TVSquad

Have you been missing those references to Scherbatsky's Canadian life? If you know what I'm talking about then you'll be overjoyed to know that on April 21, How I Met Your Mother will be all about Robin Sparkles, Robin Scherbatsky's alter-ego teen singing star. The entire episode is planned as a flashback to the 1980s 1990's when Robin became a one-hit wonder with the song "Let's Go to the Mall." Well, it turns out that wasn't her only song. Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, How I Met Your Mother's co-creators, composed a ballad. "Sandcastles in the Sand" was the flip-side of "Let's Go to the Mall." It's supposedly in the style of a power break-up ballad, like "Foolish Beat" and "Toy Soldiers."

Since the Britney Spears episode of Mother rated so well, the show is enlisting more guest stars. Not as high profile, certainly, but still pretty well-known. In the Sparkle flashback, we'll see Growing Pains' Alan Thicke (he's Canadian, don't you know) as Robin's Dad, and Dawson Creeks' hottie James Van Der Beek is playing the guy who broke Robin's heart -- a backup dancer from her video! That heartbreak leads to her writing "Sandcastles." And Tiffany, who was a legit 1980s pop star, will play Robin's BFF.

Maybe I'm overly optimistic because I like this show a lot, but I'm betting this is going to be as funny as Barney uncovering the music video of "Let's Got to the Mall" last year. And if you didn't know it before, the writers love veering into musical-land. Carter Bays talked to TV Squad's Joel Keller last year about Robin's song: "Craig and I were in hog heaven having the chance to write this song and record it, because that's what we do in our spare time, we play music and record it any chance we get. We wrote a song for American Dad when we worked there, we wrote a lot of songs on Letterman; it's something we love to do and we've been looking for an opportunity to do it again on the show. We were parodying a world we loved so dearly and its so part of our formative experience growing up. Just that whole '80s thing.... digging into that was fun." [Ed. note: While Robin's success was in the 1990's, she was definitely channeling a 1980's pop music vibe; that's on purpose. In the Slap Bet episode, Robin explains that the 80's "...didn't come to Canada until like '93."]

It was so much fun that they're taking us back to the '80s '90s again.