With all that’s goin on in the world, let’s go back down to the VIDEO STREET VIDEO STORE! The VSVS is a regular feature on my weekly podcast THE MIDNIGHT CITIZEN. I record each podcast live, and do very little post-production, which means that sometimes, in the middle of a show, I gotta take a break. When I do, I give you the VSVS, a dive into the analog weirdness of our shared pop culture heritage — collages that are designed to soothe, amuse, and, sometimes, outright disturb.
For all future trips to the Video Street Video Store, as well as THE MIDNIGHT CITIZEN, your late-night broadcast from Birmingham, AL, be sure to, ya know…
A new show drops every Saturday night. Listen to the latest one here…
And now down to business…
VIDEO 1: SUPER DAVE OSBORNE MATES WITH A WRECKING BALL
When he died a few years back, Bob Einstein had just ended a long stint of enduring himself to "Curb Your Enthusiasm” audiences as Marty Funkhauser, the plain-talking, dead-eyed simpleton foil to the scheming Larry David. As with the Funk Man, Einstein managed to make a slew of throw-away rolls iconic in his 40-plus-year career. How can you talk about Arrested Development without mentioning George, Sr.’s surrogate (…“He was such a pro, you’d never know his feelings were hurt…”), or Modern Romance (1981), directed by his brother Albert Brooks, where he played the muscle-bound him-bo athletic-wears salesman (“Those shoes are made out of old tires.”)? But despite his versatile career as a comic character actor, it is “Super Dave Osborne” that will forever adorn his pop culture epitaph.
A parody of the 70s stunt man Evil Knievel, Super Dave got right to the quick and gave the audiences exactly what they always wanted when watching Knievel: the masochistic, schadenfreudic spectacle of another man’s pain. The premise of the bits he performed on various talk and sketch shows throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s was not an especially unique one. Mr. Bill had been regularly pummeled on Saturday Night Live in the early days, and a popular Pizza Hut commercial among me and my friends in the 90s had the same conceit — a slice of pizza with an affable voice getting smashed, shredded, and gobbled up at the behest of an off-camera antagonist. But what made Super Dave so funny was his simultaneous cockiness (what the kids today would call “toxic masculinity”) mixed with a thinly-masked paranoia and fear of the outlandish stunts he would perform. A good example of what I’m talking about can be seen in the first tape of this week’s VSVS, a clip from the sketch comedy show “Bizarre” (1980-86). After Super Dave clumsily sputters his motorcycle to a stop, he announces his intentions to sit blindfolded while an 11-ton metal wrecking ball slams into him. You can hear the doubt bubbling in Dave’s throat as he tells host John Byner, “I sense danger and react like a cat.” Later, after the crane operator misses his cue and repeatedly pancakes him with the wrecking ball, Super Dave maintains that same mixture of cocksureness and vulnerability that was the key to his routine: “Super Dave doesn’t make excuses, but, what was supposed to happen was…”
It’s not quite gold, but maybe, at the very least, “comedy bronze.”
VIDEO 2: HOW TO MEET ALL THE LADIES…BY TRICKING THEM INTO LIKING YOU
I gotta thank the guys over at Red Letter Media for digging this one out of the sleezeoid waistland of early 90s “dating” tapes. At the heart of this video is perhaps a sincere attempt by its host, Michael Jeffries, to teach single men that all it takes to meet women is having a little confidence in yourself. But the way he goes about it is, well, wrong. In the most wrong kinda way. I mean, seriously, in the opening scene, the coy magician makes a woman’s top vanish. Jeez. And he never even teaches you how to do it yourself!
Still, there’s something about “Flirting with Magic” that is such a capsule in the way it manages to capture a certain time, where being a “single adult” meant that you were always hitting the nightclubs and bars, lighting each other’s cigarettes, and toasting gin and tonics. While the audience for it is obviously men who “think” that’s the way it is (think the “Larry” or “Mr. Furley”-type on Three’s Company, or John Goodman’s Lewis Fine in True Stories), it’s at least a somewhat accurate depiction of the way it once was before phones and dating apps, when the barrier to, well, entry was actually having to approach somebody and talk to them.
Seriously, I feel sorry for the poor schmuck who stumbles upon “Flirting with Magic” at their local Salvation Army, takes it home, and finds that most of the tricks he is too learn rely on cigarettes, smoking indoors, trading business cards, and, of course, talking in-person.
