picked. I'm just saying—like a straight man. 

Drew:  Right. I feel like most straight, cis-gendered men in this situation would probably wear a bright, Crayola-red dress and think that is the best way to make them look. 

Faati:  Right. Something covered in flowers or something. 

Drew:  Right. This is a more subtle look, and also kind of an iconic '90s look. I could imagine Shannon Doherty dressing like this in a '90s movie or something like that. It was very appealing to me as well. It is funny that outfits become a point of discussion in this scene because Gary, who is wearing all tan—he's wearing tan pants and a shirt that is two different shades of tan, and he himself is—

Glen:  Color?

Drew:  The effect is it makes him look like a band-aid, and it is just weird that he is passing any judgment on anyone's appearance because they just did the actors no favors by putting him in this particular outfit, I don't think. 

Faati:  Do you think that choice was done intentionally? 

Drew:  To make him look washed out and unappealing? Maybe. 

Faati:  Yeah, like Shawn—err, Veronica in this scene is making a choice. This is the outfit she picked—this little, tiny little necklace and putting her hair back that way. She made those decisions—well, we don't watch those decisions be made, so we just assume that she did—and Gary looks like he just threw things together. He's like, "These colors are alike," and then he just put them on. 

Drew:  We've already kind of talked about Cora. What do we think of Cory somehow sneaking into the restaurant and getting a temporary job as a waitress and presenting himself as Cora who's going to be waiting on Veronica and Gary during their date? 

Glen:  I mean, hijinks. 

Drew:  I think his outfit looks so good! Obviously, it's a costume. It's dressing for a performance—I mean, we're always performing. Yes. I like the way Cora looks because Cora looks not unlike a lot of supporting characters I've seen on shows like Mary Tyler Moore and The Bob Newhart Show. It's a very '70s-appropriate, middle-aged-woman look that I find very appealing because of my sitcom history, basically. 

Faati:  Yes. I agree. It fits Cory, too. Because of the way that they write Cory—which I think they figured out in the earlier seasons that he's good at accents, and he's good at imitating older New York characters, older Jewish characters or Italian characters or whatever, probably from growing up wherever he grew up because he does it very well. They probably were like, "You know, this kind of person would like this kind of character of a lady working in a diner," like somebody with a gruff smoker's voice whose name is Cora. The outfit doesn't even—no one at Chubbie's dresses like that. No one there was dressed like that. He stood out so much. But the choice to pick that outfit was very Cory. 

Glen:  Yeah. Cory's not comfortable as a teenage girl, but Cory is comfortable as a sassy, middle-aged woman. 

Drew:  Right. Makes sense. And he's thought about who this person is in a way that Shawn has thought about Veronica to some extent, perhaps. 

Glen:  Right. I will say it's troubling that Gary the Octopus orders a double cheeseburger when he's on a date. Maybe that is just me as a gay man being like, "I'm not going to order a double cheeseburger on a date." 

Drew:  And a milkshake. 

Glen:  And a milkshake. Right. 

Faati:  I'm glad that you brought that up because this imprinted on me as well, and I've been ordering lots of food on dates for a long time, and I didn't realize that it was weird until very recently. People would always be like, "Damn, you can eat!" and I'd be like, "Yeah, I'm hungry. Why do you think I'm here?" [laughter] "You're buying me food. We're having a conversation." Oh, I also found out that that's rude. I did not know that. I thought that they wanted to eat with me. I didn't realize they were trying to have sex with me, and so I didn't have sex with them. I just ate the food, and then I would go home. 

Drew:  [laughs]

Glen:  Oh. That sounds like the better choice, I think. 

Drew:  Yeah. Probably. 

Faati:  I mean, yeah. But I'm just like—if you want to have sex with someone, you should probably tell them that. 

Drew:  Which gets to the heart of Gary and Veronica's date because he was not expecting her to order as much food as she does, number one. And number two, as soon as Cora leaves, he's immediately physically invading her space, and she is continually telling him, "Please don't do that. Please don't do that. Please don't do that," and he's not listening at all. I don't know if it's at this point necessarily—oh, no. It is. It culminates with him putting his hand on Veronica's knee, and Veronica freaks out and leaves. She ends up reflecting back at him Debbie's exact criticism, I think word for word. 

Shawn:  You're crowding me a bit. 

