WHEN YOU’RE A child watching TV, there’s an awful lot of shite you’ll put up with while you’re waiting for the good TV shows to start.
Genie in the House is a prime example of one of those TV shows you get stuck watching while you’re waiting on Zoey 101 to begin. And there are plenty of reasons why it was a really frustrating show to watch.
1. You don’t even have to go further than the opening song to find this show quite irritating.
If you’re going to listen to this, try and *really* listen to the lyrics. Immerse yourself in the terrible CGI.
If you listened carefully, you might have heard this line in the song:
When magic’s out of bounds, use a little mouse. / How can we resist?There’s a Genie in the House.
It really sounded like they said ‘mouse’, didn’t it? What has a mouse got to do with this show? Nothing.
The lyrics are actually “use a little nous“, according to a Nickelodeon blog. How many of the children who watched this show knew what the word ‘nous’ meant? You don’t come across many 10-year-old children using the word ‘nous’ these days. It might as well have been mouse. At least children know what a mouse is.
2. Adil’s character was racist.
They hired a white actor to play an Arab genie, and covered in him fake tan. They also got him to speak in a weird squeaky accent that doesn’t really even resemble any accent in the world.
3. It made no sense.
Adil was supposedly 1,500 years old and was trapped in a lamp for most of that time, yet when this family found him and released him from the lamp, he spoke English. English as we know it definitely didn’t exist back then. This is a major plot-hole, tbh. Use a little nous, guys.
4. Within 8 seconds of the beginning of any episode, it’s very obvious how bad the acting is.
5. It’s supposed to be set in the UK. Nobody in the UK lives in a house that looks like this.
6. All of the actors were way too old to play teenagers.
They just cast a very tall father and hoped that it would make Emma and Sophie look younger.
In reality, they were in their mid twenties. So was Adil. In fact, they were so old that this is what Adil looks like now:
7. The canned laughter made it even worse.
Are we really expected to believe that an entire studio audience would laugh at this show?
8. The dad was a dryshite.
Why even bother letting a genie live with you if you’re not willing to let anyone make any wishes? He also wore the same clothes every day. Live a little, Phillip.
9. Emma and Sophie shared a bedroom, despite the fact that the house was huge.
As mentioned earlier, the Norton family lived in a ridiculously big, American style house. How come there wasn’t enough space for the two daughters to have their own room? Adil slept in his lamp, so he didn’t even take up any extra space in the house. There’s no way that this house only had two bedrooms.
10. Let’s not forget about the production quality.
All of the 240p episodes of Genie on the House in Youtube actually look the same as they did on TV back in the day. That was a very big part of why this show was so irritating. Somehow, they decided this was worth airing in 100 countries. They even filmed 78 episodes.
