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By PAUL BRENNER
Yes, SCTV is still on the
air, with a second collection of five discs from
The Shout! Factory, showcasing the NBC Network 90
shows, airing between 1981 and 1982. SCTV's
brilliant cast of Joe Flaherty, John Candy, Andrea
Martin, Dave Thomas, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis,
and Catherine O'Hara are back with their wild
collection of returning characters, including The
McKenzie Brothers, Lola Heatherton, Guy Caballero,
Johnny LaRue, Dr. Tongue and Bruno, Sammy Maudlin,
etc. etc. The list of the menagerie goes on and
on.
The cast and staff's killing working methods
consisted of holing up in Edmonton and living,
breathing, and eating the SCTV show even days a
week and the intensive schedule of creating mostly
three minute bits for a ninety minute program
burned everyone out after a couple of years. As
Dave Thomas points out in his commentary, the show
became their lives.
Which is perhaps why, in this second volume of
ninety minute programming, the obsessive creative
nature of SCTV began to take over the arcs of the
episodes themselves. Where before the series was a
collection of sketches revolving around the loony
characters at a fictional television network
centered in Melonville, now the episodes
themselves became story arcs that housed the
sketches, turning the series into meta-meta-meta
television.
The best of the programs from this cycle of
episodes are all concerned in some way with an
all-encompassing plot line winding its way
throughout the episode. In "CCCP 1," clunky Soviet
television is jamming the SCTV satellite and
interfering with SCTV's programming. "I'm Taking
My Own Head . . ." mocks the popular feminist play
of the early 1980s, "I'm Getting My Act Together
and Taking It On the Road," by chronicling the
flop opening night of Libby Wolfson's (Andrea
Martin) feminist diatribe (in which Dave Thomas's
Bill Needle criticizes Libby in a cutting review
of her play by declaring that Libby gave an
unconvincing performance as herself). In "Zontar,"
Bonar Bain (Conrad Bain's twin brother)
orchestrates an alien take-over of the SCTV staff
a la "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (referring
to the monotone delivery of his staff after their
bodies have been taken over by aliens, Guy
Caballero boldly remarks "I've never seen so many
low key performances in my life"). In "Doorway to
Hell," Lin Ye Tang (Dave Thomas) has to continue
on with his cheap suspense show after it's
conclusion to keep the SCTV programming day going.
"SCTV Staff Christmas Party" is just that, the
SCTV staff holding their holiday staff party while
a drunken, embittered Johnny LaRue ("I apologize
to everyone that knew me, met me, or wanted to
meet me") is forced to do a live man-on-the-street
show in the dead of winter with the streets
deserted and the shops closed down. The most jaw
dropping of them all is an out-and-out parody of
"The Godfather" with Guy Caballero inciting a
television network war because he won't go along
with CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS and support pay
television. John Marley is even on hand to
recreate his original film role from "The
Godfather" ("Do you appreciate talking horses,
Tom?").
Inside these story blankets are some of the most
hilarious sketches in television comedy. Eugene
Levy's dead-on impersonation of Perry Como,
promoting his "Still Alive" tour, singing
half-dead and listless, his head peeking out of
bedcovers as exuberant Disco dancers shake and
dance around him. A Lola Heatherton (Catherine
O'Hara) special with Mother Theresa (Andrea
Martin) and Lola singing "Space Cowboy" in a
barren field in India as Mother Theresa cradles a
sick child (Lola gushes, "Oh Mummy Theresa, you're
so special, it's scary!"). A Sammy Maudlin Show
with a drunken Joan Embery. A badly dubbed kid's
movie, "Pepi Longsocks," with lines like "Hey look
at his brain and his broad girth." Floyd the
Barber (Levy) asking Guy Caballero's Godfather to
kill Opie and his troublesome friends ("I want you
to bend his legs like his bent my barber pole").
Liberace (Thomas) promoting his Christmas special
with highlights including Liberace playing "Sleigh
Ride" on his piano while being back-whipped by a
gay beefcake guy in a red elfish bondage costume,
a catty piano duet between Liberace and Elton
John, Ethel Merman belting out "Silent Night" and
popping Christmas tree balls, and John Candy as
Orson Welles doing a holiday recitation and
getting more and more pissed off each time he
flubs his lines. And the stunning Dusty Towne's
Sexy Holiday Special with Candy as Divine trading
quips with Dusty and romping with the Juul
Haalmeyer dancers in the snow.
Of course, some of these dead on impersonations
will be lost upon people who weren't even born
when the programs first aired (who remembers how
Rupert Holmes sounded). But the now obscure
impersonations make the programs appear even more
outré twenty-four years later; a hideously
grinning Flaherty as Alan Alda in tights was funny
in 1981 but now it is just nightmarish. And since
many of the SCTV players based their character
impersonations upon local Canadian TV celebrities
in the first place (Gil Fisher, Libby Wolfson) the
further obscurities place SCTV more logically in
its own self-contained world, a world not much
different than our own.
The collection overflows with comic invention and
hilarity. What more can you ask of a comedy show?
Dave Thomas and writers Dick Blasucci and John
McAndrew do commentary for "CCCP 1" and Andrea
Martin and Catherine O'Hara on hand to talk about
"I'm Taking My Own Head . . ." and "SCTV Staff
Christmas Party." Extras include a piece on "The
Juul Haalmeyer Dancers," a discussion with SCTV
writers, a "SCTV Remembers" featurette, a photo
gallery, and "Larger Than Life: The Norman Seeff
Photo Sessions" -- chronicling a photo shoot for
Life Magazine with the SCTV cast. Also included is
a clip from the 1982 Emmy Awards, where Milton
Berle and Martha Raye present the comedy writing
Emmy to the writers of SCTV for the writing of
their "Moral Majority" episode. But since that
episode is not included in this collection and the
Emmy-winning comedy writing cannot be viewed it
represents the height of comic coitus interruptus.
It seems like the kind of stunt Guy Caballero
would pull. |