Gary:  Oh. Maybe you're just tense. Now how about I rub your shoulders. 

Shawn:  You know, I didn't ask you to do that. 

Gary:  Yeah, but doesn't it feel good? 

Shawn:  You're not listening to me. 

Gary:  Whoa. You're a strong one [chuckles like a creep].

Shawn:  Yeah. I play a little field hockey. 

[audience laughs] 

Gary:  Well, I knew that—because the first thing I noticed were your legs. 

Shawn:  Ahh! 

[dishes rattle as Shawn reacts to Gary]

Gary:  What's the matter? 

Shawn:  You just don't listen. You're too busy planning your next move to hear us say no. 

Gary:  What? 

[audience laughs] 

Cory:  Where are you going? 

Shawn:  He touched me. 

Cory:  Where? 

Shawn:  On my knee. It's my knee. What makes him think that it's his knee? 

Topanga:  Maybe you sent him a signal. 

Shawn:  The only signal I sent him was "Stop it!" 

Topanga:  And he didn't listen. 

Shawn:  I'm not like that. I'm not. I never will be again. 

Cory:  Okay. Well, here he comes. 

Shawn:  No. No, no. I quit. 

Cory:  You can't! We have an article to finish. 

Shawn:  Ugh, I should have worn a pantsuit. 

[audience laughs] 

Drew:  It's a nice moment of growth for this character, and she's speaking to not just Gary being a jerk but just men in general. 

Faati:  That was such a well-acted scene for everyone involved. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. He does a very good job. Rider Strong does a really good job with what is sort of a layered performance you have to do. Also, it's weird to think, but this cis-gendered male actor is on a sitcom wearing a dress, but in this moment he's not doing it as a joke, and that is a more delicate performance. I mean, I'm not an actor. I wouldn't know how to do that. But he does. 

Faati:  Yeah. To be completely honest. I'm surprised this didn't get any kind of GLAAD recognition because they do recognize television series that make compelling arcs. But here's the thing about that—this would be a trans narrative. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  Yeah. 

Faati:  And trans narratives weren't too popular for a good hot minute. Rent is a very popular musical that showed a lot of people in my age group what queerness looked like, especially if you're from Georgia or something like that where you don't have a queer community readily available. I mean, there is one, but it was very underground. Anyway. Yeah. When I watched Rent, Angel was the character that spoke the most to me because Angel is basically a non-binary, trans, femme character. However, the movie calls Angel a drag queen and kind of plays it like Angel is a gay man who likes to do drag as opposed to Angel being way more than you could even put into a singular box of a person. 

Drew:  Right.

Faati:  Yeah. So when this episode came out, maybe it wasn't something that would have been recognized. But if they go back over stuff—what do they call it, posthumously?—just go back and recognize this episode because that acting was really great.  

Glen:  Yeah. I really just think at the time maybe we just weren't equipped because when they wrote it what they were trying to say was "There are boys and there are girls, and this is an episode about boys learning what it's like to be a girl" rather than—it's not about crossing the line but about blurring the line, and recognizing something in yourself as opposed to changing. 

Faati:  That's also a trans narrative. Yeah. You just completely described the trans narrative. And the interesting thing is that it wasn't recognized, but I'm going to push for it to be recognized because it should be. My note for this scene was "Look at who listened earlier," because in the earlier conversation Debbie says, "You're too busy trying to plot out your next move that you don't even have the time to hear us say no," and then he just responds with "What?" like he didn't hear anything that she just said, and that's exactly how this scene was played, only he repeats back what she said because he did listen. 

Drew:  Even if maybe his macho exterior made him think that he should play off that he wasn't listening? Maybe that's an over-read. 

Faati:  No, no. I think so. I think he listened, but he was being defensive in the moment. He was trying to dismiss her. Men do this thing when you're talking to them sometimes where they make it like they're jokingly dismissing you so that you can't call them out on it. 

Glen:  Drew, you do that. 

Drew:  I do that—

Glen:  I'm joking. 

Drew:  —to you and only you. 

Glen:  Yeah, yeah. 

Drew:  Yeah. That's fine. 

Faati:  [laughs] But yeah, they play it off so that when you say, "Hey, that wasn't okay," or "I didn't like that," they can be like, "I was just joking." 

Drew:  It's been a while since I've had to work in an office environment, but there was a lot of that that I witnessed just watching other people interact, and the way gay and straight men treat women in the office was gross for that exact reason. 

