It was one of the most-watched TV programmes from the late 70s to the mid 90s. Super-fit brainiacs ran an assault course, sat IQ tests and were tested on their powers of observation. Male and female finalists were then matched in a secret breeding process modelled on the Nazi ‘Lebensborn’ programme which produced that one from Abba you didn’t fancy.
‘We had high hopes for the Krypton Kids’, a spokesman told us. ‘Fit, intelligent, observant – the three qualities you need in a master race. The mistake the Nazis made was focusing too much on appearance. As long as they were white we didn’t care’.
The first products of the breeding programme are now in their forties, but have yet to discover cold fusion or form one quarter of a global superband. Where did the programme go wrong?
‘We were too picky, we should have had thousands of couples, tens of thousands’, the spokesman said. ‘Also, the ability to remember a number plate from a brief video might not have been the superpower we thought it was.’
Critics have generally been somewhat negative about eugenics-based breeding programmes, though Nigel Farage is understood to be ‘quite interested’ in a large-scale reboot.
Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash
