Tuesday, June 3, 2025: “The Replacements”
I suspect that there’s a time in every child’s life when they wish they could replace a few of the adults around them. That mean teacher who just doesn’t like them. An unfair coach who favors other players but doles out the harshest disciplines to them. Even one’s parents, from time to time. These are all normal childhood problems to have, which later develop into normal adult problems, but sometimes one just wishes for things to be different.
Certainly, much of my childhood was spent wishing for different adults, as the adults in my life ranged from ineffective to outright harmful. With my parents and other adult relatives being on the most harmful end of that scale.
My mother closely monitored my television viewing as a child, often having to approve of what I watched, but I did have a blanket permission for a few channels that she felt were always appropriate and unlikely to cause any real mischief. Disney Channel was among these channels. Cartoon Network was limited to certain shows, and my mother really did not like Nickelodeon at all! But, for whatever reason, Disney Channel was deemed completely safe and appropriate. I could watch it all day any day.
Utterly harmless and a decent surrogate for the normal life I did not have. I could live vicariously through certain favorite characters in their shows and movies.
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Today I was reminded of one of the animated shows that meant the most to me: The Replacements.
Premiering in 2006, about a week before my fourteenth birthday, it was probably the last great animated show I watched before I began to outgrow Disney Channel. The following year, I would start high school and everything would change. But this show gave me a private language to express my frustration with the ways that the adults around me consistently failed me. My parents and grandmother who abused me, the teachers who looked the other way, or even sometimes made matters worse, even my peers who bullied me. And this language could be found in the show’s theme song.
I had only to sing, “Call in the Replacements,” or even say the words, “I need a replacement. And fast!” and I would be launched into my own little imaginary world and where I did get whatever it was I needed at that time. And, for that time, I had a bit of a buffer against the chaos around me. It helped me to become creative, daydreaming endlessly into notebooks these adventures I would have with my Replacements.
Now, in the episodes themselves, often the plan would backfire, and the protagonists would learn a lesson from that. And I’m not saying that being able to dial Fleemco to solve any problem is a desirable solution, no matter how wretched the childhood.
But in the moments when I was enduring the worst treatment, some form of cruelty devised by one of my parents or grandmother, or some other sort of frightening episode in the home, the theme song alone was a little gift to give me the strength to endure, for that time that the show was part of my life.
By a curious and extraordinary turn of events, the context of my remembering this show today was the discovery that the composer of the theme song is none other than Darian Sahanaja, better known for the essential role he’s played as a member of Brian Wilson’s band. Perhaps most notably, it was Darian who helped Brian to assemble and sequence the miraculous piece of music that is Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, a piece of music and a story so legendary that I truly would not be alive today if it did not exist. (The story of how that musical masterpiece saved my life can be found in my essay in this book.) I haven’t the words for how I feel, knowing that a composition of Darian’s was so much a part of my pre-Brian life. I love these moments of life-affirming serendipity, when I find threads of continuity between my life before everything seemed to fall apart and my life after I’d begun to pull it back together.
Sometimes I still “want to make a change, modify and rearrange,” but I have less need for Replacements now, and that’s a good place to be. But I’m grateful for what that show gave me when I needed it, and I’m so grateful to Darian for writing the perfect song to help me escape into my own mind at some of the most critical times of the fading embers of my childhood innocence.
