"Electra Woman and Dyna Girl" (TV Pilot, 2001)

WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN:

 HOT DISHES IN SPANDEX!

THE OLD GUY WHO LIVES IN THEIR BASEMENT!

HOLY DERIVATIVE!

GOTH BATGIRL!

THAT LADY FROM KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS! 

UHH...THIS GUY!

BUT WAIT! THE WILDEST IS YET TO COME!

Franchise reboots are tricky. The rules are essentially the same as remaking a movie - get it right and your work will be identified as "this generation's so-and-so"; get it wrong, and if you're lucky it will be forever compared to the original, and never in a positive light. Sadly, while some find their own success, many reboots fall into the latter of these two, either because its showrunners make too many changes to the source material or simply because the fans have such fond memories of the original.

The science fiction genre is no stranger to reboots. Battlestar Galactica got one, Flash Gordon got one, Doctor Who got one, Star Trek had several throughout the '90s... even Star Wars got a fresh set of movies (and I know "fresh" is stretching things a bit) back in 1999, plus we've started seeing teasers for a seventh installment.

Sid and Marty Krofft caught the reboot bug back in 1991 when they re-imagined their most popular '70s green screen puppet show Land of the Lost, which ran for two seasons on ABC Saturday morning and was co-produced by the people who brought you Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

Then in 2001 they tried again, and what with the popularity of Buffy and the Gilmore Girls, this time they chose to revive a series they felt would fit in perfectly. One that managed to grow from a meager one-season run as a "show within a show" to become one of their most popular Saturday morning offerings.

That's right - we're doing the failed pilot episode of the 2001 attempted relaunch of the bicentennial seventh-grader's answer to Adam West's Batman, Electra Woman and Dyna Girl.

Conceived for the WB Network and never aired on television, today this TV pilot exists only in the realm of bootleg video and preserved for posterity deep in the bowels of YouTube's servers. And the best part is, it's only fifteen minutes long, so this review won't take as long to read as most of the others.

So we begin at an amusement park, where a little girl running around unsupervised decides to take a ride on a Ferris wheel. Suddenly the cable on her car snaps and overturns, leaving her hanging precariously over imminent doom! But luckily for her, a lady in a familiar-looking costume with an oversized wristwatch in on the scene--it's Electra Woman, who climbs onto the wheel to rescue the poor girl and bring her down.

Dyna Girl rounds out the cast.

"You should know better than to wander off by yourself. Remember what happened to that kid on Lidsville?"

Fast-forward a few years, and that little girl is now a young Anne Stedman who is still crazy obsessed about Electra Woman. In fact, as it happens, her fancy-pants pretty-people-only college which I assume is some Professor Xavier-type academy for superheroes or something (which would explain all the cameos) is having a homecoming parade in which they have invited a number of superhero graduates to participate in some kind of thank-you float or something, and she's insisting that her long time idol participate in the proceedings.

Her name's Judy, by the way.

Sadly, since that episode, her rescuer has since disappeared from the public eye and is now an estranged middle-aged divorcee played by Markie Post from Night Court living in a trailer park and smelling of cigarettes and booze. Seems the original Dyna Girl ran off with her husband and since then her self-worth has hit an all-time low. She doesn't even think of herself as a superhero anymore - not compared to Superman being an alien, Batman having that goth thing going for him, and Wonder Woman having bigger--

Wait...divorce? Sex? Bosom envy? Wasn't this based off a kids' show? That was made during a time when you weren't allowed to punch people on a kids' show?

Oh, that is sad. Supergirl SHOULD have gotten that sequel.

Judy can't help but notice that Electra Woman's invitation went return-to-sender on her, not that anyone planning the parade cares since Judy's not even on the planning committee and EW was a drop-out, and pays her a visit to find out what the dilly-o. She discovers Laurie's--I'm guessing that's her name--sad state of affairs just in time for the two of them to tumble out of the back of the trailer as it's being towed away while they were still inside it, which I must admit was pretty funny.

So the main gist is that Judy now aims to bring her childhood hero back into the spotlight by hiding her booze, booking her publicity gigs, and risking bringing up one of the worst traumas of her life by digging out the original Dyna Girl costume and putting it on.

Uhh, Judy...when you get home after Laurie throws you out of her hotel room, find a dictionary and look up the word "tact."

Judy books the two of then an appearance at a local pawn shop, where nobody shows up, Laurie isn't exacly crazy about the idea, and Judy loudly announces that her leotard is "creeping into her secret places." Her words, not mine. Fortunately, nothing quite breaks up the monotony in a pawn shop quite like a pair of armed robbers who quite cartoonishly knock out the guy behind the counter and start pointing rifles at things. Judy has to goad Laurie into foiling this heist as the security guard rather ineffectually clutches his inhaler and after a moment's disillusionment, Laurie reluctantly gets involved.

