This week I'm reminded that Steve Guttenberg was in some strange shows. The other day I posted his 1979 sitcom Billy, which found him exploring his fantasies in a decidedly Walter Mitty fashion. This series from 3 years later, which also featured funny lady Edie McClurg and Laugh In veteren Gary Owens, found him running a seedy Atlantic City hotel. The plot of the series was continually being interrupted with sketch comedy of a Monty Python style in the most creative ways. The sketches were interwoven with the action at the hotel, but were completely unrelated to it. The series was a summer replacement and there were only 5 episodes made. Below is one of the sketches from the show, uploaded to YouTube by SufferingFoolsMusic.
This series is fondly remembered by the few who saw it in first run. It was subsequently aired in Britain, where it was better received. It's never rated a DVD release. You can, however, find many of the sketches on YouTube.
Obscurity factor: 10 (almost totally forgotten, hard to find complete episodes, segments available on YouTube, not on DVD)
I've rifled through about a half dozen of the sketch clips and I REALLY like this! It's very Pythonesque, but without coming off as derivative. I don't know how I missed this first time around.
ReplyDeleteIt was easy to miss, with only 5 episodes scattered across a summer... I think they kept changing the air time too.
ReplyDeleteI am not of the Python crowd, and this does indeed remind me of that show - it's no wonder that I missed it. Love British drama...but have a hard time with the comedy shows.
ReplyDeleteI have mixed feelings about British comedy. Some of it I really enjoy, some goes a bit too far. Some of these skits I find very funny, though. Have you ever seen The Bed Sitting Room? It's very out there as far as British comedy goes, but it's one that I find extremely pithy and quite funny. I wrote it up a while back. You can find it here: http://theobscurityfactor.blogspot.com/2011/04/dudley-moore-ralph-richardson-in-bed.html
ReplyDeleteThere are only the handful of videos that SufferingFoolsMusic uploaded, and that could be removed at any point, when an ABC shill presses the I-don't-like-it button.
ReplyDeleteSomeone should become a true hero and compress all 5 (6?) episodes and just toss them into rapidshare or something. Torrent it. These damn companies couldn't care less about it.
Does anyone actually have original VHS recordings? I'd be more than happy to digitize it, filter and clean it, optimize it, and then copy (yes, copy copy copy) the living daylights out of it. I'm with the 99% btw.
There are thirteen total episodes. Only five aired in the US.
ReplyDeleteThis was not a summer replacement. The shows aired in April and May of 1982
ReplyDeleteif i can find them on DVD,or somewhere, all 13 episodes, i'll put them on Archive.org
ReplyDeletei found the pilot episode on youtube so far,it is kind of blurry,there are 2 of the pilot one is better viewable than the other,but it still needs to be fixed to be viewed on a 43' tv
ReplyDelete