Around these parts, we love Halloween. It’s long been my favorite holiday, since I was a kid and – because we couldn’t afford to buy one of those awful plastic tunics – I made my own costume by painting a beard on my face with watercolor paint and completing my outfit with an old shirt or hoodie.
If you look to your right on this screen under the heading “what the what,” you’ll find a link to a lot of Halloween posts on this site, going back most of the way to the origin of this site in the early 2010s. You’ll find posts about vintage and recent Halloween costumes and decor as well as Halloween movies to watch.
I have to note, however, a subject that makes me feel equally childlike: SCTV, also known as Second City Television.
With the loss of Catherine O’Hara and Joe Flaherty, two SCTV mainstays, and the aging status of most of the rest of the cast, who appeared on stage for years before landing Second City and SCTV television shows beginning in 1976, I’m really glad we’re in the golden age of documentaries about “SCTV” and its stars. There are good reminiscences of John Candy available and the documentary of the still-very-much-with-us Martin Short’s life, “Marty: Life is Short,” debuted just a few months ago, although I guarantee you’ll get teary before the end credits roll.
Still to come to home video this fall is “You Had to Be There,” the 2025 documentary about the 1972 stage production of “Godspell” starring Victor Garber and many of the geniuses of SCTV.
The Martin Short and “Godspell” docs could serve as bookends for “SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of,” which debuted on Netflix last night, I believe. (That’s when I saw it, anyway, and I watched it the minute I could.)
With interviews with O’Hara and Short and Dave Thomas and Eugene Levy and many others, including SCTV fans like Conan O’Brien, the SCTV doc looks back fondly on the show and the cast but doesn’t avoid touching on controversies like the divide among cast members when Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis “took off” – pun intended – with their McKenzie Brothers characters from the Great White North and won not only a comedy album but a movie, “Strange Brew,” released in 1983 and starring Thomas and Moranis and Max von Sydow, if you can believe it.
The SCTV doc made me holler with delight several times as it presented clips from not only Count Floyd’s “Monster Chiller Horror Theater” – featuring Flaherty as the horror film host who also doubles as the station’s news anchor, Candy as horror movie mad scientist Doctor Tongue and Eugene Levy as Woody Tobias Jr., also known as the hunchback henchman – but lesser-remembered bits like “Play It Again, Bob,” with Woody Allen (Moranis) making a movie about Bob Hope (Thomas). The impersonations are the best I’ve ever seen.
The six seasons of “SCTV,” including the NBC late-night seasons, are available on streaming services and online and if you’re an SCTV fan you’ll enjoy a lot of it. The show could get lost in itself at times, but that was the fun of it: the conceit of SCTV being the programming of a basic cable channel called SCTV, the cast and writers could parody every type of TV show, movie and commercial. They built a show around these parodies but made us believe that this was the worst TV station in the world, run by lunatics and egomaniacs.
Definitely enjoy a good fun scary movie this Halloween – or anytime – but you should seek out “SCTV” episodes and the documentaries I cite here.
You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.
