DANDY CANDY RETURNS: THE TELEVISION WAS ALWAYS HAUNTED

By Dax Silver

There was a period in American life when television did not feel curated.

It arrived.

That distinction matters.

You did not always choose what you were watching. You encountered it. Something was already playing when you entered the room. A movie had begun forty minutes earlier. A comedian you had never heard of was standing in front of a cardboard spaceship. A Canadian television station was transmitting some elaborate parody whose references you only half understood. Three channels later, Richard Pryor was attempting to spend thirty million dollars.

You remained because there was nothing else quite like it.

Dandy Candy returns in pursuit of that sensation.

Not nostalgia, exactly. Nostalgia is too clean. It photographs the past after somebody has removed the ashtrays.

This is about transmission.

This is about the television glowing in a dark room while everybody else in the house is asleep.

This is about discovering culture sideways.

And so our evening begins with Really Weird Tales, passes through selected episodes of SCTV, takes an expensive detour through Brewster’s Millions, and finally collapses happily into the cinematic compost heap of It Came from Hollywood.

On paper, this is not a sensible program.

Excellent.

Sensible programming is how we ended up with algorithms.

THE WEIRD TALE

Really Weird Tales announces the evening’s governing principle immediately: television is permitted to be strange.

More importantly, it is permitted to be strange without constructing an entire mythology around its strangeness.

There is something wonderfully temporary about television of this species. Sets resemble sets. Costumes resemble costumes. Effects sometimes announce the precise limits of the available budget. Nobody appears particularly troubled by this.

The imagination is therefore visible.

Modern entertainment often spends extraordinary amounts of money making sure we cannot see the machinery. Older television occasionally did the opposite. The machinery became part of the pleasure. You could see the seams, and through those seams came an enormous amount of personality.

This is where Really Weird Tales belongs.

Not in some carefully indexed vault of prestige genre television, but rattling around the basement of cultural memory with a flashlight and several objects nobody can identify.

Perfect Dandy Candy material.

AND NOW, BACK TO SCTV

Then comes SCTV.

There is an important reason these are selected episodes rather than a ceremonial presentation of some agreed-upon masterpiece.

SCTV works best as television.

That sounds obvious until one considers how frequently old television is now consumed as archival material: season, episode, chronology, completeness.

No.

Tonight we turn it on.

We drop into Melonville.

Suddenly there are stations inside stations, performers trapped inside formats, local personalities behaving as though their tiny television empire constitutes the entire known universe.

SCTV understood something extraordinarily early: the medium itself was funny.

Not merely the programs.

The station identifications were funny. The advertisements were funny. The desperation was funny. The artificial intimacy of broadcasters was funny. The strange authority granted to anybody placed behind a desk was funny.

The entire architecture of television could be dismantled and rebuilt as comedy.

This is why SCTV has aged with such peculiar grace.

Sketches disappear. References become obscure. Celebrities fade.

But media behavior remains media behavior.

Everyone is still performing for the camera.

Everyone still wants the audience.

Everyone still thinks their little corner of the broadcast constitutes civilization.

Only the screens have become smaller.

THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS AND ONE TERRIBLE PROBLEM

Into this artificial television universe strolls Richard Pryor in Brewster’s Millions.

And suddenly Dandy Candy has something resembling a conventional movie.

Almost.

The premise remains one of cinema’s great mechanisms: Montgomery Brewster must spend thirty million dollars in thirty days without acquiring assets in order to inherit three hundred million dollars.

It is capitalism converted into a game-show punishment.

Spend everything.

Keep nothing.

Explain nothing.

The beauty of Brewster’s Millions is that the premise begins as fantasy and slowly reveals itself as satire.

Brewster discovers that losing money efficiently is remarkably difficult when surrounded by people whose entire social structure exists to preserve, multiply, invest, leverage, protect, and worship it.

Even waste develops an economic logic.

Even destruction attracts advisers.

Even giving money away becomes complicated.

And Richard Pryor, crucially, remains Richard Pryor: amused, frustrated, incredulous, forever appearing to recognize some additional layer of absurdity approximately three seconds before everyone around him.

There is a wonderfully American insanity at the center of the film.

A man receives access to unimaginable wealth and is immediately transformed into its prisoner.

He cannot simply enjoy the money.

There are rules.

There are lawyers.

There are conditions.

There are observers.

There is accounting.

The fantasy of wealth becomes paperwork.

America, ladies and gentlemen.

PLEASE STAND BY

And then we return to SCTV.

This is important.

Dandy Candy does not treat the television material as an appetizer placed before the feature.

It interrupts.

It contaminates.

It changes the evening’s grammar.

After enough SCTV, Brewster’s Millions begins to feel suspiciously like something airing on SCTV.

One can practically imagine the announcer:

“Tonight, following Farm Film Celebrity Blow-Up, Richard Pryor attempts to bankrupt himself.”

This is where programming becomes something more interesting than a list of titles.

Meaning begins forming between the objects.

A movie changes the television surrounding it.

The television changes the movie.

Context becomes editing.

IT CAME FROM HOLLYWOOD

There could be no better ending than It Came from Hollywood.

By this point we have spent the evening watching television parody television, movies parody money, and strange little productions surviving long after the industrial machinery that created them has disappeared.

So naturally we conclude with a movie about movies.

Bad movies.

Wonderful movies.

Movies containing monsters, aliens, scientific catastrophes, terrible dialogue, miraculous incompetence, questionable dinosaurs, ambitious miniatures and the eternal cinematic promise that somebody somewhere has tampered with forces beyond human comprehension.

It Came from Hollywood belongs to a vanished tradition of media appreciation in which mockery and affection were still allowed to occupy the same chair.

The movies are ridiculous.

The movies are beloved.

These positions are not contradictory.

Indeed, they may be inseparable.

Anyone who has genuinely loved junk culture understands this.

You do not love it despite the rubber monster.

You love the rubber monster.

You love the actor staring three feet to the left of the special effect.

You love the laboratory containing six pieces of scientific equipment and one aggressively blinking light.

You love the spaceship because somebody built the spaceship.

The failure becomes evidence of aspiration.

Someone tried.

That matters.

THE GHOST IN THE CABLE BOX

And somewhere during this ridiculous evening, something begins to emerge.

A lost mode of watching.

Not better.

Not purer.

Simply different.

Culture once contained more accidents.

You found things because they happened to be on.

You became interested in performers without knowing their biographies.

You watched movies without consulting aggregated scores.

You saw the ending before the beginning.

You remembered scenes incorrectly for twenty years.

You occasionally spent the rest of your life searching for something whose title you never learned.

The inconvenience was part of the ecology.

Streaming solved the problem of access and accidentally eliminated some of the romance of collision.

Everything is available.

Nothing simply appears.

That is what Dandy Candy is trying to manufacture again.

Collision.

Really Weird Tales.

SCTV.

Brewster’s Millions.

SCTV again.

It Came from Hollywood.

Not a canon.

Not a syllabus.

A signal.

A television left broadcasting somewhere after midnight, sending comedy and monsters and money and cheap sets and magnificent stupidity into an otherwise dark room.

You turn the dial.

There it is.

For reasons nobody can explain, you keep watching.

Good.

Stay up.

Get weird.

The television was always haunted.

— Dax Silver