Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, December 25, 1993 TAG: 9312250167
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 8 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: JACKIE HYMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
That's because the same water has been recycling itself since the dawn of time, as Bill Nye explains in colorful terms on his syndicated series, "Disney Presents Bill Nye the Science Guy."
"As the joke goes, not only am I a scientist, but I play one on TV," says the former mechanical engineer and stand-up comic, who once won a Steve Martin look-alike contest.
The weekly series (Saturdays at 7:30 a.m. on WSLS-Channel 10), produced and distributed by Walt Disney Studios, airs on independent stations across the United States and Canada.
Each half-hour show focuses on one theme, with topics ranging from digestion and skin to biodiversity and the moon. There's even an episode simply called "Garbage." "We go on and on about compost," Nye explained.
Nye, 37, says major issues facing the world today, such as the thinning of the ozone layer and the destruction of rain forests, "are all, in a sense, science projects. Even crime, if you're going to call psychology a science."
"I'm hoping that in the future we'll have a much higher percentage of scientists in our society," he said.
The National Science Foundation is providing $1.5 million to distribute free teaching kits based on the show to fourth-grade classes across the United States.
Nye also has written a book, "Big Blast of Science."
"My dream was to have my own show to get kids excited about science, to slow down the world going to heck in a handbasket," he said.
Nye, who serves as head writer on the show and draws on half a dozen science consultants, believes it's vital to encourage women and minorities. Many of the children who assist him on the show are drawn from these groups.
"The future of the United States is not going to be the same Caucasian majority of guys that it was when I was growing up," he explained. "Here's what's still going on: Girls growing up and kids of color are systematically excluded from science. It's endemic.
"If this keeps up, we'll have these massive science problems with too few people to solve them. So what I'm trying to do with the show is to change the world. That's my little objective."
In 1986, Nye quit his job with Boeing and did free-lance engineering consulting while performing and writing. He appeared on Seattle TV and radio programs and made videos produced by two friends, Jim McKenna and Erren Gottlieb, who serve as executive producers on "Bill Nye the Science Guy."
A typical project in the early days was a short film on boating safety that Nye, still based in Seattle, describes tongue-in-cheek as "a huge hit, the greatest water safety video ever."
When Seattle public television station KCTS asked for ideas for specials, Nye, McKenna and Gottlieb submitted a proposal for a half-hour episode featuring Bill Nye as The Science Guy, a nickname he'd used since 1987.
"We were just dinking around," Nye said. "Big objectives were: make money, have fun."
After completing the half-hour episode last April, he sent a tape to his agent in Los Angeles.
He soon he got a call from his agent to tell him some executives from Disney would be flying to Seattle to see him.
He canceled a planned cross-country bike trip, but it still tops the list of things he'd like to do, not so much for the sightseeing as for the time alone. "The thing I miss is time to think," Nye said. "Not sleep - I get enough sleep. But time to think."
by CNB