Thus follows one of the most bizarre dialogue exhanges within fifteen minutes of anything.

BANK ROBBER A:
I'm holding a GUN. A BIG GUN.

ELECTRA WOMAN:
Oh please. I've had bigger things than that up my--

WHOA!!! Too much information.

At the very least, it sets off something you NEVER saw in the original TV show - a fight scene.

Which also includes something ELSE you never saw in the original TV show - Dyna Girl kicking a bad guy in his Bugaloos.

Conclusive evidence.

And as luck would have it, a news van drives up right outside just as the bad guys are beaten into submission.

So Electra Woman and Dyna Girl are officially back in the public eye, Judy celebrates by immediately leaking her new secret identity to her horny boyfriend, and Laurie celebrates by--

OH GOOD LORD SHE'S A COUGAR!! OH I'M HAVING SUPERGIRL FLASHBACKS!!

Yeah...she's decided to move in with Judy and finish her degree. And she's already made herself right at home.

Chest windows? This MUST be the 21st century!

Okayyyyyyyy...good points:

Well, compared to what we were given in the original series, the writing felt more mature. Obviously it wasn't 1976 anymore, and this was made to attract older primetime audiences, so taking it in a more adult direction was a given, which honestly is not a direction normally taken in a Sid and Marty Krofft production--not even in any of their variety shows. We even got a fight scene. And a crotch kick. And at least this aborted continuity goes out of its way to explain Laurie and Judy's living arrangements. If this had actually gotten past the pilot stage, it might have been interesting to see this expanded upon.

And who was Laurie's ex-husband? Frank Heflin?

Euggghh...no. Not if Dyna Girl stole him away.

Which leads us to the bad points: the writing is a little TOO mature. There were way too many sex and female anatomy jokes in it, and whoever wrote this went a little overboard in making Electra Woman 2.0's life miserable. In fact, she kinda comes off as a sleazy, sex-starved old lady, and a lot of that made me quite uncomfortable. You wouldn't think the people who gave you something like H.R. Pufnstuf could pull off a superhero costume with a chest window.

When all is said and done, based on this pilot, I think I would probably have prefered the original. At least I had fun with its camp nature and low production values, and I would rather cringe at the writing quality than at superheroines making rapid-fire vagina jokes.

Why so serious?

"It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman" (1975)

I hate Superman. The big showoff. I like monogrammed shirts as well as the next guy, but that big red 'S'? Superman? Heh. Anyone without a last name has gotta be a little weird.
--Max Mencken

The 1960s Batman TV series, it seems, is having a resurgence in popularity as of late. Not only did DC Comics launch a new Batman series last year that's based on the show as well as a new line of action figures and toys, but it looks as though after all these years it will finally be coming out on DVD sometime later this year.

For fans of the show, the comic, or just lovers of "adventure, escapism, unadulterated entertainment, the ridiculous and the bizarre", that is very good news indeed. Adam West's Batman will always hold a special place in American pop culture, not only for its continuing influence on present Batman incarnations, but also as being the gold standard in superhero camp. From its eccentric supervillains to its Batclimb cameos to its Bat-gadgets to its Bat-fights and everything else in between, it's a silly, lighthearted superhero romp that's still fun to watch almost fifty years on.

And though many since then have tried to mimic its charm, most have not even come close. Not even the Man of Steel himself.

This TV special is based off the Broadway flop It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman, penned by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams It first debuted at the Alvin Theater on March 29, 1966 and closed  three and a half months later despite positive reviews and three Tony Award nominations, but since then it has been revived in theaters across the country, including an updated version performed in Dallas in 2010.

As for the TV special, it aired on ABC's Wide World of Entertainment on February 1, 1975 as an attempt to make back the money it lost on Broadway, but not without some changes to the original script - the show was edited to run in the time allotted, some of the villains were changed from Chinese acrobats to Mafia men, and the musical numbers were updated to sound more 70s-like. Par for the course for most of the TV specials I've reviewed, it has only aired once and has not been rerun since.

I haven't seen the musical myself, but if it's anything remotely like this, then I'm not so sure I want to now.

We begin by meeting our principal cast and learning where they stand on this whole Superman issue:

Kenneth Mars a.k.a. King Triton plays Max Mencken, Daily Planet columnist and smug egomaniac who is decidedly anti-Superman, likely because comparing himself to the Man of Steel makes his penis shrivel.

Lesley Ann Warren a.k.a. Miss Scarlett a.k.a. Cinderella plays Lois Lane, who is (obviously) pro-Superman to the point where she gets all giddy just talking about him.

She is also perpetually high.

Loretta Swit a.k.a. "Hot Lips" as the luscious Sydney Carlton, another reporter who is Max's girl Friday and madly in love with him. She's sort of a Superman-centrist.

