When Zane, my eight-year-old, was a baby, his father and I were very into “we have to be able to stand this.” We are not a household that worries about screen time except in the sense of “you don’t get to choose what we watch or use devices until your work is done.” So several of Zane’s first words related to requests for specific shows, because until that point, I would decide that it was time for Sesame Street or Pocoyo or whatever. To my great pleasure, an early word was “La La,” by which he meant Mystery Science Theater 3000. And then there was “Doh,” which was Courage the Cowardly Dog.

We start every episode with a basic summary that I might as well use here. “We interrupt this program to bring you . . . Courage the Cowardly Dog Show, starring Courage, the Cowardly Dog! Abandoned as a pup, he was found by Muriel, who lives in the middle of nowhere with her husband, Eustace Bagge. But creepy stuff happens in Nowhere. It’s up to Courage to save his new home!” He is then tormented by Eustace, who doesn’t like him.

Courage loves Muriel, who loves him as well. He tolerates Eustace because Muriel loves him. Why Muriel loves him is something I’ve never quite been able to understand. She is a charming woman of kindness and generosity. Eustace is a surly old goat. I never, and I mean never, watch the show without the phrase “she could do better” high in my thoughts. Being alone would be doing better than being with Eustace, because she wouldn’t be emotionally abusing herself. No few of the adventures of the show are caused by Eustace being cheap, mean, or both.

Sharing Courage, as we now pretty much exclusively call it, with my kids is especially nice because I shared it with friends in college. When it was new. “Rat! Come here, Rat, and give me a hug!” is a greeting of sorts among us. Just as “watch out for snakes” is a farewell for my MST3K/RiffTrax friend. One of those friends is now one of my son’s godmothers, and I suggested to him that he could reference it to her in order to connect with her—she lives in Hawaii, and we don’t see her very often. But it means he has something in common with her already.

Real talk, though? Courage isn’t a coward. I mean, he’s scared all the time. Of everything. But he’s still one of the bravest characters in fiction—if you go by the definition, as I do, that courage is being scared and doing the thing anyway. He is scared of everything they encounter. Eustace and Muriel are both too oblivious to be scared of most of what they see, and Eustace is too mean to be scared of most of what’s left. Courage is perceptive, and he’s scared every time, and he still does what needs to be done because he’s the one who can do it.

The world the characters inhabit is richly populated. One of my markers of a good show is if you can imagine a show, even want a show, about other characters in it. I’d love one about the fortune teller; one of the lines I quote is “selfishness brings only banana-heads.” It’s true that the Bagges and Courage run into several characters repeatedly, even when that doesn’t make sense, but that’s okay. It works inasmuch as you do sometimes seem to run into people in implausible places; I’m sure we all have stories about that sort of thing.

Do my kids get all the references on the show? They assuredly do not. There’s an episode where Eustace is listening to the car radio and is informed that the most recent song was played by “Danny and the Dildoes,” and I’m quite sure Zane doesn’t know that word, much less his four-year-old sister Sandy. That’s the most obvious example, though it’s hardly the only one. But there’s enough there on Sandy’s level so that she finds it delightful, and Zane loves the sarcastic computer.

This was on Netflix when Zane was a toddler, and we watched the whole series through multiple times, starting again when we finished. (Though he’s prone to nightmares, so far as I know “return the slab” never caused one.) His grandmother refused to watch it with him when she babysat, though she’d watch Pocoyo or Masha and the Bear. She didn’t find this one at all entertaining. However, I like it enough so that, when I saw the complete series on sale on DVD not that long ago, I snapped it up right away. It the last few weeks, it’s gone back into our regular rotation, letting Sandy become the fourth member of our family to start enjoying it. Few of the shows I write about for this column are ones the kids, their dad, and I all like; this is one of them, though, I’m pleased to say.

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