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Some things shouldn't make sense, but somehow they do - right away. This Red Green Show: The Infantile Years DVD box set came to my desk with cover art that shows a happy Canadian guy with bright yellow aviator glasses (?), sitting in a duct-tape-riddled baby carriage with a saw blade for a wheel, offering a thumbs-up, while a rubber ducky seems to stare direct at me from said carriage. I wasn't sure if this was an inside joke I'd understand once the show started or if it was just a rouse that only die-hard Red Green devotees would comprehend, but whatever it was, I was curious, if perhaps tentatively so.

Turns out The Red Green Show in its earliest years (1991-1993) is an absolute hoot, weird, woolly, endearing pastiche of a show that is as hard to describe as it is easy to sit through. Our protagonist and head honcho is the eponymous Red Green (Steve Smith), the owner of the Possum Lodge, and a handyman of epically minimalist aims: His goal is to get stuff taken care of with as little elbow grease as humanly possible. How can you not love this guy?

So we get skits, side characters, how-to sessions, fix-it sequences - with each short Red Green Show episode, we're shown a new way of looking at things from the Possum Lodge p.o.v. Sure, quality of episodes waver from show to show (and season to season - the second season here is far less interesting than the two it's bookended by), but the infectious charm of The Red Green Show comes without any rhyme or reason. As it says on the back of its DVD set box: "Age doesn't always bring wisdom. Sometime age comes alone."

It alone deserves a watch for the episode in the first season where Red and his pals show us how to make a beer cooler out of a toilet tank. You never know when that's going to come in handy. And did I mention canoe jousting? Or the episode in which the guys try to get their cars to run on firewood rather than gasoline? I think you're getting the hint here....

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