Learning Day: Zardip's Search for Healthy Wellness

Healthy wellness is like a goth girlfriend or the approval of your father. Everyone wants it, but the advice on how to achieve that goal is confusing and often contradictory. Contemporary Twitter users would have you believe that wellness can be achieved by cutting out seed oils, buying the right supplements, and sunning your taint. I mean, they would slip that in at the end of a two thousand word essay masquerading as a tweet about how "suicidal empathy" is destroying western civilization and it's good actually that everyone's 401ks are in the toilet now because money is made up and really you just want shelter and clean water, you don't need it.

Whew, sorry to get political. But the fact is, the subject of today's article would probably make steam come out of RFK Jr.'s ears. A government-funded, educational series teaching kids how to take care of their bodies? Sounds like socialist propaganda to me! Socialist propaganda with a bitching title card, that is.

Zardip's Search for Healthy Wellness is basically Tomes and Talismans if it was made in Canada and had the goal of inculcating clean living rather than teaching kids how to prepare a book report to defeat alien invaders bent on cleansing the Earth's culture.

The aliens here are not our foes. They have come to learn from us, these alien robots ruled by a cybermind known as the Highship. He's voiced by Billy Van, a name which means nothing except to me and anyone else who grew up in southern Ontario after the invention of color TV and before the invention of YouTube, because he also played seventeen different monsters on a locally-produced horror-themed comedy show from the '70s called The Hilarious House of Frightenstein. I know that sounds like some made-up Canadian bullshit, but it was real! Vincent Price was on it!

Anyway, the Highship's band of spacefaring machines have a problem: they're constantly breaking down, requiring visits to the repair shop. And the show makes it clear this is not merely a logistical problem — the robots experience pain and discomfort, as made clear during a little song and dance number in episode one about their agonizing existence from which they crave relief.

Highship tells the robots about the planet Earth, a pathetic backwater world whose population has nonetheless developed ways to maintain their bodies for decades. They laugh uproariously at the primitive insides of the human body and recoil in disgust as Highship informs them that human beings "take some white sticky stuff called soap and rub it all over themselves."

They decide that one amongst them, Zardip, will travel to Earth, blend in with the locals, and discover the "health secret" of the human race.

Now, far be it from me to question the wisdom of metal star beasts, but coming to the only place in the galaxy that, so far as we know, has invented both heroin and Flamin' Hot Cheetos seems like maybe not the most ideal strategy if you're looking for wellness advice. Or maybe every other species has already made themselves extinct with Super Heroin? Wait, fuck, that's just fentanyl. Coming to Earth is a mistake. Cutting to this shot indicating that the robots appear to have human feet during the song and dance number was possibly also a mistake.

Zardip decides the best way to go about his mission is to try and join a health club. By that, I don't mean a gym or a spa. He lurks in the bushes after landing on Earth and spots some kids who have set up a "health club" in a garage off an alley.

He transmogrifies himself into a human Earth child and joins the club, where he begins recording data on human health habits.

Whenever this happens, his eyes flash and some keywords appear on the screen. He also starts talking to himself in an artificially pitched-down robotic tone the show makes clear is absolutely audible to the children around him.

In each episode, Zardip learns about some aspect of health or hygiene as a proxy for the audience. Explanations by his fellow children in the health club are broken up with late '80s computer-generated graphics and claymation organs speaking directly to him. The claymation ranges from basically unobjectionable, like when it's a wizened brain explaining the importance of making good decisions…

…to slightly troubling, as when a parade of cells explains their role and short life span, each getting a few lines before they die off and are replaced by another, who mourns the one that came before it…

…to, uh, my notes say, "more racially charged than you might expect" when we get to antibodies.

Zardip is played as intelligent but clueless when it comes to human behavior, always on the verge of blowing his cover. Highship acts as a sort of overbearing, irritating boss, pestering Zardip with questions about why the earth monsters put things in their mouths or close their eyes and hallucinate every night. Occasionally he gets to be kind of cute, though; like in the episode about teeth where Zardip learns about the tooth fairy — kind of an odd choice for an educational show, but whatever — and rips one of his own metal fangs out to see if he'll get a quarter for it.

When Zardip awakens the next morning, he finds his tooth gone and a reward lying under his pillow. As he bounds away gleefully, the Highship quietly laughs to itself, implying that he took on this traditional parental role. Aw!

Hold on, I'm realizing I might have buried the lede a little there — Zardip does in fact have metal teeth which are capable of chewing through solid wood.

He has other powers, too, like skeletonizing eye rays. Behold!

Ironically, however, he is deathly frightened of skeletons.

In episode three, "Food," two members of the health club create a comic that illustrates the digestive process.

Oh. Oh no. We're not doing that, are we?

Oh no. There are teeth involved. We aren't even going to get off easy with a clean swallow.

Don't worry — Kelvin Carrot cannot ever die. Divided as he is into many pieces, he yet experiences the sensation of being swallowed and digested.

Surely that's it? Surely we're not going to imply that Kelvin persists as a sentient mass of fecal matter.

