I surely can't be the only one here who, 25-30 years ago, would've been spending tonight watching hour upon hour of lovingly-curated garbage on the USA Network.
Night Flight was the business. I discovered that hot mess while I was still in elementary school, and I'm pretty sure it changed my brain for the better/worse. If you never watched it, well, these video snippets are completely random but also totally representative:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4vIqkpQQ9M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhULosEvyhQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsmtE7b_du0
And it just went on like that for hours, all night long. This is where I first saw a lot of the animation that later wound up on Liquid Television, Alex Winter's short films, old Japanese TV shows (like the one that was repurposed into Power Rangers). I guess IFC started airing truncated versions of the old episodes earlier this year. And I believe there's a YT channel with a lot of this material but damned if I can find it at the moment. This is another good but ancient but also apparently semi-regularly updated link: http://night_flight1.tripod.com/
Up All Night came later and operated on a whole other level but was equally influential in its way. I missed the horror host train by a number of years, so Rhonda Shear and Gilbert Gottfried had to carry the mantle for me. Theirs weren't so much horror movies as they were horrible movies. But they were fun garbage and, again, pretty indelibly warped my sensibilities.
Rhonda Shear's YouTube channel has a playlist with what appears to be all of her material from Up All Night (I desperately want some enterprising soul to resplice her interstitials into the corresponding movies): http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkaFWDv1OkJHzVE-nYCVjQ_0vCqFBRyT3
(Sadly, I've been able to find very little of Gilbert's material online.)
A modern-day hero has compiled a Letterboxd list of the movies featured on Up All Night: https://letterboxd.com/noahphex/list/usa-up-all-night/
Please use this space to reminisce if you're of a like mind. Feel free to include discussion of Commander USA's Groovie Movies (which were only excluded because they aired during the afternoon and weren't quite as central to my existence at the time).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCLintTq5yw
I think very rarely (too rarely) they’d show music videos too. StrNge yo see legitimately good movies like Hollywood Shuffle and Body Double on that list. What I mostly remember are the queasily bad comedies like Night Patrol Up the Academy and Jekyl and Hyde Together Again. Gottfried had a funny joke once about how the movies thry’d show would have the nudity cut out so there would be abrupt cuts from a girl in a bedroom into a cat chase.
― Nerdstrom Poindexter, Sunday, 18 November 2018 21:10 (five years ago) link
When I read that Terence Nance specifically requested HBO that Random Acts of Flyness air at midnight on Fridays my mind immediately flashed to stuff like this, think he is a lil too young to have grown up on it but was one of the first things my mind went to as a touchstone
― H in Addis, Monday, 19 November 2018 05:45 (five years ago) link