Faati:  It's really sad. That's a part of why I don't want to go back to the office. Not that my office is bad or anything like that, it's just there's so much social energy that you expend when you are these things. Like when you are a Black person, you have to expend all of this social energy so that you're overcorrecting all of your behavior so that you don't look the wrong way and get misjudged and get fired of a miscommunication or whatever. As a femme or as a woman, you're trying to be declarative while also not coming off as bitchy. Then, when you're neurodiverse, you're trying to understand how to read what somebody just said to you in the moment. When I have something online, or when I'm listening to a podcast or something, I can pause it, and then think about what they said, and then go, "Oh! That's what they meant." But when it's happening live, I don't get closed captions. I have no idea what the eff this person just said to me, and then they're looking all expectantly, and I'm just like, "Uh, you want me to—could you repeat that?" and then they think I'm dumb because I ask them to repeat something multiple times. Anyway, yeah. It's a lot. 

Glen:  And even the act of asking for clarification or in clarifying yourself (because I've had this happen to me), people sometimes see that as an attack when you were just trying to explain what you meant by something because you don't want to be misread. Sometimes I have trouble reading people 

Faati:  You have been, right. And you could hear it. Like, you just said the thing, and your mind works fast enough that you hear what you just said and you recognize that that's not clear enough, so then you try to say it again—but while you're thinking of it and trying to say it again, it's only been a half a second since you just said whatever you just said, and so everyone around you is just like, "Why are you talking so much about this thing that you've already said?" 

Drew:  Yeah. It is something that I think I've gotten better at by doing this podcast because the more times we have a guest on it is interesting to have to listen and then anticipate a follow-up at the same time, and that is nice because I can actually stop and go back and redo stuff if I need to. That's not something you can really do in real life, but it is maybe the thing that has kept me a little bit more sane this past lonely, isolated year. 

Glen:  But maybe we should be able to do that in real life. Maybe we should just have more patience with each other to say the wrong thing and then clarify or correct. 

Drew:  Right. 

Faati:  I was going to expand on him saying that too, but I read it a whole different way. I was going to be like, maybe we should have that in real life and have closed captions so that you can actively see what somebody is saying as they're saying it. Google Glasses!

Glen:  Oh, god. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. If only. Remember those? 

Glen:  Briefly. That did not catch on. 

Faati:  Ugh. I had such high hopes. 

Drew:  Feels like a lifetime ago. So at this point in the interaction, Veronica wants to leave, and she sort of gets sold out by Cory. 

Gary:  Look. Sorry I got a little aggressive. Nobody respects women more than me. You forgive me? 

Cory:  Of course, she forgives you. You two are just adorable together. Isn't he just delish? 

Gary:  Tell you what, how about I teach you how to play Foosball? 

Shawn:  How about I teach you? 

Faati:  Yeah. That sequence was so unsettling, but it was also very realistic, which I appreciated the layers of that because as a person who has experienced—whatever. No. As someone with empathy for my friends, if this was something that was occurring with one of my friends and they came to me and said that this person touched them, that person would be regretting having touched my friend. I've never hit anybody, but I have a really good way of taking somebody apart verbally but making it sound like it's all compliments and very respectful—because I went to Catholic school and we weren't allowed to curse anybody out. So I can collect somebody in a way where they're going to thank me afterwards and be like, "I've grown," but it won't feel good when it's happening!

Glen:  I also think there's an element to this of Cory/Cora just discounting Veronica's discomfort because he is seeing Veronica—

Faati:  As a girl. 

Drew:  Yes!

Glen:  No, he's seeing Veronica as Shawn, as a boy, and thinking that "Veronica" can defend herself—

Faati:  Oh, okay. I see how you're reading that. 

Glen:  —if she needs to. So he is discounting how she feels threatened in this situation. 

Faati:  But also, Cory is not having the same experience that Shawn is having, and Cory and Shawn were pretty much in agreement in the earlier scene in the hallway—so Cory might legitimately not get it, at this point. 

Drew:  He doesn't. Yeah. I would agree with Glen that Veronica is experiencing this on a different level than Cory would if Cory were the one in a dress on a date—probably. At least with the reading of this episode we're giving it. Veronica gets pushed back to the date. They go to play foosball in the backroom, which seems like a terrible idea because there's no one else there, and Gary immediately gets handsy on her again, and she decks him. She just punches him out. 

