 |
| From https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzlkYzM0ZmUtMTA1MS0 0ZjNlLWJlYzMtNjE3Y2RmODA2NjhmXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTM2Mzg4MA@@._V1_.jpg |
Screenplay: Anne Beatts
Cast: Cassandra Peterson as Elvira,
Mistress of the Dark; Katherine Helmond as Aunt Minerva; Phoebe Augustine as
Paige; Cristine Rose as Lindsay; Ted Henning as Chip; John Paragon as the voice
of Reinfield
Synopsis: Elvira (Cassandra Peterson), posing as a fake
medium despite being an actual witch and living with a relation Aunt Minerva (Katherine Helmond), lives in peaceful existence
in Manhatten, Kansas until their niece Paige (Phoebe Augustine) arrives and the police are trying to catch her
out for fake love potions.
So Cassandra "Elvira" Peterson was involved with an unaired
pilot for a sitcom in which her character, created as the host for a show
showing old b-movies only to become a cult institution all by herself, gets to
be in the central of the kind of popular television from this era. The pilot,
made by CBS, was never released -
stories abound that the level of sexuality to the Elvira character, Cassandra Peterson more than happily
using her busty figure for comedy and sharp with sexual one liners, was
something unprepared for by certain CBS executives which killed the pilot's
chances immediately. A further irony is to be found, as I researched this
pilot, was that in 1996 a show with a similar premise (two aunts and a niece,
all witches, and a talking black cat) would go forth as Sabrina the Teenage Witch and be incredibly successful, a series I
watched a lot in my own youth and is probably as big an influence on me as an
Englishmen as for many Americans growing up in the nineties.
I'll be brutally honest in saying
The Elvira Show wasn't for me.
Immediately the laugh track, recorded live in front of an audience, welcomed me
into the strange and unreal world of sitcoms again, where each line (no matter
how cheesy or bad) has to illicit a laugh unless a "sweetened" fake
laugh track was included. Having not encountered one for a long time, pawing
over each line, I felt its strange contrivance placed up a barrier, not like
how with the BBC Red Dwarf series at
its best where the laughs were won, but uncomfortably mannered. Here it reminds
me where the rabbits sequence from David
Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (2006) was
drawing its influence for laughter appearing for the most abrupt lines.
 |
| From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/c-P6bHZc7ZY/hqdefault.jpg |
A funny premise is had in the idea Elvira, the character built in films as well having actual magical powers, is pretending to be a charlatan to keep her head down whilst Aunt Minerva (Katherine Helmond) is more inclined to enchant a shopping trolley blithely to follow her in public. (Their talking cat Reinfield, voiced by regular Peterson collaborator John Paragon, sadly doesn't work and feels like a bad Garfield stand-in). With this in mind, the pilot pushes the sexual innuendo as far as it could, "stiff cop" and all pushing the material to the point the talking black cat Reinfield has to double check one line as if almost an apology for the smuttiness; in the modern day however it is fairly innocuous stuff. It's still a sitcom episode which contrives a tiny, bit sized plot which easily resolves - in this case a hunky male cop under cover to help bust Elvira's love potion ring, Petersen's character gladly trying to seduce him. With a niece raised in a convent, the aunts attempt to hide their abilities throughout the episode only to establish said nieces are like themselves more than she knew. It's pretty predictable stuff and when the comedy is mainly from obvious sexual humour and lame puns, it did become tiring.
The production for early nineties
television doesn't help. The staged nature shouldn't be detraction in the
slightest, especially when there's one gag about the carpet flipping up to
swallow dust Elvira sweeps underneath it, suggesting it could get away with
some magical weirdness for laughs, but it adds to the flatness to the material,
the aforementioned predictable sitcom. There's a sense, having no previous experience
of Petersen's work, it was the sitcom
format for me that caused the problems rather than the character herself. It's
still an amusing curiosity but a little innocuous for my tastes.
 |
| From http://nightflight.com/wp-content/uploads/ELVIRA-SHOW-9.jpg |
No comments:
Post a Comment