Mark Y
Screenwriter
- Joined
- Mar 20, 2006
- Messages
- 1,233
That's Season 1 (although for the episode with the "Leave It To Beaver" parody, John Candy played "the beaver" in that skit, and for that episode only, John Candy was named last: "John Candy as the beaver").
The Season 1 opening I remember showed scenes of TV equipment going haywire (Quad tape rolling off reels and onto the floor, technicians pounding their fists on consoles, etc. -- similar to the opening used on some of the Cycle I Network 90 shows) with the soundtrack of Spike Jones' "Dance Of The Hours." And I didn't remember this part, but years and years later I was able to see a couple of really terrible multi-gen tape dubs, and the head shot clips of the cast are different from one episode to another -- I wonder if they were supposed to be specific to the skits in a particular show.
Odd thing is, there is a clip from a very early show opening (obviously from Season 1) in one of the documentaries on the Vol. 1 DVD set -- and it's different from what I remember seeing when WMAQ-Channel 5 in Chicago repeated these shows back in 1979-1980 (during the "break" between Seasons 2 and 3). It uses a different piece of music -- a "needle-drop" I think I recall from some drive-in intermission trailers, which the show also used as a closing theme during Season 1 -- but still has Dave Thomas as the announcer. Could I have seen this at one point but just don't remember it? Or did that version of the intro just never make it to the US version of the show?
(Of course, all of the original openings and bumpers were replaced with a very dull, generic intro when the 30-minute and 90-minute shows were recut into a new package of half-hours in the 1980s.)
By the way: One of the performers who overdubbed voices on the "Cisco Kid" parody episode was MARTIN SHORT -- a couple years before he actually officially joined the SCTV cast.
