DVD -26 Shout! Factory From 1981 to 1983, NBC ran SCTV late ...

Shout! Factory

From 1981 to 1983, NBC ran SCTV late on Friday nights, hoping to tap into a hungry Saturday Night Live crowd. It didn't really, but it did earn itself an army of obsessive fans, myself included, who always felt that SCTV was consistently funnier and smarter than SNL ever was. Joe Flaherty, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis and Catherine O'Hara could sing if need be, do impressions, act-and best of all, their brains just didn't work like other people's.

The concept behind the show was simple-each 90-minute episode would follow the workings of a small tv station through the course of its programming day-from homegrown morning shows like Wrong Side of the Bed to commercials, the news, movies, variety shows, talk shows, music programs, to Count Floyd's Monster Chiller Horror Theater, which regularly aired some of the unscariest movies ever made.

It also followed the station's personalities behind the scenes-from station president Guy Caballero, who only used a wheelchair "for respect," to hapless stars like Johnny LaRue, Bobby Bittman, Lola Heatherton and the McKenzie Brothers. Mixed in were spot-on impersonations of Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Woody Allen, Katharine Hepburn, Richard Harris, Orson Welles and dozens of others.

There were no guest hosts, no monologues, no live studio audience. Their musical guests (Dr. John, Roy Orbison, The Tubes) would act in sketches, but for the most part it was just those seven performers taking on hundreds of roles.

The bits ranged from 15-second promos for non-existent shows to extravagant half-hour parodies (one of my favorites combined Fantasy Island, Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz). Sometimes they fell flat, of course, and sometimes they were just plain odd-like "The Fishin' Musician" or Polynesiantown. But even when something fell flat, you knew that something brilliant was just a few minutes away: Gregory Peck in Taxi Driver, or Eastern European cleaning woman Pirini Scleroso in My Fair Lady.

I could go on and on. The set itself is super. Expensive, yes (obtaining those music rights was a bitch), but on five discs you get nine episodes, together with five featurettes tracing the history of SCTV-from its early days as a Chicago improv troupe to a recent cast reunion. (Oddly, though, Rick Moranis is nowhere to be found.)

The menus are a little short on specifics-if you're trying to track down a specific sketch, you're going to have to rely on your own memory. But over these past weeks, I've found that hopping around looking for one particular sketch will lead me to another I hadn't caught before, so it's all worthwhile. Actually, "Dr. Tongue's 3-D House of Stewardesses" alone makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Jim Knipfel