In Our Broadcast Day (Wideo Weekend)

 

I have very fond memories of watching SCTV on the weekends in the early 1980’s. That would be the time, late at night, when we were working on closing up Mr. Gatti’s and the crowds were thinning out. I could linger over bussing the tables in the front room, which had a colossal three-lobed TV projector and screen, the height of technology at the time. There I could catch huge swathes of their skits, humor that would energize me at the end of the day and raise my spirits. Our little circle considered SCTV superior to SNL in many ways. In the years after I would catch episodes in syndication whenever I could.

SCTV - Pepi Longsocks - YouTube

SCTV - Lust For Paint - YouTube

SCTV MOVIE: “Death Takes No Holiday” (Agatha Christie / William Castle) - YouTube

John Candy in: Polynesian Town (SCTV) - YouTube

07 Play It Again, Bob [057] [SCTV - Season 3] - YouTube

The Amazing Time Travels of Henry Osgood was not an SCTV production, but was made by SCTV alumnus Dave Thomas, and starred many other alumni. I was and am very fond of it, but always felt it would benefit from a little bit of editing, and maybe an upgrade on the special effects. But I could see what he was trying to get at through all the interference, and I loved it. I class it along with You Can’t Take It With You and Heartbreak House and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy in the little matrix of influences that were swirling around on Showtime about that time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzwydUUdE74 (Amazing Time Travels of Henry Osgood)

I don’t see Osgood mentioned on Thomas’s Wikipedia page, but it does list a book collaboration he has done with Max Allan Collins, called The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton, which seems to have a sort of parallel storyline.