I've written on Last Will about the significance of SCTV before, click HERE, for some of it. Last night, I watched half of a DVD I picked up in the clearance section of Half Price books that contained the two SCTV Christmas specials. The one I viewed was the first, aired December 17, 1981. There was plenty of Christmas content of course, but what blew my mind was the size of the eventual careers of these performers, many who are still going today some 40 years later. You have the late great John Candy, whose Johnny LaRue finally gets his crane shot, Eugene Levy (a fucking legend, still kicking it on Schitt's Creek), Catherine O'Hara ("this is my art and it is dangerous!!"), Rick Moranis, the Ghostbusters accountant who retired from acting to take care of his kids and record country records. There are others, but I don't want to make this a roster.
The backdrop of this special is the SCTV network of Melonville (in Canada I suppose, as SCTV was a Canadian production) has an office Christmas party, where shenanigans ensue, intermingled with broadcast material from the channel's performers. Station owner Guy Caballero (genius Joe Flaherty) shows what a cheap-ass he is throughout, as everyone from SCTV gets drunker and drunker and more angry at this fact. This is especially true in the case of Candy's LaRue who winds up alone on the streets of Melonville, broadcasting pure nothingness in a pathetically hilarious monologue on a live episode of his show Street Beef.
Eventually we get a lengthy segment featuring Levy's terrific Judd Hirsch and Andrea Martin (of Black Christmas and My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame) performing her Marsha Mason, as they star in Neil Simon's The Nutcracker Suite. In its time, this sketch would be hilarious, though it would be lost on a younger crowd today. Even then it was funny to SCTV talk show host Sammy Maudlin as he and his co-host can't get enough of the word "Nutcracker", much to the dismay of his guests, Simon and Mason.
What's really missing here is Bob and Doug McKenzie, (appearing in a small dose, eh?) who ironically a year later would have a hit single with The Twelve Days of Christmas (if you read my link, you'd know. In actuality, if you're over 40, you should be hugely familiar with it) that was all over the airwaves. Martin Short had yet to join the cast at this point, but he appeared heavily in the first few minutes of the second special that I began watching before I got too damn tired to make it through round two.
Frani pointed out that I wasn't laughing much, and I explained that when SCTV was just being itself, its hilarious world-building was capable of drawing major chuckles out of me. Last night, I felt in these specials, they were trying too hard to focus on Christmas and incorporate musical numbers that often fell flat.
However, for nostalgia's sake, I couldn't have watched anything better.
No comments:
Post a Comment