It's time for the Weird Accordion to Al column to become a real book you can hold in your hands and read on the toilet and everything!
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This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Howdy y'all,
To give y'all exclusive material and hold you over til the release of the extended The Weird Accordion to Al book, and also keep me honest, I'm going to be sharing articles I'm writing for it with you here and on Patreon, starting with the first episode of The Weird Al Show. Subsequent articles will be shorter but thankfully this gives me an awful lot to work with.
The Weird Al Show: Episode 1: “Bad Influence” original airdate: September 13, 1997
Lesson: “Don’t follow people who can get you into trouble. Think for yourself.”
Part of what I find fascinating about The Weird Al Show, Al’s maiden foray into the world of children’s Saturday morning television, is how often the behind the scenes drama spills over into the onscreen action. When Al got his own boob tube vehicle through the production company of ageless rock and roll powerbroker Dick Clark he set out to make the television equivalent of his music, something funny and commercial but also absurd and conceptual and exquisitely ridiculous, a pastiche of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and Mr. Show filtered through the persona and sensibility of a bona fide national treasure.
Al had a bold and audacious vision he was more than capable of realizing. Television executives had demands. As Al and his collaborators relate wryly on the audio commentary for The Weird Al Show DVD, the show had to fit the FCC’s requirements for educational and informative children’s television.
This led to the defeated and overwhelmed creators and producers literally beginning each show with classy music accompanying a scroll containing what is clearly demarcated “Today’s lesson:” “Don’t follow people who can get you into trouble. Think for yourself.”
Announcer Billy West sets an unfortunate precedent for yelling certain words randomly, seemingly for emphasis and to make the message-delivery less obnoxiously literal,
but also with an underlying sense of desperation, frustration and rage. That frustration is reflected by the show literally ripping these words apart in passive-aggressive disgust immediately upon introducing them, not unlike Nancy Pelosi tearing up the text of Trump’s State of the Union address.
The FCC forced the prodigiously talented folks behind The Weird Al Show to spoon-feed the audience lessons in between the laughs and fun and while they did their damnedest to oblige their frustration is evident. In a typically morbid turn, the lyrics to the theme song reference the “tortured screaming of a funny little man” who turns out to be a TV executive who gives Al his own show as appreciation for being sprung from a bear trap by the Grammy-winner.
That’s not the only tortured screaming to be found on the show. Al and West both scream throughout the episode, and the show, in ways that say more than they intend to.
The Weird Al Show marked one of the last hurrahs of the classic, old-school Al look. Al’s persona changed dramatically when he lost the glasses and shaved off the mustache and increasingly embraced clothing beyond black pants and Hawaiian shirts around the turn of the millennium. But The Weird Al Show features a mustachioed, bespectacled Al as a fictionalized version of himself, an inventor whose body might be thirty seven but whose mind and maturity level seem stuck at around a third-grade level.
In part because his character has to learn so many lessons in EVERY episode he’s also a bit of an oblivious jerk who lags decidedly behind the audience in figuring life out.
In the first episode, “Bad Influence”, for example, Al learns the evils of peer pressure and giving into bullying when he invites Spike, a twenty something, leather-jacket-wearing creep, animal torturer and possible serial killer played by Kevin Weisman, into his split level cave twenty miles below the earth to see if he’s cool enough to join a club that exists for the sake of keeping people like him out.
This off brand Fonzie, this wannabe James Dean, is also something of a sociopath who forces Al degrade himself for his malevolent amusement in scenarios that call to mind the cinema of theatrical cruelty and arch-sadism of Lars Von Trier and Paul Verhoeven, most directly when Al, in a pathetic frenzy to be be accepted, quite literally, as a member of the club, dunks his arms in a vat of hot melted chocolate that can’t help but look like something a whole lot less savory.
“Come on Al, do something to entertain me” Spike taunts maliciously, doing nothing to suppress his clear-cut disdain for the desperate sucker in his midst.
To try to keep his tormentor entertained Al gleefully suggests that they watch TV. This affords this television show about a television show to riff briefly and mischievously on other forms of television as Al and his guests flip through commercials and kiddie show parodies that run the gamut from a very funny Saturday Night Live-style pizza ad for an innovative new restaurant that promises piping hot pizzas by removing the eight to ten seconds other pizzerias waste by putting pizzas in boxes with a completely box-less delivery process to a kid’s show parody featuring Al as Fred Huggins and Al’s hero Stan Freberg and his son Donovan (who some of y’all might remember as the kid from the Encyclopedia Brittanica commercials from the 1980s) as apoplectic, hate-filled puppets Papa and Baby Boolie respectively.
Huggins suggests what Mr. Rogers might losing like if lobotomized, narcotized and cross-pollinated with Barney the Dinosaur, the purple pop culture phenomenon whose cloying sweetness, mindless repetition and oppressive popularity made him perfect for Al to parody.
Mr. Rogers is of course a national treasure but Fred Huggins is so soothingly obnoxious that the puppets’ clear-cut desire to murder him for the sake of preserving their own sanity is not only understandable but impossible not to share. You’d think it’d be hard to convey emotions like murderous aggravation and uncontrollable rage with such primitive puppets but the Frebergs make Baby and Papa Boolie shockingly expressive in their visceral hatred and rage.
