Thursday, October 25, 2018

Thursday Movie Picks #224: The Weird (TV edition)



This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This being the last Thursday of the month, it's time for another TV edition. And being the last Thursday in October, we get TV shows that are just plain weird. Well, I'm not too good at that, so I cheated slightly, as you'll see:



The Moneymaze (1975). Future AMC host Nick Clooney hosted this game show in which couples competed for the right to have one partner guide the other through a maze in which they could pick up a one and four zeroes at certain spots to win $10,000. Short-lived in part because premise and in part because of the expense: The crew had to be paid a lot to assemble that maze, and it cost a lot more studio time. I believe that in addition to the pilot, one other episode survives, thanks to Andy Warhol. One of his works of "art" had him record 24 hours of one TV station's broadcast on an early VCR, and The Moneymaze is one of the shows he recorded.



The $1.98 Beauty Show (1978-1980). From the warped mind of Chuck Barris, who gave us The Gong Show, is this spoof of beauty pageants, with rather plainer-looking entrants, and contestants winning the titular prize, and a bouquet of carrots.



Wilkins and Wontkins (c. 1960). Jim Henson produced a series of commercials for Wilkins Coffee in the late 1950s and early 1960s, creating a couple of proto-Muppets who had a rather stark warning on what might happen if you don't like Wilkins coffee. For anybody who got up in arms about that recent Muppet movie with the characters acting closer to an R rating, show them these commercials.

3 comments:

Brittani Burnham said...

I like the direction you went here. I haven't heard of any of these but they seem to fit the weird bill!

Birgit said...

I couldn’t get the first video to watch which is a bummer but I never heard of it. I have heard of the $1.98 Beauty Pageant Show which was so bad but funny bad. That gal must have ended up at strippers plus and she has no ass...just saying:) I love all those commercials...brilliant! I am one who liked the new Muppet Show and, I did see an early Kermit from the 1950’s and it was just like these commercials

Sonia Cerca said...

I haven't heard of any of these but they sound like a good fit.