David Wayne a.k.a. The Mad Hatter as Dr. Abner Sedgwick, professor at the Metropolis Institute of Technology, mad scientist and part of a fringe group of anti-Superman radicals who sees the Man of Steel as a roadblock on his path to world domination.

I'm guessing Lex Luthor was busy.

And finally David Wilson, who will probably never work in Hollywood again, as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet (and a COLOSSAL mega-dork) who is quite pro-Superman, since...well...he IS Superman.

Oh, yeah, and the unmistakable voice of Gary Owens narrates.

The plot of this special is divided up into chapters, so we'll analyze it in the same manner:

Chapter 1:
WHO HE IS AND HOW HE CAME TO BE

Not much to this part, really. It covers Superman's origin--infant survivor of the destruction of his home planet Krypton, flown on a rocket to Earth, lands in the heart of the clearly labeled "Good Old U.S.A.", found inside a rocketship in the middle of the Kansas wastelands by the couple from the American Gothic painting, develops superpowers, and finally grows into manhood and becomes the legendary SUPERMAN!!

FASTER THAN A PLASTIC SPEEDING BULLET ON A WIRE!

MORE POWERFUL THAN A DRAWING OF A LOCOMOTIVE!

ABLE TO LEAP TALL SUPERIMPOSED BUILDINGS IN A SINGLE FRAME!

Then we get a song about how the people of Metropolis say they need him because he saves their babies from a fire, saves their relatives from muggers, gives the orphans Christmas turkey and flies the policeman's asthmatic son to Albuquerque for no other reason than that the song needed a word that rhymes with "turkey."

Looks like Gerber baby foods learned their lesson after that one marketing fiasco.

Chapter 2:
MERCHANT OF DOOM

Clark Kent settles in at his job as reporter at the Planet and is ignored by everyone around him, including Lois who sits in the desk across from him. And it seems that all the paper ever prints is news about Superman--if it's not Lois writing headlines about him (and singing about how he never tells her he loves her and just saves her all the time in something rejected from Grease) it's Max writing some Fox News-style smear column about him (this time it's about how he disrupts commercial airline flight paths).

Meanwhile, at the Deserted Warehouse deserted warehouse, a convention of Italian mobster stereotypes (three of whom are the nefarious Batman villain False Face, notorious movie biker Eric Von Zipper and...Al from Happy Days) discuss "rubbing out" Superman. Then they sing about how America is such a great place to be a mobster in and how it would be a better one if Superman were dead.

Wow. We've only had three songs so far and already I hate this.

Are they reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or pulling out their guns all at once? The answer isn't worth knowing.

Dr. Sedgwick visits the Daily Planet to quite casually inform them that a death ray he has created at the university has gone crazy and Metropolis is, in fact, doomed. With his superhearing, Clark Kent learns of this, transforms into Superman and heads out to destroy the device, with Sedgwick anticipating he will fail and die in the attempt."Will Superman make it in time?" asks Gary Owens.

Chapter 3:
SUPERMAN MAKES IT!

(Dude! Spoilers!)

Superman...uhh...makes it. The death ray is destroyed and the city is saved. Who makes a friggin death ray, and WHY?

Sedgwick rues this setback, and monologues to the audience why he wants to get rid of Superman: to rule the world. And why does he want to rule the world? Because he want to obliterate Sweden. And WHY does he want to obliterate Sweden? Because he has been snubbed for the Nobel Prize for ten straight years and is a bit of a sore loser, vowing revenge on the entire Nobel Prize committee. In fact, he even sings about it.

Just before his song ends, Gary cuts in and asks "What is the one terrible thing that Dr. Sedgwick will have before he dies?" (What do you think he's been singing about?)

Chapter 4:
SEDGWICK'S REVENGE

(Is this for real?)

Sedgwick finishes his song, which Max overhears, and the two of them decide to team up and destroy him. Then Max takes advantage of the Daily Planet's criminally lenient sexual harassment policy and tries to musically hit on Lois after blowing off another date with Sydney, but Lois rightly brushes him aside to continue brooding over Superman.

"Wanna see how much faster than a speeding bullet I can be?"

Chapter 5:
THE NET TIGHTENS

The mobsters continue discussing rubbing out Superman, making unfunny jokes, mimicking bad Three Stooges visual gags, and finally decide to visit Sedgwick for advice on how to rub out Superman, while he and his new friend Max scheme to make Superman destroy himself.

Meanwhile, Sydney musically hits on Clark, with the musical's most popular song "You've Got Possibilities", which is the least worst song in the whole special and perhaps the only thing that has survived this special.

"Will Clark Kent find happiness with a new love?" asks Gary Owens.

Chapter 6:
CLARK KENT FINDS HAPPINESS

(If you're not gonna take this seriously, why should I bother?)

Clark is happy.

Sedgwick decides to give Superman a chance to disgrace himself at a thank-you-for-trashing-our-death-ray ceremony by staging a calamity. Then they both sing a song about being partners with romantic overtones. I'll say no more about it.

