The Bullseye Spotlight 06.02.07: The Idiot Box

Posted by Scotty Flamingo on 06.02.2007

The best MTV sketch comedy show not called The State...

Do you have a certain movie, show, or celebrity that you love, but you don't see much praise about? We're not talking The Shawshank Redemption here, everyone loves that. This column is about those things that seem to be unfairly criticized or forgotten completely. This is The Spotlight.

Hello friends and welcome to another treasure trove of obscure goodness from your old pal Scotty Flamingo. Some of you guys pointed out that my last column on the Fantastic Four was cut off in the editing room. No big cliffhanger there, half a sentence got cut off with me saying that the sequel would probably fall into the same category of hot and cold moments that the original had.

I saw At World's End this past weekend. I thought it was good, but definitely the weakest of the three Pirates movies. I think that it was a little too long and convoluted in parts, but my main gripe is that the film focused way too much on Elizabeth. Jack Sparrow is the cash cow of this series, and I really didn't feel he had as many great moments as he did in the original. Mainly because he doesn't have as much screen time. Elizabeth being elected pirate king was also a bit annoying. These are dirty nasty pirates. Women are good for one thing to them, and it ain't being their captain. I would've much preferred having the pirate lords unanimously voting Jack in as a way of sending him on a suicide mission.

So as far as big blockbusters for this summer go, it is a toss up. I think that Pirates is a better all around film that Spider-Man, but I feel the Spider-Man 3 had better moments in it (I still love the press conference scene with Spidey bouncing all over the stage).

And now, on with the show.


The Idiot Box

In the 90's, MTV really started to morph into what it is today, a bunch of regular shows like every other channel. However, in the beginning, there was at least an attempt to keep the attachment to music. Beavis and Butthead had their little MST3K style segments where they provided commentary for videos. Eventually, they began producing shows that had nothing to do with music at all, but fit the edgy style of the 18-25 year old demo. You had shows like Liquid Television and The State.

The Idiot Box came out somewhere in the middle. It was a sketch comedy show like The State, but also had music videos. It was actually a pretty poor mix, since the videos were just the popular alternative songs of the day and didn't really strive to match up with the humorous theme of the show. Nor did the videos have any kind of enhancement or commentary to punch them up. It was just straight videos. So what you got essentially was a 10-15 minutes sketch comedy show starring Alex Winter.

Who?

You know, Alex Winter, of Bill and Ted Fame. The one that didn't go on to make a lot of bad but profitable movies. Watching the Idiot Box, I can't help but wonder how Keanu was the one that ended up with the big career. Winter is a great talent and does a number of funny characters. He directed and started in a great little 90's movie called Freaked featuring Mr. T as the Bearded Lady and a pair of giant walking Rastafarian Eyeballs. So the guy is versatile. Even watching The Matrix, you can see that Reeves is essentially playing Ted, minus the humor.

There were six episodes in all, so that's less than an hour and a half of actual skits, so we probably won't be seeing it on DVD anytime soon, so instead, I'll just Youtube some highlights. Here's the first episode:


Here you can see Lee Arenberg from the Pirates movies as the "headache guy". He was a regular cast member. He's been in a ton of stuff since then, but this is the first I remember seeing him. Also, you see the first edition of one of the show's recurring skits, Eddie The Flying Gimp.


Here's some of Episode 3:



This episode features more of the recurring bits with the 80's cop show parody, Lockjaw and sitcom spoof, The Huggins Family. Also, is my personal favorite, Alex as Wisey Wisenstein. Babaloo!
That should give you a taste of what the show is about. If you like it, the rest of the episodes are available here.

And with that, we wrap up another week of this little column. Until then, this is Scotty Flamingo, signing off.