Could you help me identify a cheesy series of educational films?
When I was in elementary school (around 2004), I saw a series of live-action educational films for children where a white man teleported to various places (such as the US Mint, or a chocolate factory) to investigate how things were made. I think he wore glasses.
He lived on a tropical island with animal friends: a parrot and a chimpanzee. The man would communicate with the chimp using a handheld communicator, which also doubled as a teleportation device. The prop was obviously just a rectangular magnifying glass with a keypad on it. I think it was a calculator with a magnifying glass attached to it. Anyway, he could essentially do video calls with his chimp friend through this device.
In one episode, he went to a chocolate factory (I think it was the Ghiradelli factory—or was it Hershey’s?). The man got into some wacky hijinks with a forklift-like vehicle that wraps up huge shipping pallets with plastic wrap. Some representative of the company handed him a gigantic chocolate bar about a yard long, but when he made a narrow escape, the doors slammed on the chocolate bar and broke off most of it—so he had nothing to show for it when he got back to the island.
It looked very cheap. The teleportation effect was phenomenally cheesy: a kind of ripple-dissolve transition. I would guess it was a direct-to-video release.
I grew up in the Southeastern USA, but a friend who grew up in the Midwest told me he had seen the same videos.
Things I've tried
- I asked one of the employees who had worked in aftercare at my elementary school. He confirmed that it's real, but he doesn’t remember the title.
- I emailed somebody at Found Footage Fest. They knew of a public-access educational show that involved a man flying around with puppet friends in a UFO, but it wasn't that either.
- I asked ChatGPT, which was adamant that it was a show called Beakman's World.