Still, if ya wanna learn how to meet ALL the ladies, check out the full video here.
VIDEO 3: THE INTERACTIVE PICTURE SHOW…WAVE OF THE FUTURE!
After the disastrous box office returns of early summer flicks Fall Guy and Furiosa, all the talk lately has been about the multiplex apocalypse. Seriously, are we looking at the end of the movie theater as we know it? Do we feel fine…about this? With so many theories being thrown around about how we save the movies, no one’s mentioned a return to exploring the possibilities of director Bob Gale’s Mr. Payback. For a few minutes in 1995, the experimental film by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Back to the Future was all the rage, especially in the Hollywood board rooms of nervous execs and bean counters who were seeing the future in the scary 1’s and 0’s of the Internet. Like the rise of video stores and the resurgence of 3-D movies in the 1980’s, there was a real fear in the air back then — as there is now — that people would abruptly stop coming to the theater, and the theaters needed to fight back with flashy gimmicks.
But as we learned in “Flirting with Magic,” you only have one chance to make a first impression, and your trick better be a good one. While his writing partner Robert Zemeckis was busy making Forrest Gump, Bob Gale was sinking all of his energy and, as he says, “favors” into the short, tacky and irritating Mr. Payback, a 25-minute live action cartoon that was basically the big screen version of FMV games for the Sega 32X — games like “Night Trap” and “Double Switch.” As they watched the flick, audiences would sit in the theater and “vote” on certain outcomes, using a remote answering device that would later be widely adopted by sports bars that offered interactive trivia. Of course, while the movie was initially a success with some audiences (one movie-goer told Gene Siskel it was better than Forrest Gump), it was ultimately reviewed terribly by critics. As Roger Ebert puts it in his review, “You want movies to act on you, so interactive movies are not movies.” Still, Ebert grants that interactivity has some possibility at the movies, though Mr. Payback did not demonstrate those applications.
Maybe it’s time to get back to trying it out?
“Should Furiosa (a) shoot Dementus in the head; (b) tie him to the car and drag him, or; (c) take him to the Green place and make a tree grow outta his junk? VOTE NOW.
Maybe not.
VIDEO 4: HARDING BEFORE KERRIGAN
It’s difficult to express the joy I feel every time I watch Tonya Harding land the triple axle at the 1992 US Nationals. I’m not a big sports fan, and I definitely have never held an interest in professional figure skating, but the look on Harding’s face when she lands gracefully after spinning spiral 2 feet off the ice is just…amazing. It’s the culmination of everything she had gone through in an otherwise graceless life: being poor, living in the back of a truck, an alcoholic mother, abusive husband, and on and on. Harding is that rare timeless case of an athlete you just have to pull for.
Of course, it wasn’t like that in 1993, when this local news doc was produced — and it certainly wasn’t like that a year later, when Harding would be permanently banned from professional skating after allegedly conspiring with her husband Jeff Gillooly to knock US Olympic Team Competitor Nancy Kerrigan out of the running by smashing-in her kneecaps. Like so many major media frenzies of the 90s, the Harding/Kerrigan affair was about so much more than the story itself. It was about class warfare. As documented in the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, The Price of Gold, and its later film adaptation I, Tonya (2017), Harding had long been a thorn in the side of the snooty United States Figure Skating Association and its perceived air of prestige. Unlike Kerrigan, who appeared to be the bible-toting golden girl sweetheart of figure skating, Harding was portrayed in the media as crude, obnoxious, entitled, and, more than anything else, poor. Her handcrafted knit mini-skirts and abrasive personality, as seen in this week’s tape, certainly never helped her image. But, as time has gone by, I think it’s easier for us to see Harding as a competitor, who demanded greatness for herself and those around her. Unfortunately, some in her orbit didn’t believe in her as strongly as she did herself, which is why, we now know, Gillooly and his ding-dong friend from childhood, Shawn Eckhardt, acted alone in hiring two “hit-men” to handicap Nancy Kerrigan.
Well, that’s it for this week’s VIDEO STREET VIDEO STORE! Again, be sure to, ya know…
A new episode of the VSVS drops every Tuesday throughout the summer, and, of course, be sure to check out THE MIDNIGHT CITIZEN, your late night broadcast from Birmingham, AL, hosted by me, Mike Boody, every Saturday night. Keep your eyes open!
VIDEO STREET VIDEO STORE -- Episode 3