Then the mobsters bust in and ask Sedgwick to rub out Superman. How convenient. Henchmen.

The Three Stooge-fathers.

Chapter 7:
OH CLARK, HAVE YOU BEEN THERE ALL ALONG?

The above chapter title has been a running gag throughout this musical so far. It's what Lois keeps asking Clark whenever he speaks to her.

Anyway, it turns out Clark and Sydney weren't compatible after all, but at least Sydney's little song gave Clark the self-confidence to talk to Lois. Though Lois is slightly disappointed that it's Clark falling for her and not Superman.

In song.

Apparently they had to CUT SOME SONGS OUT to make this special run in the time allotted.

"Wanna see how much faster than a speeding bullet I can be?"

Anyway, while Clark Kent is ironically sent out to cover Superman's big ceremony, Sedgwick, Max and the thugs plot to plant a huge cartoon-sized bomb at city hall to go off during it.

"Will Superman fall into this dastardly trap?"

Chapter 8:
SUPERMAN...TRAPPED!

Superman's big ceremony arrives, and Sedgwick is there to heap false praise on him to a crowd of energetic students. It turns out he's having a laundry named after him. That's gratitude for ya. You'd think he'd get a statue or a plaque or something, but a LAUNDROMAT? Wow.

While he's there, a news bulletin somehow interrupts something that's not on television to report that Metropolis City Hall has blown up. Max is on hand in the newsroom to angrily blame Superman and generally heap abuse on him for not being there to stop it. Needless to say, the crowd instantly get word of this and turn on their hero pretty quickly.

"Think of me the next time you want to clean skid marks off your tighty whities!"

Chapter 9:
GET LOST, SUPERMAN

As Max gloats about the Man of Steel's downfall as if his manhood grew an inch or three--

Okay...Max...can you bend steel bars? Do you have X-ray vision? Super hearing? Can you even FLY? What makes you think you could possibly compete with Superman? I mean, what's YOUR superpower? Smarminess? Obnoxiousness? Having an ego the size of Krypton?

Anyway, as Sydney sings another song of unrequited love, the mafia clones sneak in, kidnap him and steal him back to MIT, where Sedgwick reveals that he has a computer that can deduce the true identity of Superman. After some comic misunderstanding where Sedgwick is convinced that it's Max, eventually they all come to realize that it is, in fact, Clark Kent.

Chapter 10:
CURTAINS FOR SUPERMAN

Cut to Clark Kent's apartment where Superman is...depressed. He sings a sad little song about how depressed he is while somewhere in Germany, Friedrich Nietzsche proceeds to turn over in his grave.

"And none of the other kids would play with me, and...once I accidentally used my X-ray vision on my fifth-grade teacher..."

Sedgwick pays him a surprise visit, sits Superman down and plays psychiatrist with him, i.e. emotionally kicks him when he's down by saying his X-ray vision makes him a pervert, claiming all the good he does covers up guilt for leaving Krypton to explode by being a baby in a rocketship at the time, and finishing up by saying that all his superpowers make him a unloved freak. Supes by this time is too depressed to even wonder how he figured out where his alter ego lives when he and Max invite Lois over to drive the final nail in the coffin by saying she's in love with Clark Kent before getting kidnapped by the mafia clowns.

The next scene has Superman in red cape and blue tights clutching an anchor and proceeding to jump off a bridge.

Some Übermensch YOU turned out to be.

"Is this finally the end of Superman?"

Chapter 11:
SUPERMAN TRIUMPHANT

(Uhh...a guy is attempting suicide here, this is no time for spoilerific chapter title jokes, however weak)

Superman's suicide attempt fails ("super-lungs"...ha ha) and he just pulls himself out of the river when he is greeted a pair of students from the laundry ceremony who teach him that there's nothing wrong with being a freak, and some of history's greatest figures were freaks, like Michelangelo, Christopher Columbus and...Abraham Lincoln.

Yes, they're actually calling Abraham Lincoln a freak. For his Emancipation Proclamation. Because in their words, "freeing the brothers was the freakiest thing of the 1800s". They actually say that.

Also, I guess it's worth mentioning that these kids are named Jerry and Joe, an obvious nod to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of the Superman comic.

"Why are we taking hostages again?"
"I dunno, boss--we started with the dame and then I guess we got carried away..."

Segdwick and Max celebrate Superman's self-destruction by strapping Lois to a chair with a bomb for no reason. Well, actually, the bomb is there to destroy any incriminating evidence against Sedgwick for driving Superman to suicide; as to why they dragged Lois in and tied her to it, your guess is a good as mine.

Then Sedgwick double-crosses Max and ties HIM to a chair which somehow detonates the bomb under Lois' chair from so much as a sneeze.

Then Sedgwick gets double-crossed himself when the mafia guys tie HIM to a chair as well.
 
