Going Most Excellent

Readers in their thirties may remember Going Great: the Toronto-produced CBC/Cineworld newsmagazine targeted to kids. The series eventually folded after a few seasons wrestling the challenges of presenting newsy human-interest stories to kids, but it won a 1983 Children's Broadcast Institute Award for Best Network Television Program.

What Going Great was most known for in later years, however, was its hosts. The entire run was helmed by Chris Makepeace, 1980s Meatballs and My Bodyguard teen heartthrob (and brother of our Panoramaist contributor Tony), with additional reporting duties by Megan "Anne Of Green Gables" Follows and Keanu "Blue Pill/Red Pill" Reeves.

The half-hour program featured "ordinary" kids who had interesting talents or stories to tell, mixed in with profiles of budding minor celebrities, like a young Celine Dion and the cast of a Canada's Wonderland show. More than a decade later, the most fascinating clip is this cutting-edge journalism by correspondent Reeves, who was assigned to the first Canadian International Teddy Bear Convention—an event wherein the future Bill & Ted's star feared "a lot of craziness." Little did he expect that the real danger was at the hands of 13-year-old Graham Abbey (the Robin Hood Abbey?), who teaches Reeves the hard lesson that bears aren't always soft and cute, except when passing ingognito in a pair of zany sunglasses.