VIDEO STREET VIDEO STORE -- Episode 5

And hellooooooo, everybody! Time to go back down again to the VIDEO STREET VIDEO STORE - return some old tapes and pick up some new ones. This week, we’ve got our longest show yet, but that doesn’t mean we’re thinning out the quality! No way, man. We’ve got a short film from Albert Brooks, some behind-the-scenes magic of a Universal Studios fan favorite, a wimpy kid who complains about violent movies on television, and a depraved director who makes them.
So sit back and enjoy! And if you’re new to this here Substack, feel free to go back and check out previous episodes of the VIDEO STREET VIDEO STORE, a regular feature that drops every Tuesday here at Mike’s Bonfire. For future episodes, as well as the big show I do, THE MIDNIGHT CITIZEN podcast, be sure to, ya know…
A new podcast drops every Saturday night.
And now, down to bi’ness!
VIDEO 1: ALBERT BROOKS PRESENTS NBC’S 1979 FALL LINE-UP
As I say in this week’s episode of THE MIDNIGHT CITIZEN (mikesbonfire.s...) podcast (which you should definitely listen to if you haven’t yet) (mikesbonfire.s...) , most of the comedy from Saturday Night Live’s early days has not aged well. Of course, that’s a rule of thumb for a lot of stuff SNL has given us over the years - up-to-and-including what just went live on-air as recently as last week. Not that it’s the cast and crew’s fault; the show, by design, is meant to be timely, and as soon as culture moves on, the funny just becomes…irrelevant. While the first 5 years of the show gave us the men and women who were the faces of comedy throughout the 1980s and 90s, the stuff they did on the show now comes across as outdated and, sometimes, embarrassing - like-your-unfunny-parents-trying-to-entertain-your-friends-at-a slumber-party-embarrassing. Just look up any “Coneheads” sketch and you’ll see what I mean.
While this week’s first video may have dated itself with the title alone, I think you’ll still find this short subject Albert Brooks did for SNL pretty spot-on. In fact, if you laugh at all, it’s proof that the comedian was then what he later became known best for - a master satirist whose biggest target was always the medium that fed him.
Before Brooks sent-up movies with his first feature, Real Life (1979), he was given a contract by SNL producer Lorne Michaels to produce a series of short films. The deal was Brooks’s preferred alternative to what Michaels really wanted from him, which was for him to be the permanent host of Saturday Night. Brooks’s deal kicked in immediately, and his first film - a repackaging of the short that had initially brought him to Michaels’ attention, “The Famous School for Comedians,” is probably the best thing of the show’s pilot, which featured George Carlin as the host, and introduced us to Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gila Radner, and all the rest of the original “Not Ready for Prime Time Players.”
For the next several years, Brooks routinely churned out short films. I may be a little biased, because ever since I first saw Lost in America (1985), I’ve held the guy up as one of my greatest comedy influences, but I believe all his early SNL shorts still hold their value - especially the one we’re watching this week, a pointed satire of the homogenous banality of network television programming. Though you can see Brooks being funny as the proverbial man-in-the-middle in “The Three of Us,” my favorite gag here is the promo for “Black Vet,” about a scarred Vietnam vet who becomes an animal doctor in a small, racist southern town. They don’t make em’ like that anymore…which is probably a good thing.
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VIDEO 2: THE COMPUTER “MAGIC” BEHIND “T2: 3D”
I’m embittered by this week’s second tape - partly because it gives me the bad memory of finding out in the mid-90s, at the height of my prepubescent “Terminator” fandom, that a new one was being made, but that I’d have to go all the way to stupid Universal Studios in Florida to see it. Mostly, now, it irritates me at how much this Discovery Channel documentary kisses the asses of the computers that generated all the effects for this stage show that combined live stunts with pre-filmed ones.
There was definitely a golden age of computer generation - where not only were they a marvel to behold on the silver screen, but the public was captivated with how much movie magic could be achieved without ever having to build a practical model. This era of the public’s fascination with CG began around 1989 with James Cameron’s The Abyss, and really hit a fever pitch a couple years later with his follow-up film, Terminator 2, which gave us mind-bending visual effects of Robert Patrick as the T-1000 morphing, contorting, and folding his liquid metal self all over the damn place. For the next few years, you couldn’t flip the dial on your TV w...