Shawn:  What is wrong with you? 

Gary:  I'm just showing you how to play the game. 

Shawn:  I know how to play the game. 

Gary:  Yeah, I could tell by the way you're dressed [guffaws like a weirdo].

Shawn:  What? I—I just wanted to look nice. 

Gary:  Well, you do. 

Shawn:  I said don't touch me. 

Gary:  Okay! Don't like to be touched. 

Shawn:  Did it ever occur to you that I might be a nice girl? 

Gary:  No. What I thought was that you'd be into guys—but I guess you're not. I guess you prefer girls.

Shawn:  As a matter of fact, I do. 

[audience laughs] 

Gary:  What? 

Shawn:  I said, as a matter of fact [punching sound]—I do. 

Gary:  What was that for? 

Shawn:  For every girl I've ever known!

Drew:  And the scene ends with Veronica leaving arm-in-arm with Cora and Topanga. 

Faati:  So everything about this scene was so weirdly relevant to me. My husband, when we were first dating some years ago, we did this cabin in the mountains because he was working for this wedding company or whatever, shooting weddings and stuff, and they gave us this winter vacation thing with all of their employees. It was sick. And he goes, "Do you want to play foosball?" And I was like, "Oh, yeah. I'll kick your ass," and then he was like, "Hah, okay. Sure," and it was just the exact same back and forth that they have in this scene. And then Shawn (as Veronica) kicks his ass because why wouldn't she be able to play foosball? It just reminded me of that—like, why wouldn't she? 

Drew:  Foosball is among "sports," which I'm putting in quotes for people who are only listening. There is no reason any gender would necessarily be better at foosball. It's not the most gendered game. Anyone could be great at foosball, regardless of their presentation. 

Faati:  Right, and it was showing that that character Gary—that's such a forgettable—

Drew:  He doesn't need a name. Band-aid. We can call him Band-aid. 

Faati:  Yeah. So Band-aid, the way that he remarks to her was so sexist, and Shawn was just like, "What? Why would you think that I wouldn't be able to—" and then kicks his ass at it. I remember I beat my husband multiple times at this game, and he's just like, "When did you learn how to play this?" and I'm like, "We had it when I was a kid." My mom—this one Christmas she couldn't give us a whole Christmas, so we just saved up enough money to get one big gift for everybody. I have six siblings, so there's a lot of us, and so some Christmases weren't—you know? And she got us this foosball table, and we just annihilated each other all day. So I'm really good at foosball. I love that it's in the scene. 

Glen:  I mean, that sounds like a good gift. 

Drew:  Yeah. It also sounds like a good skill to surprise people with to have in your back pocket—that you're secretly a foosball assassin. 

Faati:  Yeah. It's a really weird, random thing too. And then when he pretends to show her how to do it, and then she says, "I already know how to play." I just love that they—ooh, the writing in this episode is so great because that is a sequence that happens so frequently when you're on a male-female date. You'll be doing something that you have been doing or talking about something that you know about and then they will mansplain to you as a form of flirtation—and I don't feel pleased to know that you think I'm stupid. That's not sexy. That's not a fun feeling for me. For men it's like, "See how I'm better? Now sleep with me!" and it's like, "What? No!" 

Drew:  Probably does not work most of the time, if not all of the time. In this case, it is solved by punching. 

Glen:  We don't "condone" it—for legal reasons. 

Drew:  No. Don't condone it, but I feel legally fine saying that Gary probably had it coming. 

Glen:  Oh, yeah. 

Faati:  [singing] He had it coming. Yeah. 

Drew:  He really did. 

Faati:  I will say that it's a problematic display. Despite the fact that I appreciated that Veronica decks him, I know that you can't do that—especially when you're trans. You can't be going out here putting your hands on people, and genuinely you wouldn't be doing that. But Veronica just put on the skirt. Veronica doesn't know everything about what it's like being a trans femme at the moment—and she's a teenager. 

Drew:  In the next scene we see that Veronica is Shawn. Shawn is not wearing the dress. They're back in the hallway. They are reading Cory's article, which everyone agrees is apparently very interesting. I don't love that Feeny comes by and mentions that the article had troubling photographs. That's sort of the opposite of the Feeny that we got in the earlier scene where it seemed like he was being supportive and progressive—but whatever. Mr. Feeny is sometimes snarky and critical of his students. The episode ends with Cory being happy and Debbie being impressed. 

