Reviewed by Rich Depping

Paramount Home Video – 293 minutes – 2007 – NOT RATED – Widescreen – Dolby Digital -Stereo English/Spanish/French  – Two Discs

The school was supposed to be 1 story school with 30 rooms, but due to an error when reading the plans, it was built 30 stories tall with 1 classroom per floor! And lucky new student, Todd, has to attend class on the 30th floor! WAAAAA-CKY!

THE SERIES

Wayside School is based on the series of children’s books by Louis Sachar of the same name. Todd (voiced by Michael Cera, the kid from Arrested Development & an infinite amount of terrible teen movies he will be cursed to star in til he turns 30) is the new kid in Mrs. Jewels class, striving to fit in to his abnormal new enviroment, where musical lessons envolve a hypnotic noseflute that instructs cows roaming the school grounds to eat the school, dodging the wrath of Maurecia, the girl that expresses her crush on him by punching his lights out on a routine basis, and not dying from consuming the cafeteria food prepared by Miss Mush and her dead rat sidekick, Sammy. Oh, and not collecting enough demerit points to get his name written, check marked, and circled on the blackboard, leading to being sent home early on the kindergarten short bus, which happens nearly every day.Each day presents a new and different alternate way of learning things at Wayside, as well as strange adventures often due to the meddling and/or incompetence of the principal, Mr Kidswatter. Like appointing a student as Principal For The Day, assigning them actual principal duties, and taking his leave to play 18 holes. Or hijacking the student TV station donated by a broadcasting company for letting them place an antenna on the school roof (EM fields do wonders for developing children I hear!) and turning it into his own home shopping  channel… I only vaguely recall flipping through one of these books as a kid, so I’m imagining some of the character designs were slightly updated from their initial scribing, such as the narcoleptic goth girl, and Maurecia’s rollerblades, and so forth. As an adult, watching some of these episodes, the plots almost seem to border on psychotic sometimes, for example when filling out the TEACHER’S report card, noting ‘see me after class’ requires the teacher’s parent to be called by the principal in for a meeting to berate the student in question. Maybe I’m just getting old…

VIDEO

The package states a ‘full screen’ presentation – however, every player I have tried them on has displayed 16×9 without any noticible stretching, which seemed a bit odd. It appears to be animated in Flash, which leads to a crisp and clear presentation on DVD. Bright visuals and crisp lines permeate both discs throughout.

AUDIO

Your basic stereo mixes for English, French (it is a Canadien production, can’t forget le Quebecois!), and Spanish (it also airs on Nick in the states & Latin America)

EXTRAS

Kids don’t really expect extras, and we really could not find any, apart from a trailer for the Wayside School movie DVD release…

BOTTOM LINE

Good clean wholesome and weird entertainment for kids… just don’t expect it to be as enthralling as the books were, if you’re old enough to have read them back in the 80s…Note: Review copy came shrinkwrapped with a paperback edition of the original novel, Sideways Stories from Wayside School – we assume the retail version does as well…
SCORES (Out of 5)

The Series: 3.5
Video: 4.0
Sound: 3.5
Extras: 2.0
Bottom Line: 4.0