Here’s another little goody related to ABC’s 1984 broadcast of “Alien” (1979) — the intro to it on “The ABC Sunday Night Movie,” complete with a content warning.
I am linking here, by the way, to the totally cool people at the Retro Channel on Youtube.
If you are even remotely familiar with Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” then you know that ABC’s marketing staff was not.
John Hurt is looking pretty spry. (At least they had the good sense to leave Ian Holm and Veronica Cartwright out of this mess.)
Anyway … did it really take “Alien” five years to reach network television? I seem to remember (falsely, I suppose) that it hit TV when I was still a very young child. Yes, HBO carried it only a year after its theatrical release — maybe that’s what I’m remembering. (People just called it “Home Box” back in the day. Being a little kid, I thought they meant the physical “box” –the converter — that sat atop the television.)
Yet I also seem to recall my family having Showtime, but not HBO … and people on my street still just called any premium channel “Home Box?” Whatever … it was a verrrry long time ago, and I wasn’t the brightest kid out there, anyway.
Source: Screen Gems on Facebook
Alright, 80’s pop culture historians, the chronology for the various “Max Headroom” movie and television shows can be a little confusing. I think I’ve got it down …
The original “Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future” was a 1985 TV movie for Britain’s Channel 4; it was two years later that ABC made it the pilot for an American show that would last for two seasons. (A sanitized version of the British movie served as the pilot for the series.)
There were also a couple of versions of a “Max Headroom Show” that ran in either Britain or the United States more or less concurrently. But these simply had the eponymous digital personality hosting … a talk show? With music videos? And, at any rate, a lot of people remember Matt Frewer’s iconic character only from his famous Coca-Cola commercial.
I remember being pretty excited as a tot about “The Last Dinosaur.” I was probably too young to enjoy it when it debuted on ABC on February 11, 1977 — I’m betting it picked me up as a fan a few years later, when I would have been around the age of a first- or second-grader. Here are a few quick, weird facts:
ABC.
Here’s some more early Tom Hanks weirdness … he starred in ABC’s cross-dressing comedy “Bosom Buddies” between 1980 and 1982. The show ran for just two scant seasons. I’m surprised at that, because I seem to remember it being a much bigger deal in the 1980’s — maybe just because it was a big hit at my house, when I was in second and third grade. I wanted to be like the guys in the show, albeit without the cross-dressing. I wanted to be grow up to live in New York City with my best friend and a beautiful blond girlfriend name “Sunny,” and get into zany hijinks.
I remember thinking that Hanks’ co-star, Peter Scolari, was the cool and funny one. I thought Hanks was annoying, even if he did look like Billy Joel, whose music my older sister had taught me to really like. (Joel’s “Glass Houses” album was stacked vertically with the others beside the living room record player, not far from where I watched this show on the family’s color television.) And that is indeed Billy Joel’s “My Life” playing as the show’s theme song — but it had a different vocalist, for some reason. (No matter how many times I hear it, that song will always take me back to the 80’s.)
Scolari’s career following the short-lived “Bosom Buddies” certainly hasn’t paralleled Hanks, but he’s still done a hell of a lot of television. (Among many other things, he surprisingly starred as Commissoner Loeb in “Gotham” in 2015. I didn’t see that one coming.)
As you can see from the opening credits below, the central plot device for “Bosom Buddies” was that the two guys had to pretend to be women in order to live at an all-women’s apartment building. It only occurs to me now as I’m writing this that the show’s title was a double entendre. I actually asked my Dad what the word “bosom” meant when I was a kid, and he gave me an answer that was accurate, if incomplete. (He explained the colloquial meaning of the expression — a “bosom buddy” was a best friend, who you figuratively held close to you. I subsequently told my best friend next door that he was my “bosom buddy” at one point.)
Yeah, I know it’s strange that I can remember a conversation from 39 years ago about an obscure TV show. It’s weird what people remember.
(I was talking about ABC’s “Donny & Marie” show from the late 70’s, which I really enjoyed as a tot.) At the time I suggested they the Osmond siblings were immortal vampires because they are still performing in Las Vegas.
I take it all back. I was just reminded that Osmond is the unnamed dancing man in the 2008 “first take” video for “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “White & Nerdy.” Have you seen the way this guy mugs and dances for three minutes straight? He’s hilarious. And he’s a goddam force of nature. He’s like Spider-Man 2099. He’s cooler in that three minutes of video than I will ever be.
Besides, I’m old too. I feel certain I was told at some point years ago that the guy was Osmond, yet I completely forgot about that when I discussed the show. I also don’t know if “throwing shade” has fully replaced “smack-talking” in the vernacular, or even if the term should be hyphenated.
You think that 80’s kids are old? Well, I also have memories of the 1970’s; after all, they fully occupied the first seven years of my life.
And I remember “Donny and Marie” (1976-1979), which ran on ABC. It was a sanity-challenging, Kafkaesque combination of disco, country music, family entertainment, themed-comedy skits, sequined outfits and … ice-skating. Which made it either the height of 70’s cheese or the very nadir of Western civilization — you decide.
I’m embarrassed to admit here that I loved it, even if I was a tot at the time. (Hey, if you’re five or six years old, then the sight of Donny being a non-threatening goofball on stage was the very height of hilarity.) You can see what I mean in the second clip below, if you can stomach all four minutes of it.
What’s interesting about this show is that it was kind of a dinosaur in its time … variety shows had been on the decline for a while in the late 1970’s, and were already being supplanted by the situation comedies that would become the trademark of the 1980’s. Bizarrely, NBC tried to launch Marie in her own solo variety show during the 1980-81 television season, but it just didn’t catch on. It was cancelled after seven episodes.
What’s truly crazy is that Donny and Marie are still performing in Las Vegas. I kid you not. Google it. You can even see them tonight at The Flamingo. There’s at least a chance that they’re immortal vampires.
Postscript: I at first typed “Donny and Maurie” in that blog post headline, and I feel certain there’s a terrible joke hiding there somewhere about Donny hearing the results of paternity test on “Maury Povich.” That would make a great “Saturday Night Live” sketch.
I was only a baby when ABC debuted the original “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” in 1973, but I caught it when it was rebroadcast around the end of the decade, when I was … six or seven years old? And dear GOD did it scare the crap out of me.
Since then, it’s become a minor legend in the horror fan community as one of the rare made-for-television movies that is easily as scary as something you’d see in a theater. This was the film that was remade in 2010, produced by Guillermo del Toro and with Katie Holmes in the lead role. (And I thought that the remake was a fun horror fantasy, even if it wasn’t terribly scary.)
I actually caught the film again about ten years ago, courtesy of Netflix’ DVD-by-mail service. And it was still creepy enough.
Here’s another very obscure Throwback Thursday post about broadcast television in the New York metropolitan area — this was the intro the ABC 4:30 movie. People commenting here at its Youtube entry remember it from the 1970’s … I thought I remembered it from the very early 1980’s as well. But I could be mistaken.
One commenter said that, as a young child, he thought that the image of the spinning camera-man looked like “a mechanical frog monster.” I thought that as a kid too!
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 