Debbie:  Shawn, I wanted to thank you for what you did. 

Shawn:  Hey, not necessary. I learned a lot. 

Debbie:  You did? 

Shawn:  Yeah. You know, in fact, of all the guys around, I'd say I'm the world's most perfect date right now. 

Debbie:  Well, I'd say of all the girls around I could probably use a perfect date right now—so what'd you have in mind? 

Shawn:  I don't know. We could, uh—start with an evening of good conversation? 

Debbie:  And a genuine connection with another human being? 

Shawn:  Hey, I'm your boy. 

[audience woos in reaction to the love connection]

Topanga:  What's wrong? 

Cory:  My hosiery is still bunching!

Drew:  And coming back and agreeing to go on a date where Shawn does not manhandle her. End of episode. Debbie, not gay after all, unfortunately. 

Glen:  Well, I mean, in our canon—

Drew:  Yeah, actually—

Glen:  In our canon, Veronica—

Faati:  Is gender non-conforming. 

Drew:  Veronica and Debbie—

Glen:  Yeah, and in a relationship with Debbie. 

Drew:  Yep. And then we split off into our alternate Boy Meets World dimension where things play out differently. 

Faati:  [singing to the tune of the Boy Meets World theme] And it's boy meets gay—boy meets gay. 

Drew:  That's the second reboot of this show. Final thoughts. What are our final thoughts about this interesting piece of TV? 

Faati:  Okay. So as a queer person who grew up in the '90s and watched this episode—and this is my favorite episode—on the rewatch, I understand why it was my favorite episode. All of the stuff ended up—the freaking foosball thing. I was playing foosball when I was a kid, and she's just really good at foosball, and so am I. I associated with Veronica so hard, and I feel like there are just such a limited number of gender queer or gender play expressions—like messing around and blurring the lines. There's a limited amount of those in early TV, so it makes sense that so many of us loved that episode and love Boy Meets World and it's like our favorite thing whereas now kids would watch it and be like, "This is so basic." 

Drew:  Right. Well, we do try to split the difference between watching something on the merits of how it would have looked back in the day and also how it looks from a modern lens. It's the least we can do. But yeah, I hope anyone listening to this episode would be able to look at the episode we are and appreciate why what it's doing is interesting and special and unusual and progressive. It's a richer piece of TV than you might expect to see on TGIF. 

Faati:  I mean, honestly, I think that it has conversations about gender expression that is more nuanced than some modern-day television—like Glee. Glee tries to explore that, but Ryan Murphy and I are enemies. He don't know that. He don't know who I am, but—

Glen:  Oh, I think he knows that. 

Faati:  Oh my—you know what? I think he do know that because of the way that all of the characters that are similar to me in all of his series, I'm just like, "Oh. You don't like us, huh? You just don't like." So yeah, the nuance that is here that is given—I will say by Rider Strong, to be perfectly honest. I know the writing is good, and ups for the writing. Ups for the writing, for sure. But Rider Strong carried this episode and put so much sincerity and heart into it that it made it seem like it was okay for me to be who I was. It was the tiny seed that turned into a flower when I saw Angel in Rent when I was in high school, and then just turned into this whole dinosaur cosplay person that I am now when I started watching Steven Universe. 

Drew:  A flower that turned into a dinosaur—it's a tale as old as time [laughter].

Glen:  Yeah. The conversation between Veronica and Topanga around the name "Veronica" was a permission structure to have these thoughts and explore these thoughts, which is very interesting. 

Drew:  Maybe I will try to reach out to the writer and see if I can get him to talk to us about the episode. We've been making more of an effort to interview the people who actually wrote the scripts for these things back in the day, and I wonder if he has any idea what it has meant to other people who watched it years later. He might be surprised. It might not have been intentional at all, but that doesn't reflect on it having the ability to be impactful to people. 

Faati:  It's one of the most powerful trans narratives in fiction that I've seen because, watching it today, I expected it to be very cringy, and I expected there to be a lot of trans phobia and for it to be difficult for me to watch it. But when I watched it, all I saw was someone little trans kid taking their first deer steps out into the world in high heels and being like, "This is wobbly, but I'm actually doing a lot better than I expected." I love the choice to wear flats. Those boots that Veronica wears in her first scene, those are the kind of boots that I wore. I still kind of play with heels, but they're too hard. They're hard, man. They're hard. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. Heels are hard. 

