The Daily Omnivore

The Show With No Name was a long-running and highly popular Public-access television cable TV show in Austin, Texas, hosted by Charlie Sotelo and the mysterious ‘Cinco.’ Each show featured clips of TV, film and music ephemera along with commentary by the hosts and calls from a predictably unruly Public-access television audience.

The clips were usually video snippets that captured a crazy moment of ephemeral history, such as Ed McMahon drunk on ‘The Tonight Show,’ an early live TV appearance by Frank Zappa playing the bicycle and other found instruments, or the famously disastrous Andy Kaufman appearance on ‘Fridays’ (ABC’s weekly late-night live comedy show). Often they were obscure cult favorites only circulated underground, such as ‘Heavy Metal Parking Lot,’ the profane bloopers of an actor in a Winnebago sales video, or Corey Haim’s ‘Me, Myself, and I.’ Many other clips simply presented a zeitgeist gone by: a trailer for an Akira Kurosawa or Sam Peckinpah film, a Bill Hicks comedy set, or Bob Dylan appearing on the Johnny Cash show.

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Adventure Time is an American animated television series created by Pendleton Ward (a former writer and storyboard artist of ‘The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack’) and produced by Frederator Studios for Cartoon Network. The series follows the adventures of Finn, a 14-year old boy whose best friend is Jake, a dog with magical powers such as growing and shrinking or stretching into many shapes. Finn and Jake live in the post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo.Ward describes Finn as a ‘fiery little kid with strong morals,’ while Jake is based on Bill Murray’s character in the movie ‘Meatballs.’ The series is based on a short produced for Frederator’s Nickelodeon animation incubator series ‘Random! Cartoons.’ After the short became a viral hit on the Internet, Cartoon Network picked it up for a full-length series that premiered in 2010.

According to Ward, the show’s style was influenced by his time at CalArts and his work as a storyboard artist on ‘The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack.’ He tries to include ‘beautiful’ moments like those in Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ and some subversive humor, inspired by series like ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse.’ Executive producer Fred Seibert compares the show’s animation style to that of ‘Felix the Cat’ and the Max Fleischer cartoons (e.g. ‘Betty Boop,’ ‘Popeye’) but says its world is also equally inspired by ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ and video games. Ward intends the show’s world to have a certain physical logic instead of ‘cartoony slapstick’ — even though magic exists in the story, the show’s writers try to create an internal consistency in how the characters interact with the world.

Second City Television (SCTV) is a Canadian television sketch comedy show offshoot from Toronto’s The Second City troupe that ran between 1976 and 1984. The basic premise of the show is that ‘SCTV’ is an independent television station in the city of Melonville.

Rather than broadcasting the usual TV rerun fare, the station produces a bizarre and humorously incompetent range of cheap local programming including a soap opera called ‘The Days of the Week’ (‘Monday… Tuesday… Wednesday… these are… the days of the week’), a game show, ‘Shoot At The Stars,’ in which celebrities are literally shot at like targets in a shooting gallery, and full blown movie spoofs like ‘Play it Again, Bob’ in which Woody Allen (Rick Moranis) tries to get Bob Hope (Dave Thomas) to star in his next film.

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In Living Color was an American sketch comedy television series, which ran on the Fox Network from 1990 to 1994. Brothers Keenen and Damon Wayans created, wrote, and starred in the program. The show was produced by Ivory Way Productions. The show was taped before a live studio audience in Hollywood.

The title of the series was inspired by the NBC announcement of broadcasts being presented ‘in living color’ during the 1950s and 1960s, prior to popularization of color television. It also refers to the fact that most of the show’s cast was African-American, unlike other sketches comedy shows like ‘Saturday Night Live’ whose casts are usually mostly white.

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Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! is an American sketch comedy television series, created by and starring Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, which premiered in 2007 on Cartoon Network’s ‘Adult Swim’ and ran until 2010. The program features surrealistic and often satirical humor (at points anti-humor), public-access television-style musical acts, bizarre faux-commercials, and editing and special effects chosen to make the show appear camp. The program has featured a wide range of actors such as Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly and Zach Galifianakis, as well as alternative comedians like Neil Hamburger, and television actors like Alan Thicke, celebrity look-alikes and impressionists.

The creators of the show have described it as ‘the nightmare version of television.’ The show expands the genre of the live-action material featured in Heidecker and Wareheim’s previous show ‘Tom Goes to the Mayor,’ such as Gibbons, the ‘Channel 5 Married News Team,’ and the Cinco Corporation with its variety of inefficient and tasteless products. New recurring characters and sketches include ‘Uncle Muscles Hour,’ a Public-access television variety program hosted by a gravelly-voiced ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic and Channel 5 News Correspondent Dr. Steve Brule, played by John C. Reilly.