Search - The Weird Al Show - The Complete Series on DVD

A Show About A Guy Named Al

J. Rose | Greenwood, MS USA | 10/13/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"At one time, Saturday morning television was an actual EVENT. Those of us who are of a certain generation remember that as children, we waited through the week of rather boring, standard television (broken up by the occasional rerun of STAR TREK) to reach SATURDAY MORNING: a chaotic place where things such as bears stealing stuff, psychedelic science-fiction, and coyotes falling for fifty feet and actually living to tell about it ruled.

THE WEIRD AL SHOW debuted in the wake of PEE-WEE'S PLAYHOUSE, Paul Reubens' very creative but unfortunately staunchly mannered and deadly serious kids' show featuring his character Pee-Wee Herman. Though both shows have the same set designer, THE WEIRD AL SHOW succeeds in bringing forth the unbridled anarchy that PWP only hinted at, mainly because of two things about Weird Al Yankovic: first, he has no pretensions about his work, and second, his humor attempts to be truly anarchic while remaining, on some level, for everybody. You have to have respect for a man who purposely designed his Ear-Booker Productions company logo (which appears at the end of every episode) to be the most nerve-wracking thing ever made.

The plot is fairly simple: Al (Weird Al Yankovic), a goofy, often jerky but still likable fellow who lives in a cave some twenty miles below the surface of the earth, is bringing you a television show featuring himself, various friends and neighbors (such as the Hooded Avenger (Brian Haley), the superhero who lives in the cave next door, and his strangely cute cousin Corky (Danielle Weeks), who shares Al's taste for clashing-but-colorful wardrobe), and his roommate/pet/best friend Harvey The Wonder Hamster, a professional stunt hamster who performs such feats as hang-gliding off a model of Mount Everest, jumping a race car and wrestling Randy "Macho Man" Savage (who is soundly defeated by said plucky rodent). Each episode has Al involved in a situation that serves as an object lesson of sorts to the viewer, which Al rarely completely learns until the end of the episode. While the lesson is fairly ham-handed in its execution (much of which happened due to CBS forcing educational mandates some ten years before No Child Left Behind down the producers/creators' throats, which Al and several others detail in extensive commentary for every episode), the show manages to demonstrate the raucous nature of Saturday Morning TV at a time when it was in its death rattle.

This set features commentaries for every episode by Al, his partners in crime (director Peyton Reed and producer Thomas F. Frank), and occasional drop-ins from Emo Philips, Danielle Weeks and Judy Tenuta, who all appeared on the show. None of these are particularly complementary of the CBS network, who often went to blows with Al and made the production of every episode a struggle. The set also features concept art galleries and animated storyboards for FATMAN, the Al-produced cartoon that appeared on the show, as well as show theme karaoke (probably the weirdest feature on the set).

Pick this up if you like Weird Al, as I do: it's a very good showing from the mind of a talented comedy performer who managed to overcome many obstacles to create something interesting and fun at a time when it was really needed. Good work."