Drew:  I believe. I believe. Just seeing people try and never having tried myself, it seems very, very difficult. I don't know why people would risk—

Glen:  Because they're beautiful. 

Drew:  You risk your ankles! You could hurt your ankle really bad. That's the only thing I think of. 

Faati:  I will also say that Topanga—Danielle did a good job in this episode, too. I wish that they had given her more lines. I think it's interesting that this episode was written about the boys understanding the female perspective when the girl in their group is right there to ask, like Cory said in the beginning. Why didn't they just ask? 

Drew:  Also, she's in the entire last scene where she's kind of observing the date with Gary, but she doesn't really get that much to do. She's just kind of there to make a face at Cory dressed as Cora. That's it. 

Faati:  Yeah. It's a weird way to handle that. You know what? I'm going to pitch a new version of this episode. Instead of having an Eliza Doolittle side story or whatever, they should have done a She's All That. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Faati:  Like have Topanga do the flip and try to figure out what it's like being on the guys' side or whatever and actually have this conversation between all of your characters. The way that they framed it, it just didn't give a lot of the girl characters in the show anything to do. 

Drew:  Right. It is a show that is frequently overwhelmed by the male characters. Yeah. Faati, if people have questions about Boy Meets World or dinosaurs or anything else that we've talked about in this episode, where can they find you online to ask you these questions? 

Faati:  So I am @FaatiTheStreet on everything. My Facebook is public but if you find it—if you come across it that's cool, but I'm not going to tell you my actual name-name. But my Twitter is @FaatiTheStreet, spelled F (as in "frog"), A-A-T-I-The-Street, like with a T-H because I didn't realize I could do "da street." Oh, my god. That would have been way cooler. But yeah, FaatiTheStreet on Instagram, on TikTok, and on Twitter. I make threads about media, and my TikToks are almost all about cosplay or me being dorky with my friend Mariah, who's @SailorMarseline. Oh—oh, yeah. And we also have a thing that we're doing together called "HeyFamdom." We have an Instagram, @HeyFamdom and a Twitch. We're not really doing much with it yet, but we're planning on. 

Drew:  "Famdom" with an M? 

Faati:  Yes, like, "Hey, fam-dom." You know how all the kids are saying "fam" because all the Black kids are saying "fam"?

Drew:  Yes. I'm aware. 

Faati:  Language is fun [laughter].

Drew:  Language sure is interesting. Awesome. Thank you for that. Glen, where can people find you on social media? 

Glen:  If you would like to send me fan art of Road Rovers—sexy or otherwise—you can do so on Twitter @IWriteWrongs, I-W-R-I-T-E-Wrongs. Drew, if people would like to send you '90s fashion that people may have worn to dances that were not specifically like prom but were less formal dances—

Drew:  Where you get the actual really good style anyway? 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  I'm on Twitter @DrewGMackie, M-A-C-K-I-E, and this podcast is on Twitter @GayestEpisode. None of us over here at this podcast are on TikTok because we are neither as young nor as cool as you are, Faati. You can listen to all previous episodes of this show at gayestepisodeever.com or literally on any podcast listening app because we are on all of them. Our logo is designed by Rob Wilson. Our show is transcribed by Sarah Neal. You can find links to Rob and Sarah's respective websites in the show notes. This is a TableCakes podcast. TableCakes is a woman-owned Los Angeles based podcast network, and you can find out about our other shows at tablecakes.com. All audio clips used in this episode are done so under the protection of—? 

Glen:  Fair use. 

Drew:  Thank you. And that means we are at the final segment of the show, which is the Box of Inquiry where we have a question posed by one of our Patreon supporters. If you want to pose your own question, go to patreon.com/gayestepisodeever. There is a post pinned to the very top of the stack where we are specifically asking for your questions, and this question comes from Alfred Day, who asks us, "Who is the sexiest comic book superhero from the DC and Marvel, respectively?" which means he's actually asking for two answers from us. Faati, you are our special guest in this episode. Would you like to go first? 

