Editor Ira is here today to talk to you about the great bane of his childhood: Encyclopedia Britannica kid.

If you were a kid doing schoolwork in the late '80s or early '90s, chances are you relied on the Encyclopedia Britannica as one of your primary resources. And if you were a kid watching daytime television during that same period, chances are that you grew extremely tired of seeing ads for the Encyclopedia Britannica starring the most insufferable Gen-X teen ever to smirk his way into your living room.

I hadn't given much of a thought to the Encyclopedia Britannica kid for a couple of decades, until my colleague Greg graced the Trivia Mafia Slack channel with a YouTube clip he came across while researching our '80s trivia night. As soon as I laid eyes on that thumbnail image, all of my childhood loathing came rushing back, along with some unexpected chunks of pop culture ephemera.

If you're blissfully unaware of the TV commercials of which I speak, congratulations to you. I'll try to explain. On the surface, there was nothing so patently awful about the ads. The first installment consisted of an unseen narrator interrupting a bespectacled teen as he worked on a report. The narrator extolled the unparalleled research value of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the kid replied with a string of smug quips intended to demonstrate that it was possible to be both a self-satisfied sarcastic nerd archetype and a savvy consumer of middlebrow reference literature.

Gosh, did I hate that kid. His ads seemed to play during every single commercial break of my summer vacations, his squeaky-voiced catchphrases worming their way into my brain and haunting my dreams like the provocations of a vengeful ghost. "NOW ya tell me! I've got a REPORT due tomorrow!" "Don't zap me yet!" "We gotta SAVE this place!" I'm getting upset just transcribing these words.

But like the most annoying person in the room will say anytime someone complains about a commercial, it must have been effective, because I'm talking about it now. It's true – that campaign was supposedly far and away the most successful advertising in the two-century history of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is why nearly every home in the U.S. has a set proudly displayed on the bookcase to this day. I'm kidding about that last bit, of course. The final Britannica kid ads aired in 1993, moments before the internet came along and devoured physical research media just as it will one day devour you and everything you care about.

Still, in their day, these ads were all over the zeitgeist. The Britannica kid was celebrated in magazines like GQ and roasted by David Spade on "Saturday Night Live." (Sidebar gripe: I started looking for a clip of that but quickly gave up when I remembered that the only '90s artifact more intolerably smug than the Britannica kid was David Spade lazily flailing at low-hanging fruit on "Weekend Update.") He later inspired one of my favorite pieces from the early days of "The Onion," a strangely moving metaphor about the futility of clinging to the past called "Remember Me? I'm That Kid Who Had a Report Due On Space."

Revisiting the Encyclopedia Britannica ads today with the twin benefits of hindsight and not being 10 years old, I'm surprised at how much more tolerable I find them. The smug teen who once made me shout rude things at the TV now feels like a familiar throwback to a very specific time in American pop culture. The kid's performance is still irksome, but that's clearly intentional. He puts me in mind of Bruce McCulloch caricaturing Gen X culture in a "Kids in the Hall" sketch. The ad copy is sharply written and doesn't feel nearly as forced and cynical as a lot of contemporaneous attempts at marketing to my generation did.

It turns out there's a good explanation for that. The Encyclopedia Britannica spots were written by comedy legend Stan Freberg, one of the most visible U.S. satirists of the 1950s and '60s. Freberg got his start in the 1940s as a voice actor for Warner Bros., performing "Looney Tunes" characters such as Junyer Bear, Pete Puma, and Tosh the Gopher. He worked on Disney films such as "Lady and the Tramp" and "Alice in Wonderland" before branching out as a solo comedy act. Freberg churned out an impressive string of hit comedy records throughout the '50s, parodying everything from "Dragnet" to Elvis to Senator Joseph McCarthy. He hosted his own radio comedy series and was a frequent guest on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

Later on, Freberg moved into the world of advertising, founding an agency that quickly became one of the most successful in Los Angeles. While he kept his hand in the comedy game for the rest of his life, advertising became his major focus from then on. And thus it was that starting in 1988, Stan Freberg ended up writing a series of sardonic ads for Encyclopedia Britannica and casting his son Donavan in the lead. Nothing has ever made more sense to me than the revelation that the Encyclopedia Britannica kid was a nepo baby.

Actually, Donavan Freberg has quite the pedigree himself. He followed in his father's voice-acting footsteps on cartoons like "The Get-Along Gang" and "The Littles." He was the voice of Charlie freaking Brown in a series of late '70s commercials. He mostly moved away from acting after his big Britannica break, although he did appear in the much-loved "Zork" video game franchise and voice a puppet on "The Weird Al Show." That role was only fitting, as "Weird Al" Yankovic has long cited Stan Freberg's music parodies among his greatest inspirations.

Nowadays, Donavan Freberg is an accomplished photographer who seems to take a good-humored view to his youthful notoriety. I'm happy to see he came out all right, and I'm glad that this little bout of research made me look more closely into the humanity of one of my greatest childhood nemeses. I'm also glad it made me dig deeper into Stan Freberg's body of work. I knew some of his stuff coming in, but had no idea how versatile, prolific, and influential he was.

I'm sure there's a lesson to be learned from this experience. But if that lesson requires making my peace with the Encyclopedia Britannica kid, then it's one I refuse to learn. Gosh, do I still hate that kid.

(If you'd like to learn more about the ways the internet gutted the encyclopedia industry, Co-Owner Chuck endorses this episode of Jill Lepore's "The Last Archive" podcast.)