Anyway, to finally put an end to this farce, Superman busts into Sedgwick's lab, engages the mafia guys in a lame, one-sided onomatopoeia-laden Batfight while singing a song about regaining his self-confidence, rescues Lois and leaves the remaining two malcontents to their apparent deaths when Max hiccups and blows the lab sky-high. Don't worry--in the next scene it turns out the explosion just turned them into good guys and even made them forget Superman's true identity and everything goes back to normal.

"I'm a good guy now. This is my good guy face. I love being a good guy."

Wow. This...is...stupid. Really, really stupid. Not even on the same level as Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, where it's stupid but watchable. Or the Flash Gordon movie, where it's stupid but at least has Brian Blessed and Queen and everyone's at least enjoying themselves.

I think one of the reasons that Batman '66 works well is that it's a show with energy. It's a lighthearted superhero romp that keeps its foot firmly on the gas pedal right up until the final Bat-punch. Every time the Joker comes on screen or the Penguin whips out a gas-spraying umbrella or the Riddler starts giggling maniacally, it adds to the whimsy.

This Superman special doesn't have the same energy. In fact, it doesn't have any energy at all. I wasn't really expecting anything from Alan Moore, but from its Roy Lichtenstein knockoff sets to its bottom-of-the-barrel production values to its lackluster writing, it isn't really all that exciting or compelling or even entertaining. Plus, none of the jokes are funny, most of the characters are annoying, including Superman and ESPECIALLY Max, and as for the songs...well, okay, that "possibilities" song was all right, but the rest of them are pretty forgettable.

In summary, if you think Adam West's Batman is too silly, too ridiculous and too corny for your taste, watch this special and see everything that Batman COULD have been...and thankfully wasn't.

Where's General Zod when you need him?

"Hanna-Barbera's All-Star Comedy Ice Revue" (1978)

Nothing surpasses the beauty and elegance of a bad idea.
--Craig Bruce

It has been a longstanding notion of mine that people were very easily entertained in the 1970s, as a majority of the popular culture I've seen from that time was seemingly made to accommodate the lowest of the lowest common denominator. Oh, sure, this was the decade that gave us "Stairway to Heaven", Farrah Fawcett, Fawlty Towers and Star Wars, but on the other end of the spectrum it was also the decade that gave us "Disco Duck", Scrappy Doo, the variety show phenomenon, and one of the most reviled televisual offerings in the history of Farnsworth's box, The Star Wars Holiday Special.

(Of course, other decades had their low points, too - the '80s gave us Saved by the Bell, the '90s inflicted the Backstreet Boys on us, and have yet to recover from the reality TV show craze of the '00s - but the 70s seem to be more remembered as a good decade for bad ideas.)

Talking of Scrappy Doo, the 70s was also the decade where the animation duo of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, once known for popular characters like Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound, went to crap. This was the decade where the quality of their creations were in flux, recycling everything from characters to show pitches to animation sequences to fill out entire broadcast network Saturday morning schedules before they had The Smurfs to fall back on. Carbon copy groups of teenagers with talking animals who weren't oversized Great Danes going around solving mysteries, a girl band and their entourage travelling haphazardly through space for no apparent reason, all of their characters from the 60s floating around in an ark battling personified social issues like smog and litter and vandalism, the Harlem Globetrotters as superheroes...

They used the wrong spelling of the word "revue". I have SUCH a good feeling about this one...

Hanna-Barbera's All-Star Comedy Ice Revue was another such misfire, first airing on CBS on January 13, 1978, and like other crappy TV specials I can think of, has justifiably not been re-aired since. It was released on videocassette in 1986, but that's about all the attention it got after it aired. Time Warner probably owns it now, and hasn't seen fit to release it on DVD. (Don't strain yourselves, guys!)

Okay, here's the rundown - the special is supposed to be like a Dean Martin celebrity roast or something, only with ice skaters and ballet and stuff like that. Your masters of ceremonies are country singer and Hee Haw host Roy Clark and One Day at a Time star Bonnie Franklin, flanked by a cavalcade of actors dressed as some of Hanna-Barbera's most beloved characters (and the Hair Bear Bunch) to celebrate the 48th birthday of one Fred Flintstone of The Flintstones, the most popular prime-time animated sitcom ever to be accused of ripping off The Honeymooners.

There's only one slight detail - Fred is absent from this whole affair, as he is sitting at home watching the special on TV, thinking he was supposed to be on the next day, and only just realizes that he's supposed to be at the ice arena now, so much of the special is focused on this particular plot point.

To think many of those people had dreams of skating in the Olympics.

Roy and Bonnie are forced to fill up time to wait for Fred, and the guy in the Jabberjaw costume is not making life any easier for them, as he pretends to be Don Rickles, makes several failed attempts at wisecracks at the honoree's expense (this is a roast, remember) and insists that with the man of the hour nowhere to be seen, they should roast HIM instead.