That detailed illustration of vore is the perfect segue for me to reach for that lowest-hanging of internet comedy fruit, taking a look at a piece of old media for children and talking about how if you think about it, it was like, really dark actually.

I mean, Zardip's race of mechanical beings have mastered interstellar travel, but can't keep themselves from falling apart. Their lives are an eternal cycle of decay and repair. Perhaps they were created and abandoned by some other, more advanced species. Now they wander through the universe, tormented by their agonies, seemingly unable to live well or die. It's like From Software decided to make an educational program for kids.

But it gets worse. In his human form, Zardip doesn't suffer from any of the ailments of his people. He's a perfectly healthy child with a cool '80s haircut and a windbreaker that would go for $500 on Depop today. I mean, he doesn't understand the concept of bones and is obsessed with eating every flavor of Dorito at once, but in that respect he is really no different from the average American.

No, Zardip is essentially fine during his stay on Earth. He fronts like it's hard work, but he's actually enjoying himself. And remember, while he's having fun making friends and sleeping in a garage, the rest of his species is suffering. Whenever Zardip checks in with Highship, he's coughing and complaining. And all of the health information that he relays seems unlikely to apply to artificially engineered life forms. In the final episode, Highship urges Zardip to return, but he demurs, begging to be allowed to stay. And why wouldn't he? There's no autoerotic asphyxiation in space.

Putting all of that aside, though, what's strangest about Zardip's Search for Healthy Wellness is how much work went into it. It's got actors, animation, songs, lore — this thing had production values. It aired on television. You might think it would have achieved some measure of cultural notability in Canada, but no. Bring up Today's Special or even Telefrancais, a show where a talking pineapple gave French lessons, and Canadians of a certain age will lose their shit. But I have never heard anyone talk about Zardip.

Zardip's Search for Healthy Wellness also has one of the strangest Wikipedia pages I've ever seen. And look, I've seen a lot of weird Wikipedia pages written by 30-40 year old fans of '90s children's media. The article for Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad is longer than Ted Kaczynski's, which is in itself an incredible illustration of his notion of surrogate activity. But the Wikipedia page for Zardip isn't strange like that. It doesn't have extensive episode summaries nor overly laudatory discussion of the show's themes and legacy. It is under 300 words long, cites no sources, and includes the following, uncited sentence:

Who wrote this? It's not like there are any Zardip fan sites out there. Well, I have one suspect.

See, Zardip was played by a kid named Keram Malicki-Sanchez. If you take a look at his Wikipedia page, you'll notice that it's, uh, extensive.

Ah, the combo of "multiple issues" and insane detail: a sure sign of the author being someone fixated on the subject of the article. There's two possibilities here: one is that Malicki-Sánchez has an especially intense fan who's been tracking his movements for the last forty years or so. And before you dismiss that out of hand, you should know that this is what he looked like in the early 90s:

In other words, he was absolutely the kind of gender non-conforming heroin chic prettyboy someone might develop a life-ruining obsession with.

It helps that after Zardip, he was a musician and appeared on a number of other Canadian teen series. Here he is in the classic coming-of-age show slash unintentional lesbian representation Ready or Not as "The Liz."

To be clear, he wasn't a lesbian. Neither was the character everyone saw that way in the actual text. It's complicated, alright? People sort of had to grasp for whatever imagery they could in the '90s and sometimes that meant headcanoning a mousy tomboy as gay before the term "headcanon" even existed. But come on, Busy Ramone was never heterosexual.

Sorry, we're getting off track here. I'm just saying that it's possible that Keram Malicki-Sánchez wasn't the one who wrote his own 10,000 word Wikipedia page or the page for Zardip's Search for Healthy Wellness. There's probably people out there who remember him from that one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or fucking TekWar and are still nursing their crush.

Possible, yes. But likely? No. Taking his Wikipedia page alongside his YouTube channel, it's clear that Malicki-Sánchez has held onto clips and credits for basically everything he ever did during his time as a child star and briefly as a cute teen. Keram Malicki-Sánchez is essentially a better-adjusted, more talented Corey Feldman. Their paths diverged early on in one critical way — while Corey befriended the most famous person on the planet, thus warping his relationship to success irrevocably, Keram played a friendly alien on an educational TV series.

Further, I submit that playing a health-curious space robot was one of the defining events of Malicki-Sánchez's life. My proof?

Exhibit A: He founded an "ironic annual festival" called Robot Pride Day in 1994.

Exhibit B: For years, the only episodes of Zardip's Search for Healthy Wellness available online were those hosted on Malicki-Sánchez's YouTube channel.

Exhibit C: He wrote a song called "A Simple Robot" in 2013, about "a simple robot who kind of looks like me."

Nobody else may remember Zardip's Search for Healthy Wellness, but Keram Malicki-Sánchez remembers. And if the US does end up invading Canada, he will be called upon to use what he learned so long ago. Zardip, god willing, will give us the edge of good health in the bitter and unrelenting guerilla war we will wage against our vitamin-deficient, unvaccinated aggressors.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Brockway FAMOUSLY Loves the Meat Milly, who once tore out their own tooth to see if the Highship would reward them.

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