TV Reviews : Celebrities Reminisce About Growing-Up Years

Hey, dudes, want to see how a chunky little kid called “fatso” grew up to be that mountain of muscle, Hulk Hogan? Or how “Anything but Love” star Jamie Lee Curtis learned that revenge isn’t so sweet after a shady junior high school caper?

“Stories From Growing Up,” a mildly beguiling new series on the Nickelodeon cable station, beginning at 7 p.m. today (and repeating Sunday at 12:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.), features celebrity hosts narrating humorous re-enactments of their own childhood reminiscences.

A production of Shelley Duvall’s Think Entertainment Inc., the series features teleplays written by John Scheinfeld, based on celebrity anecdotes. The remembered pains of growing up are given a comic touch. When the 13-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis character is hauled off to the principal’s office, it becomes an encounter with Dracula, who keeps student transgressors on ice, literally.

Hulk Hogan’s idiosyncratic, pumped-up narrative--”even the Hulkster couldn’t stand that type of punishment,” and “the world was now ready for truth, justice and the Hulk Hogan Way”--keeps the bathos out of his 13-year-old self’s struggle to fit in with peers.

The result is a pleasant half-hour of family viewing: Adults can watch without wincing and children can see that the miseries of childhood are survivable.