In one of the show’s most exquisitely passive-aggressive acts of rebellion against their dictate to edutain young people, it contains a charming, agreeable child character and ostensible audience surrogate played by Gary LeRoi Gray named Bobby, the Inquisitive Boy who, as his name suggests, is positively bursting with good-natured, admirable curiosity about the world around him.
This delightful young man WANTS to learn, to be educated and informed about the universe and its infinite mysteries. So he comes to the host of this educational program hungry for knowledge and is shown an absurdist instructional film parody that utterly fails to educate or inform, that, if anything, just make everything fuzzier and more confusing.
Bobby is continually asking why and The Weird Al Show is forever not answering his questions except to mock them and the idea of education as a conceit and a children’s entertainment trope.
“Bad Influence” is a fascinatingly dark opener for a children’s program. Beyond the bright colors and blinding 1997-ness, it’s a study of male fragility and weakness, the cautionary tale of a sad, pathetic child-man pathologically desperate for approval and validation (Al) who humiliates and degrades himself for the sadistic amusement of an overgrown schoolyard bully.
When Al proudly showcases the Evel Knievel-like gifts of his beloved pet Harvey the Wonder Hamster, Spike suggests some adjustments to his heroics seemingly guaranteed to kill, or at least maim the furry little guy.
When Bobby, the Inquisitive Boy, an actual child, is insufficiently deferential towards Spike, he tells Al of the curious youngster, “If your creepy little friend wants to avoid a big accident, he should leave now.”
That certainly sounds like a not so veiled threat against a child.
Spike continues to bully, torment and manipulate Al’s emotionally shattered man-child until a young comedian named Patton Oswalt shows up in the official nerd uniform of glasses, a bow tie and Cosby sweater as Spike’s friend Eugene and betrays that there are no coolness tests for their dumb club and Eugene was messing with Al’s emotions just for the sake of cruelty.
It is at this point that our hero turns on Spike, not when he proposed murdering his pet or threatened a twelve-year-old friend of his.
Most children’s shows go out of their way to make their protagonists as likable as possible. The Weird Al Show introduces him to Saturday morning audiences as a validation-crazed loser degrades himself in increasingly extreme, pathetic ways out of an all-too-relatable need to be accepted as one of the cool kids.
Then Barenaked Ladies show up wearing medieval garb solely for the sake of having to change out of their old-time clothes so they can perform “Shoebox”, a song about the star-crossed affair between a teenaged boy and a much older woman.
“Shoebox” is an awfully melancholy, adult song for a band to perform on a Saturday morning children’s program, and not just because it dates itself doubly, AND incorrectly, with the lyrics, “You're so nineteen-ninety/And it's nineteen-ninety-four” which was decidedly untrue when Barenaked Ladies performed this song for confused children in 1997.
Re-watching the first episode of The Weird Al Show in 2020 I was reminded why it’s such an audaciously dark delight but also why it failed to find an audience during its initial run as part of CBS’ brainy "Think CBS Kids” block, which also included fellow live-action kids shows The New Ghostwriter Mysteries and Wheel 2000, a kiddie version of Wheel of Fortune.
Even for Al, The Weird Al Show is surprisingly conceptual and sophisticated in its humor. In a typically bizarre joke, Al answers a viewer’s question about whether or not he has any brothers or sisters who are not just cheap camera tricks by relaying that he does have a brother named Alex the 8 inch tall savage warrior (who looks exactly what you think a character named Alex the 8 Inch Savage Warrior played by Al would look like) whom he loves very much but that who is, sadly, just a cheap camera trick and doesn’t actually exist beyond the sake of a very odd joke.
That is a weird-ass punchline to an even weirder set-up but it’s perfectly in keeping with the show’s oddball sensibility. The Weird Al Show turned out to be too damn weird for a mainstream Saturday morning audience but it’s exactly the right level of weird for me, and I’m guessing for you as well, particularly this deep into our adventure.
Hey y'all,
I'm proud to say that I have sent out over 200 books so far and have about 80 ready to go out. Believe you me, I want these books in your hands as much as you do. The problem is that 80 to 90 percent of people who filled out surveys and knew they had an option chose the extended Self-Indulgent Vanity Tour version with entries on every episode of The Weird Al Show Show and Al's season of Comedy! Bang! Bang! as well as UHF and an article on the 2018 Self-Indulgent Vanity Tour that will come out in June. Or possibly July. Or August. It's going to come out and it's going to be great. It's just a lot of work on top of the enormous amount of work that went into the original version of The Weird Accordion to Al.
That's understandable, as folks tend to want more, rather than less, but I also am super proud of the version of the book that is done now and about 100 people haven't filled out the survey to let me know which version they want.
So, if you would like a copy of the book that's out now, the Squeeze Box Plus version, and haven't filled out the survey or never got the survey, please email me or message me and I will be delighted to send you a signed copy of the book that's out now ASAP.
Please do get at me if you're interested. It doesn't matter if you've already filled out a survey saying you want the long version: if you contact me and say you want the book now I'll get it out to you ASAP.
And I'm shipping out all these books myself, and signing and personalizing them on top of everything else I do, so I'm working as fast as I can but obviously I can't be as efficient or timely as someone with other people working for him, or a big publisher helping me out.
Also, I'm doing a big event at Dynasty Typewriter in connection with the book the afternoon of February 22nd at 3:30 and I would love it if y'all will come out! It's gonna be amazing! A celebration, even!
https://www.dynastytypewriter.com/calendar/weirdaccordiontoalfeb22
Thanks,
Nathan