Since moving to the southern U.S. last year, I've found that the people around here live for Wal-Mart.  Even if they don't have any shopping to do, they just hang out there for no apparent reason.  Luckily for them, this is easy to do since there's a Wal-Mart approximately every fifteen feet, oftentimes there's one actually built on top of another one so that if one is out of what you want, you can just go upstairs to check in the other.  This naturally confuses a native Chicagoan like myself since up in the north Wal-Mart is considered just slightly above cruising the streets and rooting through people's garbage cans.  However, in a recent trip there, I discovered the source of all the buzz...

The legendary Pro Stars television show on DVD!  And in the "Please Buy This Crap" bin for only five measly dollars!  The one I managed to secure after fighting off several other shoppers has not one, not two, but three episodes.  Don't remember the show?  That doesn't surprise me since no one has ever even heard of it much less seen it, despite it's super catchy theme song "Pro stars, go stars, all stars, pro stars!" (NOTE:  lyrics are authentic and not made up by me since I probably couldn't make up lyrics that bad if I tried).  So let me give you a brief rundown before we delve into the first episode:

Michael Jordan is the leader of the team.  He's the brains of the operations, and uses big words that clearly Jordan himself would never know, such as "the."  He also likes to grab little children while wagging his tongue.

Bo Jackson is the laughably oversized brawn of the team who plays the critical role of beginning every single sentence with "Bo knows..."

Hey, who let the white guy in here?  Wayne Gretsky is the clown who jokes around and is constantly hungry.  Have him say "zoinks" or "like" every other word and you've got a puck-shootin' Shaggy.

The woman named "Mom" (so named because she is in fact the biological mother of all three Pro Stars) and her daughter Denise round out the cast and really don't do much of anything other than speak in ridiculously exaggerated Jewish accents.

So the three Pro Stars, who are professional athletes from three different sports in three totally different geographic areas, spend all their time in Mom's gymnasium/super secret crime fighting headquarters receiving distress calls and stopping criminals and overall nasty bad persons.  I know, it sounds so obvious you have to wonder why this show didn't last several decades.  Mom typically will invent several super high tech gadgets to help them fight the baddies, which of course makes us all try to figure out why she's not selling these inventions for top dollar to the government or the much more profitable eBay.  But no time to think of that, here comes the first episode...

"Roll to Victory" is a feel-good romp which rivals any big time Hollywood blockbuster or episode of Roswell.  I begins with a basketball coach calling Michael Jordan (since everyone knows how to get a hold of him) on the video communicators from Star Trek that we all have and asking Jordan to come immediately before he beats the crap out of his son and breaks his legs for doing the unforgivable:  actually thinking Hal Sparks is funny.

So the Pro Stars spring into action, leaping into their jet (oh yeah, did I mention they have a private jet with wings made out of giant hockey sticks?) and fly to the rescue.  But they're too late!  Wheelchair-bound for life, the kid begins crying and singing some Staind song, possibly the one where he sings all flat and monotoned.

The father does the only logical thing and hurls the little runt into the path of a taxi cab.  At the last second, Jordan decides to break all known laws of Physics and jump ninety feet into the air while holding the wheelchair.  This part of the episode sucks because it's always fun to watch kids get horribly slaughtered.  But anyway, Jordan, the dad, and the son (whose names may possibly have been Flattop and Whiney) go to shoot some hoops to relieve the stress.

But some mean thugs show up!  Check it out, they're so vicious that they actually turn Flattop white!  They challenge Flattop and Whiney to try playing in the upcoming basketball tournament which their team, the "Hoods," always win.  Then a hearty laugh is shared by all.

But the day of tournament arrives, and it turns out the Hoods don't play fair!  They cheat and roughhouse and inject cyanide into the other players' brains.  You've got to kind of wonder here how they can continually punch and trip players without getting any kind of foul whatsoever called against any one of them.  You've also got to wonder why they feel it's necessary to cheat when here's a glimpse of their competition:

Come on now, what's going on with this guy?  He's about four hundred pounds, wears a diaper on his head, and though you can't see it in the picture he shoots granny style.  Well, the Pro Stars certainly aren't going to sit still for this, so they decide to quickly slap together a team, and out of desperation even include the stupid brat gimp on their team.

Not surprisingly in the least, the Pro Stars--professional fucking athletes--end up in a tie game with the Hoods and it's up to little Snot Bucket to shoot the final shot with just one second left on the clock.

Though the crowd laughs uproariously at how he shoots like a girl, the basket of course sinks and the Pro Stars win.  This leaves the captain of the Hoods to pound his fists on the ground in a remarkably stupid way while the basketball mysteriously seems to float around on its own accord.

So the Pro Stars are victorious.  This episode, like all of them, teaches valuable lessons about life.  The first is that even if you're a sniveling wimp cripple you can still win the big game, and the second is that if a local basketball team is cheating the best way to beat them is to also cheat and put three all star athletes on your team.  You heard it here first:  two wrongs do make a right.  An excellent show which doesn't just entertain in spades, but also makes you think a bit.

So there's the first episode in the trilogy of reviews, but it's not over yet, no sir!  Each episode ends with real kids woodenly asking obviously not scripted questions of our favorite Trio of Triumph.  Well, it's really only Bo Jackson and Wayne Gretsky since Michael Jordan evidently had the sense enough to duck out of the project early.  I figure it's best to end this article with the question as well.

- Danimal