What's Jabberjaw, you ask? Think Scooby Doo with a talking shark set in Al Gore's dystopian vision of the future, or in a world where the bad guy from The Spy Who Loved Me actually succeeded.

To make matters worse...apparently they couldn't get Frank Welker to play Jabberjaw as he did in the TV show, so voice acting duties went to Don Messick. And I have nothing against Don Messick, his voice is legendary--Scooby Doo, Papa Smurf, Hamton on Tiny Toons--but his attempt to sound like a shark who borrows shtick from both Rodney Dangerfield and Curly Howard comes out sounding like--ughh--his Scrappy Doo voice.

In a nutshell, it's Scrappy Doo once again trying to steal the spotlight from a character more popular that he. Only as a talking shark.

Sharks just aren't popular. Once Jaws came out, the market was pretty much oversaturated.

Variety shows aren't necessarily known for their plots, so here are some edited highlights:

Bonnie dresses up as a polar bear and sings "You Are My Lucky Star" while skating girls dance around and sing the completely unrelated "We're in the Money".

Then we're treated to an unusual comedy vignette from a duo named Course & Young, who I can't even find info on Google about. One of them tries to sing a song but gets distracted by the janitor, who keeps hitting him with a mop, knocking things over, then tries to blow him up and bites him in the leg.

I'll be over here crying for those poor baby seals if you need me...

A Jackson Five-ish group called The Silvers, of whom I have also never heard, sing a song titled "Disco Showdown" while all the dancers and costumed animals get day-yown on the ice.

Sashi Kuchiki, a shirtless guy in a badly-made thong, skates and jumps around with flaming torches while some men and women dressed entirely in yellow give us a fitness workout video.

Roy Clark plays the theme from that one movie Love Story whose name escapes me on the guitar while some lady dances in the background.

This aired during the family hour, right?

And also, for the purpose of entertainment and DEFINITELY not to pad out the special's running time, the audience is treated to some live-action vignettes from another recently-produced live-action Hanna-Barbera program, The Skatebirds. The Skatebirds, for those who don't know (i.e. all of you), was a Banana Splits-style supershow-type dealie starring a trio of live-action people in rollerskating bird costumes getting chased around by someone in a live-action rollerskating cat costume (rollerskating in an ICE skating special, go figure). I couldn't tell you anything else about it, apart from the fact that it gave us among other regular segments a cartoon called The Robonic Stooges, which is just...ughhh...oh lord...that'll take you to some dark places.

Why am I always forgetting which one of them is Fleegle?

Finally, the climax is a grand birthday tribute number where all the cartoon-character-costumed actors dance around with chefs for some reason paying their respects to the still-absent Fred. The Hair Bear Bunch trio tell jokes that stopped being funny in the third grade, some ice dancers in Wally Gator costumes dance around for a bit while one of the Bears chases after them with a flyswatter--why, I do not know--and finally a giant birthday cake flanked with dancing girls is brought out onto the ice.

During this whole farce we get animated updates on Fred's travel to the ice arena, as he and Barney watch the whole affair on a portable TV set in the car on the way there.

Okay, special, explain this to me. In the cartoon segments, which are clearly based in Bedrock, the "place right out of history" where The Flintstones takes place, we are clearly in the prehistoric setting, while the live-action ice skating segments were filmed in Bakersfield Civic Auditorium in 1978 A.D. California. How does this work? Did the ice rink suddenly fall through a hole in the time-space continuum and land 65 million years in the past? Did Fred somehow go through a wormhole and end up in the Bedrock of the late 20th century just in time for his 65,000,048th birthday?

Well, as it turns out, Fred doesn't make it after all, because when it seems that he finally arrives on stage, it's actually another actor in perhaps the worst character costume of the bunch. All the other costumes use fur, but Fred having no fur to speak of, has a head obviously made out of plastic. His mouth doesn't even close.

After that, the special ends and the credits roll.

Roy, get off the screen! You're distracting me from the pretty girl!

So...how does Hanna-Barbera's All-Star Comedy Ice Revue stack up?

To answer that question, let's break down its title.

It isn't exactly "all-star", since not only does it include lesser-known characters like Jabberjaw and the Hair Bear Bunch (and of course the Skatebirds, whose show you can't even find episodes of on YouTube), but I've never even heard of ANY of the musical, comedy or ice skating acts in it. I barely even know anything about the hosts, other than that one of them sang country music and the other was on a TV show that starred Valerie Bertinelli.

And it also didn't have anything in the way of comedy, either. None of the gags were funny, Jabberjaw was just annoying, and the laughter, par for the course in a Hanna-Barbera production, obviously came from a can.

In fact, the only thing that Hanna-Barbera's All-Star Comedy Ice Revue promises and actually DELIVERS is...ice. The one thing I can definitely guarantee you is that there is ice in this special. Ice that is both danced and skated upon.

