The New Fall TV Season : TELEVISION REVIEWS : ‘DR. SCIENCE’

“What do you know about dinosaurs, Zeke?” Dr. Science asks his overzealous security guard. “There aren’t any,” says Zeke.

That answer is more than good enough for mad Dr. Science, who makes his zany commercial TV debut this morning at 11 on KTTV Channel 11 in “Dr. Science,” a bright new children’s comedy series (for adults, too) that was originated by and stars members of San Francisco’s loony Duck’s Breath Mystery Theatre.

In today’s show, Dr. Science (Dan Coffey) is looking for volunteers to travel back to the “terror of the Pleistocene” to study dinosaur dental hygiene.

A kind of a Mr. Wizard from hell played for laughs, Dr. Science is strange, deranged and arrogant. (He tells Mr. Pickett (Bill Allard) that he’s living proof that you can’t divide by zero.) He’s also wonderfully anti-scientific: Dinosaurs, he announces with his customary certainty, became extinct because of their “whining, gimme attitude” and “poor posture.” Yet he mutters iconoclastic, virtual-truths, such as “Anything can be discovered by science if you have enough patience and government money.”

Inaptly assisted by Rodney, the nerdish and skeptical lab assistant (Merle Kessler, whose alter ego is “Ian Sholes” the satiric sociopolitical commentator and frequent “Nightline” guest), Dr. Science is confined to his lab (“The Fortress of Arrogance”) because of “certain psychosomatic allergies.”

Therefore, he has invented such devices as the occulum vehiculum , a wheeled TV probe that he sends off to interview a man who runs a factory that fixes, sells, leases and rents dinosaurs.

Though it’s unlike any known children’s show, “Dr. Science’s” junior Monty Python/SCTV silliness is good, clean and sophisticated fun. With about as much socially redeeming value as an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, it is no doubt antithetical to what professional kid-vid activists have in mind when they demand better children’s programs. But that’s probably exactly why it’s so refreshingly clever and perfectly suitable for kids of all ages.