Faati:  All right. First off, in Marvel, I'm going to say Deadpool is the sexiest. I am totally in love with him, and I love how irreverent he is and meta. All of his humor is great. I also love the sincerity and the madness—the utter madness. Totally drawn into that. That's on the Marvel end. And then on the DC end, I will say Harley Quinn because she's basically the exact same character—but with titties. There we go [laughter].

Glen:  And some sort of a degree. 

Faati:  Oh, oh! Yes. 

Drew:  She does have a degree. She is a doctor. 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Faati:  She is smarter than Deadpool. That is fair. She has titties and brains. There are other parts of the body there, too. This is just getting weirdly Frankensteinian now, so let's just move on to the next person's answer [laughs].

Drew:  Glen? 

Glen:  On the Marvel side, I am resisting saying Gambit because he's a narc and basic, but he is very important to being gay. I'm going to say Wiccan—which yes, I know he's too young for me. But he is an emo, Jewish, magic boy, which is 110 percent my type, I think. On the DC side, I will say Kirk Langstrom, specifically Man-Bat in the current iteration of Justice League Dark where he has somehow tweaked a formula that he's more of a nerdy-bat humanoid. He's kind of like Harrison Ford as a professor but as a bat. 

Drew:  I think you also like that because he reminds you of a Ninja Turtles character. 

Glen:  I mean, I like Wingnut of Wingnut and Screwloose, but I'm not attracted to Wingnut. 

Drew:  This is the attractive version of that. 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Faati:  Yeah. Yeah, wings are attractive. Mm-hmm. 

Glen:  Drew? 

Drew:  So this was tough, actually. This was one of those questions where I'm like, "Oh, this will be easy," and then I really got stuck on it. I think the Marvel hero I find the most attractive—

Glen:  Doesn't have to be a hero. 

Drew:  He actually did say hero.

Glen:  Oh. Oh, oops. What I chose is fine. 

Faati:  Oh, yeah. I definitely said anti-heroes. 

Drew:  I think anti-heroes count. Most characters in superhero comics are a gray area anyway, so I wasn't too strict about that. The Marvel version of Hercules I think is very, very attractive—especially the version that's in a relationship with alternate dimension Wolverine. That is a very, very sexy combination. If I just pull myself out of it, who I think is the most daring and sexy is specifically the version of Storm who has a mohawk, which I remember seeing as a little kid and being like, "That's a thing? When is she from?" She comes from a very different timeline, but it's a really good look, and I think that's one of the cooler things. That's one of the sexier superhero looks I think I've ever seen. 

Faati:  Damn. I want to change my answer because I'm literally looking like that right now because of what a big deal that look was for me. My sides are shaved. 

Drew:  I didn't know that. 

Faati:  I literally got a white mohawk right now [laughs]—"Harley Quinn because titties!" Entire wonderful, Black-woman characters here. Geez. Sorry guys. 

Drew:  But sexy gets weird. Like, who am I attracted to the most versus who has the most daringly sexy costume—and then that also sent me into "Wait. What about Polaris?" I think Polaris is—

Glen:  Okay. But Drew, you're avoiding your DC answer. 

Drew:  Okay. So DC, my first answer would be Poison Ivy, but Poison Ivy is not really a hero almost ever. She's pretty bad. But I like that she is extremely sexy when she has green skin—but you can't touch her because she's poisonous, and that makes her sexier. But Catman. I'm going to go with Catman.

Glen:  Yeah. Catman is super sexy. 

Drew:  Catman is super sexy. Maybe Madame Xanadu. I couldn't pick.

Glen:  Mm-hmm.  

Faati:  Booster Gold is also super sexy. 

Glen:  Yes. I was going to say him, too, but he's a little too jocky for my taste. 

Drew:  Booster Gold is like how I would be attracted to Cyclops if I didn't dislike him so much as a character, but Booster Gold has a lot of those aesthetics transferred into something I find a lot more appealing. 

Glen:  I mean, if he'd just kiss Blue Beetle he'd be way more attractive. 

Drew:  That should be where they take him. 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  This has been a wonderful end to a thrilling conversation about media. Faati, thank you so much for giving us your time to discuss Boy Meets World and also bringing your smarts about all this stuff and allowing us to have this conversation in the first place. 

Faati:  Yeah. Thanks for accepting my demands [laughter].

Drew:  They were good demands. Please enjoy the rest of your night. Podcast over. 

Glen:  Bye forever!

["I Never Dance" performed by Crysalis plays]

Katherine: A TableCakes production.