And, honestly, the ice wasn't all that bad.

Fwed Fwintstone wuvs you DIS MUCH.

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (1983)

Caught in a future world, his only escape is back in time!
--the tagline on the VHS cover, which is odd since the film doesn't mention time travel

Why don't you "reconst" your "Flavo-Fibes"?!
-Tom Servo

Is it just me, or have I been getting a lot of movies telling me the world will suck in the future since I started this blog?

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is a 1983 TV movie filmed in Canada and bankrolled by public television station WNET in New York. It was intended to be part of an ongoing series of PBS-funded productions adapting various sci-fi novels (in this film's case, a 1976 short story written by John Varley) but ended up being the last of only three because of lack of funding. The film was not a critical success and since then was re-aired a few times on the Sci-Fi Channel, including in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 during its eighth season, which also featured fake pledge drive host segments.

To think, your tax dollars helped fund this movie.

You don't have to be computer-simulated to work here, but it helps.

In what is yet another in a ever-lengthening list of dystopian movies I have come to review on this blog, this faux-Matrix world is entirely computer-controlled and ruled over by a number of super-duper-maxi-mega-multi-million-dollar corporations which have assumed all power of governance and lawmaking and general bossing-people-around-type affairs. The late Raul Julia, known for such films as The Addams Family, Addams Family Values and I am certain many others, stars as Aram Fingal, a programmer for one of these big companies (named "Novicorp" for the sake of convenience) who's one of those annoying people at the office. You know the type - never does his job, sits at his desk staring at Facebook posts, spends all his time at the water cooler chatting up secretaries, we've all seen them. Only instead of Facebook, Fingal just sits as his desk downloading old movies like Casablanca (or in this film's futuristic lexicon, "scrolling up cinemas") on company time.

Well, one day, his superiors finally catch him in the act and order him to visit his "psychist", an old lady who has to be prompted to ask him about his mother by the big all-seeing computer with an electronic disembodied voice that exposits absolutely everything that happens in this film. His "psychist" orders him to 48 hours of compulsory "prophylactic rehab", which consists of inserting him in a virtual forest with his mind placed in the body of an animal, or "doppling" him as they call it. It's sort of a forced vacation, though if you ask me, it's more like they give him some juice (or "reconst", whatever that means), knock him out, cut his head open, stick some electrodes in his brain and have him narrate over some stock film ripped from a nature documentary.

Fingal, as it happens, is also very poor, so rather than be doppled into a horse or something nice yet very expensive, he ends up inside the body of a baboon named Daisy.

It was either that or go in as an anteater. Vile, stupid, hateful creatures.

Either he's being doppled or he's part of a focus group for an Adult Swim pilot.

All goes well in his little dopple universe/nature documentary footage. He skitters around the place, gets drunk on nature documentary footage maruba fruit with his little animal friends, and just chills. However, when he's threatened by a nature documentary footage elephant, he requests to be pulled out of there, but there's a bit of a problem with that - you see, at the same time some grade school kids are going on a field trip of the doppling facility, touching people's brains and unbuttoning their tops, when one perverted little urchin in particular for some reason switches Fingal's tag with somebody else's, and now his body has gone missing.

When word of this gets out to the rival companies, Novicorp's stock plunges, and the appropriately fat, appropriately evil Chairman (Donald C. Moore) is considering having Fingal terminated to recoup their losses, but Fingal's dopple supervisor, a tech named Apollonia (TV movie vet Linda Griffiths) convinces him to change his mind and have her keep Fingal's soul in their HX368 computer mainframe until they can find his body, or before his dopple time runs out and his existence is erased, whichever comes first. Of course, Fingal IS quite easily bored, and she would have to keep an eye on him so he doesn't start screwing with the computer's source code.

You can already guess how that will turn out.

"I'm getting something...Novicorp...can...suck...my...HEY!!"

Fingal wakes up in a computer simulation of his own bedroom and tries to phone for help, but is only informed to go to work as normal. Apollonia must enter the simulation and explain to him that he can create his own reality simulation in the HX368, but he must create a reality as normal as possible to make it easier to track him.

And how does she enter the simulation? AS FINGAL'S LONG DEAD MOTHER. Yeah, THAT'S normal.

Well, at least this scene gives us the film's most unintentionally funny line - Raul Julia asks "Mom...am I nuts?" and it comes out "Mom...my nuts?"

By the way, Fingal is played by a Puerto Rican actor, but his mother is Caucasian? How does that work?

"Well, I had a little fling in San Juan, one thing led to another, and then..."

Anyway, for some reason the Chairman decides to undermine Apollonia's efforts by hacking the simulation to chase her Fingal's-mother character to run into the path of a simulated truck.

