As for my own, it was the PBS series from the 1970s that would run in the afternoon, usually about 15 minutes each that I would watch when I was home sick (yeah, I was/am a nerd). I can’t remember the names of half of them:
Read All About It - three kids along with a robot keyboard and a tv monitor that spoke solved a mystery behind the founding of their town and the villain Duneedon.
The Metric System - fairly irreverent as I remember, at times parodying Sesame Street, it obviously taught the metric system.
Mulligan Stew - 4-4-3-2, that’s the formula for me and you. I remember getting a comic book of this in school when I was a kid. No idea why I was a fan of it.
The last one that stands out at the moment was about kids having to make hard choices. I think it was called Think About It.
I’d love to have the uncensored, uncut version of I, Claudius. It’s not available in the US, and while I know I could order it through Amazon’s UK branch, it’s only available as Region 2 DVDs. Last time I looked, region-free DVD players in the USA had a bad reputation, as in either didn’t work well, or stopped working as region-free within a short time after purchase.
I seem to recall a late night show after the Pat Sajak (I believe) went off the air. The network was trying a lot of different shows and at one point had Rush Limbaugh on. I remember he had the Mayflower Madam on and was holding her hand walking around with her. I also recall that he came back after a commercial break and showed that the audience had been cleared because they were jerks and how awesome he was at showing that he was continuing to do the show to an empty house.
However, the show I am thinking of was I believe a sketch show and the beginning would have a weird looking guy approach the camera and say “it’s the Mr. Sticky show”. I don’t remember anything else about it and don’t think it lasted long, but would like to see it again. Actually, I wouldn’t mind seeing the Limbaugh show either because it would be interesting to see how he performed in front of an audience he didn’t have control over.
An episode of the Daily Show (with Craig Kilbourne) where he ruthlessly torments Jason patrick over Teen Wolf Too for the entire interview. Super awkward / mean, really funny, impossible for me to find on the internets. I so want to see that again.
There used to be a sketch comedy show called “The Newz.” It was filmed at Universal Studios in Florida. It was very similar to MADTV and absolutely freakin’ hilarious. It was on between 1994-95. I’d love to see the sketch with the black cat again: “I will use all of my nine lives to kill you.”
There was also an awesome show from Halifax called “El Mundo Del Lundo” that my friend and I stumbled upon late one night in 1996. Apparently some guys went to a video store in Times Square and bought a bunch of super-cheesy B-rated movies from the olden days and did hilarious voice-overs on them. Holy crap that show was funny. I found a couple of YouTube clips but they’re not the funniest ones I remember. AFAIK they never released the episodes on DVD, which is a shame.
There is a difference between a “region-free” player and one with a “hidden menu” where you can change the region. I have one of the latter, and never had any problem playing Region 2 DVDs.
A few years ago, the studios got wise to “region-free players” and started making DVDs that worked something like this: it would try to play as if it was from a different region - if it “worked,” then a screen would be displayed saying that the DVD was meant for a different region (and I think all of the buttons on the remote except for eject and power on/off were disabled), but if it returned a “wrong region” error, it would try to play the correct region. This is why you need a player where you can set the region rather than just ignore the codes.
I remember a Barker-era episode (Christmas Eve 1982, I think) where they gave away a plane (not a microplane, either; flying lessons to get your pilot’s license were included); it cost around $30,000 at the time.
For some reason, most companies stopped destroying/re-using video tapes around 1980. Mark Goodson was ahead of his time, and kept just about all of his shows on NBC and CBS (but not the ABC shows before Family Feud, for some reason; ABC episodes of Password are quite rare). The only other person I can think of who made it a point to keep his tapes was John Guedel, who saved most of the You Bet Your Life (with Groucho Marx) episodes when he heard the kinescopes were going to be destroyed (for the silver in the film, presumably),
You don’t recognize most of the celebrities because either they were primarily in soap operas, or they were regular characters but not stars of prime time shows (especially ones that lasted only one or two seasons). (Occasionally you’ll get somebody who became a little more famous - for example, Brian Stokes Mitchell appeared on a few (back then, he was “just” Brian Mitchell, and was a co-star on Trapper John, M.D.).
My Aunt Esther and her then-husband appeared on an episode of the short-lived game show Matches 'n Mates when it was being shot in Cleveland. I’d love to see that, as well as the two episodes of Academic Challenge on which I appeared in the mid-1970’s.
I did not know this, but A/V equipment is definitely not an area of even mild expertise to me. What I don’t understand is why they even CARE. Who came up with this silly region thing, and why?
Do those hidden menus allow you to change the code anytime you want? Do you have makes/models? Not that I need it now for the I, Claudius, but you never know what the future will bring.
My previously mentioned Holy Grail, El Mundo del Lundo, played old-timey cartoons as well. One that I only saw once and would LOVE to see again was a cartoon featuring the song “Hambone” (“Hambone, Hambone, where ya been? Around the world and back again…”) It was a blonde cartoon girl singing and there was a train and all sorts of trippy stuff. I’ve Googled like crazy and have never found it.
I swear there was an episode of the Weird Al Show on MTV where he played a music video of a heavy metal band singing a deliberately off-key version of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”. I thought the name of the band was “Bad Axe”, but I’ve never been able to find any promising references matching Weird Al and Bohemian Rhapsody that don’t involve his polka rendition instead.
Of the five musical guests Weird Al had on his show(Hanson, Barenaked Ladies, Immature, Radish and All-4-One), only Immature has covered Bohemian Rhapsody. Could this be the video?
