Trivia / Square One TV

• Acting for Two: Briefly in "The Trial of George Frankly" In the climax, Joe Howard plays both George Frankly and one of the brothers Karamazov disguised as George Frankly.
• Corpsing: Invoked in one of the bank pranks from "The View from the Rear Terrace", when a bank was flooded with laughing gas.
• The Danza: Officers Sam and Steve, played by Sam Salazar and Steve Fellman. Also overlaps with Cast the Expert, as both Salazar and Fellman were actual police officers working with the LAPD at the time.
• Distanced from Current Events: An exception - not long after the World Trade Center in the city of New York was attacked in the year 2001, Noggin aired an unedited episode in which George Frankly casually discussed having dinner there at its restaurant (Windows on the World).
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The series has not been rerun since the early 2000s, when it was rerun on Noggin, and there are currently no DVD releases planned. Domestic recordings do exist of many episodes, and they sometimes show up on YouTube, but they are nowhere near exhaustive, and quality varies widely.
• Same Language Dub:
  • In "The Case of the Willing Parrot" from Mathnet, the voice of Sunshine the Talking Parrot, who played as Little Louie, was provided by Jim Thurman.
  • One of the shows' recurring sketches was "Grown-Ups". In the sketch, kids would talk about how they were going to need math in the future, but their voices were provided by adult celebrities, by the likes of Ed Koch, Lawrence Taylor, Marv Albert, Robin Leach, James Earl Jones, and Joan Rivers. This was done intentionally.
  • In "The Case of the Calpurnian Kugel Caper" from Mathnet, in some shots, you are looking at Peggy Shay, and hearing her voice. But in other shots, you are looking at her, and hearing her same-language-dubbed-in-post-production voice, which was provided by Jon Devries. Again, this was done intentionally.
• Recycled Script: There are a few different versions of the same basic skit in which someone is filming a commercial with a critical number, and the director repeatedly interrupts and tells the actor to use a different expression of the same number in the ad (decimal, fraction, or percent).
• Screwed by the Network: According to Toni DiBuono (Pat Tuesday) and Joe Howard (George Frankly), Children's Television Workshop abruptly canceled the show despite high viewership because they wanted to free up funds for Ghostwriter.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Phil Hartman auditioned for the role of George Frankly before Joe Howard was cast.
  • When it was learned that Square One TV was going to be cancelled, Howard Meltzer, who produced the Mathnet segments, called up ABC and suggested to them that they revive Mathnet as its own program. ABC was interested, even willing to continue airing it in the five-day-a-week format, but unfortunately, the Children's Television Workshop vetoed the plan when they heard about it, because they would not have earned any money in the deal^note This was because the Mathnet segments were not technically produced by CTW itself, but instead were produced by outside companies contracted by them. In the L.A. era, it was The Webb Organization, while in the New York era, it was Turtleback Productions in association with The Entertainment Group.. ABC did end up airing a CTW-produced program later, the short-lived animated series Cro.
  • The show was at one point going to be called That's Mathematics; Tom Lehrer's song of the same name was originally intended as a theme song for the show, but it was left unused when the name was changed.

---