TVSquad

I'm just as thrilled as ol' Annie that AMC is bringing the walking dead back to the barely alive audiences of prime time television with Frank Darabont's revisioning of the iconic Walking Dead. I was even tickled to hear that J.S. (I don't know if he hates that name or not) knew of a post-apocalyptic drama series in development hell called Alive. I've been a big fan of the post-apocalypse genre since the oil barrel zombie in Return of the Living Dead taught me that I don't have as much control over my bodily functions as I once believed.

But even though these two shows have shown just as deep TV has tried to dig its own heel-mark into the genre, it goes a lot deeper and frankly, I'm not sure you want to dig that deep. This is a show about life after an unfathomable nuclear accident that kills everyone in the world except for six people who are left to fend for themselves in an unrelenting wasteland of death, despair, destruction and death ... and it was a sitcom.

And before you ask, yes, it was on Fox.

Back when the Fox Network first formed in the mid-80s, they produced a string of low budget, cut rate and just plain bad shows that saved UPN, the Baywatch spinoffs and everything The Brady Bunch ever did on television outside of their initial show from dominating "Worst Shows of All Time" lists.

One of the network's earliest productions was a sitcom about the wacky hijinks of six survivors of an accidental nuclear holocaust called (I swear I didn't make this up) Woops!. I have never actually seen an episode, but based on the descriptions I've read from various sources such as Television Obscurities, the book "What Were They Thinking?" and TV Guide's "50 Worst Shows Ever Made," it sounds like the mother of the MOAB.

The only evidence I could find of this Defcon-2 turkey's existence was its opening, posted in an un-embeddable video format on Retrostatic.com. That's an even greater testament to how bad this show must be. Even YouTube, a media giant that built its empire on kittens playing musical instruments and guys voluntarily getting smashed in the junk for our entertainment, won't show it.

The opening tells the story of an America busily concerned with trivial concerns such as the Pennant race, surfing and a small town homecoming parade. A local military base also joined in the parade by letting their soldiers, tanks and even a hot nuclear missile march down the street while a crowd of simple American folk looked on without a care in the world. Suddenly, two kids playing with a remote controlled car somehow set the missile off, causing World War III times two. And after the Earth's population are reduced to crispy chicken nuggets, apparently THAT is when the hilarity starts.