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By PAUL BRENNER
As the years line up their
speed bumps to the grave and the folks who
recollect staying awake until 2 am on Fridays
nights during the Reagan years, watching the merry
pranksters who comprised the SCTV repertory
company, get older and grumpier, the SCTV pop
culture references become as obscure as the
topical jokes on a Bob Hope radio show. What
entity under twenty-years-old would understand on
a visceral level jokes involving Merv Griffin, let
alone, Phyllis Newman?
But for oldsters and aficionados of pristinely
written and acted sketch comedy, SCTV is as
hilarious as ever and The Shout! Factory has
provided a third mammoth helping of the SCTV
Network 90 canon with "SCTV, Volume 3," a five
disc collection of SCTV programs taken from their
NBC glory days from April 1982 to October 1982.
This collection represented a changing of the
guard in the SCTV creative structure. Don Novello
(Father Guido Sarducci of SNL fame) took over as
SCTV producer, while Dave Thomas, on the verge of
creative burn out, relinquished his crown as head
writer. And, like a crisp burst of sparkling wine,
Martin Short, made his SCTV debut towards the end
of this cycle of shows.
The old stalwarts are still omnipresent -- John
Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin,
Rick Moranis, Catherine O'Hara, and Dave Thomas.
Taking the lead from the last cycle of
programming, SCTV in Volume 3 reaches its
crescendo at integrating through-stories into the
ninety-minute shows. The sketches also expand to
follow the comic zeitgeist to conclusion,
sometimes inflating to fifteen minutes of
broadcast time. When these expanded sketches work
(as in "Maudlin's 11" or "The Merv Griffin Show:
The Special Edition"), nothing works better. But
when the sketches don't work (as in the
interminable "The Adventures of Shake and Bake")
they REALLY don't work. Which is fine too, since
by that point, the creative team behind SCTV were
working without a net.
The first program on Disc 1 revolves around the
success of Bob and Doug MacKenzie and Guy
Caballero's efforts to star the diffident hosers
in their own big budget Hollywood Palace variety
show, which, of course, ends in disaster. Tony
Bennett appears in the episode playing himself and
delivers a powerhouse performance rivaling his
previous performance in the film "The Oscar." The
second show involves the hook of a "Pre-Teen World
Telethon." This episode features the sublime
"Maudlin's 11" along with the disquieting "Shake
and Bake" program, an Elizabethan romp with
William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon writing
characters in and out of plays. Joe Flaherty is on
hand with writers Paul Flaherty and Dick Blasucci
to provide commentary.
Disc 2 features the awards show romp, "The
People's Global Golden Choice Awards." The opening
number to the awards show is sung by O'Hara's Lola
Heatherton and Martin as "the resilient" Liza
Minnelli. Dave Thomas is on hand as Bob Hope,
slithering around the back stage chicanery. This
program also includes the ultimate comic trip of
"The Merv Griffin Show: The Special Edition" with
Moranis as Griffin, on a spaceship to Jupiter,
interviewing HAL the Computer from Kubrick's
"2001: A Space Odyssey" in inimitable Merv-style:
"Hal, you wound down and busted up so beautifully
in "2001" and yet you haven't worked since. Is the
HAL 9000 series maybe outdated, huh?" The next
program on the disc is centered around a
documentary "Making Of . . ." parody of Francis
Ford Copolla's 80s mega-flop "One From the Heart"
entitled "3D Stake From the Heart." Moranis is
appropriately caffeinated as Coppola.
The first program on Disc 3 concerns the Shmenge
Brothers' Happy Wanderers show. But because of
musical rights that Led Zeppelin would not
approve, the centerpiece of the show -- a polka
version of "Stairway to Heaven" -- has been
excised from the collection. The program is also
liberally ladled throughout with "Pet Peeves of
the Stars" featuring celebrities grousing about
ephemeral complaints. The best which features
Thomas as Bob Hope complaining about the then
current rash of celebrity-bashing biographies.
Hope's soliloquy is priceless: "Boy, I'd hate to
think what they're gonna write about me when I'm
gone. It's gonna be one mean book, boy. A lot of
pictures I hope. I've always believed you
shouldn't be too tough on your audience, you know.
If they butcher me I hope they do it with
pictures. That's what they'll do. I'll bet they
really massacre me with a movie of my life and
make me look real bad, you know. . Boy . . .Just
because of that I'm never gonna die." Disc 3's
next episode centers around Bobby Bittman's
directorial debut, "Chariots of Eggs" with Hall
and Oates. This episode also features an extended
sketch that is both brilliant and benumbing, as
Thomas as Walter Cronkite and Moranis as David
Brinkley cover Buzz Aldrin and his Mercury 3
Players as they make their Broadway debut
performing T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral."
The astronauts receive instructions from mission
control in Houston while O'Hara as Katherine
Hepburn fumes in the theater lobby bar and
Brinkley tries to pick up chicks.
Disc 4 introduces Martin Short to the menagerie.
The first episode is the knee-slapping "Battle of
the PBS Stars" with two PBS teams led by William
F. Buckley (Flaherty) and Carl Sagan (Thomas).
Commenting on the action is Howard Cosell (Levy)
and Dick Cavett (Moranis). The best of the PBS
stars stunts is a boxing match between Julia Child
(Candy) and Mister Rogers (Short) with Mister
Rogers beating the shit out of the porcine Julia
Child (Cosell comments on the action: "I don't
have to explain it. You saw it. He beat the woman
unconscious with a puppet"). The episode "Rome,
Italian Style" rounds out Disc 4 with a
scintillating Italian film parody with cheap
dubbing that rivals the old Sid Caesar foreign
film burlesques on "Your Show of Shows." Short is
at his show-biz best as a thoroughly nasty Jerry
Lewis in "Martin Scorsese's Jerry Lewis Live on
the Champs Elysees" -- a seminal Short
impersonation that appears for the first time in
this episode. The best part of the sketch is Short
as Lewis, dressed in a little boy sailor suit,
lambasting pimple-faced, twelve-year-old Hollywood
studio executives who won't grant him distribution
rights to his films. After yelling at his
bandleader for missing a song cue and stalking
off-stage, the French audience hails Lewis as a
genius and throws French bread onto the empty
stage. This episode also includes commentary by
writers Dick Blasucci and Mike Short.
Disc 5 finishes the cycle with a substandard
program that features the by now interminable soap
opera parody "The Days of the Week." But even
given that, the episode also contains a rib
tickling Tide commercial with Levy as Norman
Mailer demonstrating how Tide can get out
bloodstains on a white shirt after Mailer slugs
self-absorbed wit Gore Vidal (Short) in the
buzzer.
The extras on "SCTV, Volume 3" are slimmer than in
previous releases. Besides the limited audio
commentary, the extras also include interviews
with SCTV producers, a Canadian-produced
newsmagazine program interview with Candy, a short
John Candy photo gallery, recollections by O'Hara
and Short, and, best of all, a Museum of
Television and Radio discussion of SCTV from 1997
featuring Moranis, O'Hara, Levy, Thomas, Flaherty,
Martin, Short, Robin Duke, SCTV founder Bernie
Sahlens, SCTV Executive Producer Andrew Alexander,
and improv-directing legend Del Close (who has
since died and bequeathed his skull to the Goodman
Theater in Chicago to be used for future revivals
of "Hamlet" -- almost sounds like an SCTV sketch). |