From there, it isn't long before Fingal's turned the inside of Novicorp's mainframe into a cheap Casablanca set, complete with a virtual reproduction of himself playing Humphrey Bogart and an unnamed neurotic virtual guy as Peter Lorre. Apollonia and the Chairman pop in and out frequently, the former to try and keep him in line and slowly become the love interest, the latter as the "Fat Man" who comes in to make vague threats and generally make life difficult for them.

Of all the scenes in all the movies in all the world, they reference this one.

Eventually, after extensive periods of boredom which included sleeping with one of his lady coworkers and even finding THAT boring, Fingal gets tired of waiting for them to pull his mind out of the machine and decides to find his own way out of the HX368 by punching in numbers at random, despite the fact that tampering with the programming could have devastating effects in the outside world it controls. After numerous attempts, he stumbles onto the access code quite by accident - IY479.

So the name of the computer is HX368 and the password to access it is...IY479. The letters and numbers that follow each letter and number in the name of the computer. That's the kind of thing an idiot would have on his email account. I'm surprised it wasn't 863XH or 12345 or the Chairman's wife's name spelled backwards.

Anyway, some cheesy video effects and random falling snow later, we've found he's hijacked the weather control system and is now wreaking meteorological havoc all over the world. Or so the graphics tell me.

WHOOOOOO, FUTURISTIC! WHOOOO...

Apollonia reappears to Fingal for some reason dressed as Venus in a clam shell from the Renaissance painting (or, if you want, think Uma Thurman from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) and tells him to stop again. Fingal complies...for about five minutes, until another visit from the Fat Man changes his mind again. He also deduces that the Chairman is using Apollonia to track him down and badger him. He tries to regain access, but luckily the CEO has added another security lock to the system to keep Fingal out, but he gets back in anyway by just "reversing the access code."

So now it's...974YI? ...How did this guy get to be CEO of this company again?

Anyway, THIS has the effect of spitting Monopoly cards out at everybody in the building, as Novicorp's finances are redistributed to the proletariat masses.

Meanwhile, Fingal's body is finally recovered. Turned out he was in the sex change operation queue. Go fig.

EPIC STARING CONTEST ACTION!

What happens after that is very, VERY confusing, so I'll just skim through it. The Chairman finally decides that Fingal must die and re-enters the computer via Apollonia for a final confrontation, promptly shutting her out entirely somehow, the ensuing meeting leaves virtual Fingal and the little guy shot, a cheesy spinny virtual effect appears out of nowhere in front of Fingal which he grabs somehow and screams "I'M INTERFACE" at the top of his lungs, and then he stands in front of the Fat Man who starts convulsing for some reason, and they both just stare at each other for a full minute before Fingal shoots some very large pixels out of his eyes and vaporize the Fat Man.

...ah calls 'em as ah sees 'em.

Some MORE cheesy video effects later, Fingal returns to his body, and he and Apollonia make out a little before he erases their identities, assigns the Chairman a month's compulsory rehab (as an anteater, appropriately enough--serves him right, the bastard) and programs every screen in the building to scroll up Casablanca before the two of them leave the room, free from their corporate yokes.

"Look, I've Photoshopped the Chairman's face onto an anteater! ...I think I've improved the anteater!"

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank wants to be a good movie, I can feel it. Deep down inside it wants to be a decent sci-fi movie. Sadly, it comes up short in this because of three reasons:

One: the visuals in this film are not the least bit pleasant, at least when it's not nature documentary footage. The filmmakers' decision to shoot this movie on cheap-looking videotape instead of film is glaring, and the chroma key and blue screen special effects only heighten the level of its ugliness. I was half-expecting Mr. T to come out and teach me something about self-esteem. The climax practically thrives on them to the point where you have no idea what's going on. Not to mention it looks horrifically dated three decades after the fact, and the music and sound effects do nothing to help.

Two: it tries to pass itself off as futuristic by giving everything silly futuristic names. It rips a page out of George Orwell's 1984 by trying to invent new words for things. Money is called "credits." Movies are renamed "cinemas." Even potato chips are renamed "Flavo-Fibes!" It's cute and all, but in a few cases it gets really confusing and unnecessary. I mean, what the hell is "reconst" supposed to be anyway? Water? Beer? Medicine? Whatever was in Fingal's cup at the doppling table could have been wallpaper paste for all I know.

And three: corporation that is so glaringly evil and yet so grossly incompetent that the concept of network security eludes them. This is a guy who could hack into their server and watch illegally download movies on company time, and they put an access code to their most delicate software that is so simple a grade school kid could crack it? And then when he tries to get back in, they put in ANOTHER access code that he literally cracks in seconds?

In short, this movie is one part cheap Orwellian sci-fi, one part plot enigma, one part computer graphics vomit and one part low-budget Casablanca ripoff. I can't think of any other reason not to recommend this movie that the Anteater Anti-Defamation League can't provide.

"JETSONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!"