Night Flight Nostalgia
What triggered my recollection earlier today of Night Flight is irrelevant, but I felt that the recollection came for a purpose: to tell all you folks how any cable music video channel these days is largely pathetic, ossified garbage, and that if you had a show like Night Flight running (even re-running the old episodes from its initial tenure on the USA Network from 1983-198?), I'd be tempted to watch TV regularly again.
Why do you ask? Actually, you most likely aren't because I would be surprised if more than 4 people read my inane musings, and of those 4, I am sure none remember a show that played in the 80s on a B-grade cable network in the deep bowels of the night. But I digress.
Night Flight was initially a 4 hour block of utter freeform madness. Usually several hours worth of random videos with interspersed interviews (including a very bad infamous one with super-white, super-moribund Peter Frampton), concert footage and strange shorts, both animated and live action.
It was not uncommon to see one hit wonder Rockwell followed by Kate Bush, a smattering of animated jibberish (anyone remember the French-Czech sci-fi absurdity that was Fantasic Planet or La Planète Sauvage as it was originally known), maybe 15 minutes of a live show from Bauhaus or a documentary on some second string post-punk band -- although some consider Bauhaus a second string post punk band. More videos (maybe Fishbone, maybe Talking Heads, maybe Timex Social Club, maybe all three). More animated weirdness. Pepper at regualar intervals with a rather goofy voiceover (I have no idea who the "host" was, since you never saw him, he never named himself, and really all his short blips of speech were extraneous to the actual content of the show). It was only one of two places on TV I know of that ever showed anything by Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics (the other being Solid Gold of all shows). They showed Bad Brains, the Dead Kennedys, Grace Jones, and uncut versions of videos you wouldn't catch during primetime. It was a programming free fire zone.
Now we have the problem that MTV, VH1 and I am sure MuchMusic, Fuse and all the other also-rans have become so programmatic, so compartmentalized and rigid beyond hope, that any chance of a show like that airing now is essentially nil. Unless some whackaloon decides to take his old 80s VHS collection and some downloads from a p2p network and takes them to the local cable access channel and pulls some un-retarded variation of Waynes World, we are destined for ever lower standards of cool.
If anyone has old NF footage, let me know.
Why do you ask? Actually, you most likely aren't because I would be surprised if more than 4 people read my inane musings, and of those 4, I am sure none remember a show that played in the 80s on a B-grade cable network in the deep bowels of the night. But I digress.
Night Flight was initially a 4 hour block of utter freeform madness. Usually several hours worth of random videos with interspersed interviews (including a very bad infamous one with super-white, super-moribund Peter Frampton), concert footage and strange shorts, both animated and live action.
It was not uncommon to see one hit wonder Rockwell followed by Kate Bush, a smattering of animated jibberish (anyone remember the French-Czech sci-fi absurdity that was Fantasic Planet or La Planète Sauvage as it was originally known), maybe 15 minutes of a live show from Bauhaus or a documentary on some second string post-punk band -- although some consider Bauhaus a second string post punk band. More videos (maybe Fishbone, maybe Talking Heads, maybe Timex Social Club, maybe all three). More animated weirdness. Pepper at regualar intervals with a rather goofy voiceover (I have no idea who the "host" was, since you never saw him, he never named himself, and really all his short blips of speech were extraneous to the actual content of the show). It was only one of two places on TV I know of that ever showed anything by Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics (the other being Solid Gold of all shows). They showed Bad Brains, the Dead Kennedys, Grace Jones, and uncut versions of videos you wouldn't catch during primetime. It was a programming free fire zone.
Now we have the problem that MTV, VH1 and I am sure MuchMusic, Fuse and all the other also-rans have become so programmatic, so compartmentalized and rigid beyond hope, that any chance of a show like that airing now is essentially nil. Unless some whackaloon decides to take his old 80s VHS collection and some downloads from a p2p network and takes them to the local cable access channel and pulls some un-retarded variation of Waynes World, we are destined for ever lower standards of cool.
If anyone has old NF footage, let me know.
posted by theloniusfunk at 3:31 AM
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