When Basic Cable Was Good

Someone has posted a clip from the USA Network's Night Flight, which aired for a total of eight hours(!) every Friday and Saturday evening, from 1981 to 1988 (it was also brought back for three years starting in 1990, but that incarnation was related by name only, and consistently unwatchable).

 I discovered tons of music, art and film via this program, which spanned the entirety of my teenage years. Here in this segment is a rapid-fire collage of exceptionally outré art and entertainment, the sort of which, in the pre-internet era, I'd only otherwise find on homemade VHS tapes from collectors procured via mail order or film conventions (which I was also doing in my teens). In order, I'm recognizing a Betty Boop cartoon with Cab Calloway, a clip from The Mascot by Ladislas Starevich, a clip from possibly my favorite Three Stooges short Disorder in the Court, a vintage toy commercial, a mondo newsreel, a trailer, Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon scored to Pink Floyd,  a collection of Atom Age Sci-Fi trailers, a worn 16mm reel of Star Trek bloopers, and a Mr. Bill short. There are worse ways to spend 24 of your minutes, both on a weekend night in 1985 and in here in 2014. What else are you going to do, turn on the TV so you can zone out to a six-hour back-to-back marathon of Storage Wars?



(bonus clip here and here: an example of Night Flight's original programming, a typically irreverent interview with DEVO)