Just the Ticket #128: Stay Tuned (100k View Special)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster

You'll see why later, but of all of my reviews, this is the one that I would most like to do as a video some day. Unfortunately, I sound awful in recorded form and I lack the time and motivation to write, record, and edit videos on a weekly basis. So blogging it is!

And seeing as how Stay Tuned is a common sign-off/"here's what's coming up" phrase of mine, as well as the title of my seldom-used TV review series, I thought Stay Tuned would be Just the Ticket to do a review in celebration of this blog passing a hundred-thousand views last month.

Ticketmaster's Note: Though it hasn't been very long since I re-introduced Twitter (now "X" because birds are the John Cena of the animal kingdom, according to the richest, dumbest Elongated Muskrat to ever exist), I still find that it is an intrusive, smutty garbage fire of a platform, and will no longer be promoting myself there. I may try my hand at LinkedIn, and possibly start a Discord in the future. But until then, the new call to action is that you please remember to comment at the bottom of this post, Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook to like and get the latest news on my content.

Stay Tuned is at once a formulaic, cash-grab relic of its time (released in 1992), and a compelling, entertaining, technical marvel of a thing with a rich underworld (literally) to its reality. So if you haven't seen it, put yourself in an early-90s mindset and go watch Stay Tuned to avoid the spoilers I'm about to drop on you.

It opens by showing a lot, but giving away very little, with a stereotypical (for the time), semi-elderly couple who are lazy and TV-obsessed, but flips the traditional, chauvanistic dynamic on its head by having the husband grumble about having to wait on his wife's every need. That is, until a shadowy figure (Spike, played by character actor Jeffrey Jones, who fit the role perfectly, even over a decade before he became a registered sex-offender with multiple failure-to-update charges) offers the man an undefined, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that leads to the offscreen disappearance of him and his wife. I love how this opening scene sets up the campy-threatening atmosphere of the movie and establishes its horror elements without showing very much. And the animated, neon TV that eats the early-90s-as-Hell opening credits is fun and unsettling.

Speaking of registered sex-offenders, Stay Tuned then immediately shows itself as a 90s relic by having the young male lead's (Darryl Knable, played by soap actor David Tom, the lesser-known brother of Heather and Nicole) voiceover intro compare his father to Bill Cosby. He also name-drops Alan Thicke (father of the guy whose most famous song is about the "Blurred Lines" of sexual consent). Having nothing to do with sex crimes, but being ironic because of the wholesome, nuclear family ideal being promoted on television at the time, the voiceover also name-drops Mike Brady from The Brady Bunch (actor Robert Reed, who portrayed Mike Brady, was gay).

What ensues is your basic, "father obsessed with thing falls back in love with his wife and reconnects to his family after being tortured by supernatural and/or sci-fi version of thing" story that was popular at the time, with the aforementioned Darryl Knable being cast and costumed to make young David Tom look like a cross between Kevin McCallister from Home Alone and Ralphie from A Christmas Story, and the daughter (Diane Knable, played by Who's the Boss and Party Of Five star Heather McComb) dressing like an extra from Blossom, being a tweeny jerk to her little brother, and inviting her gaggle of shrieking, cheerleader girlfriends over for a slumber party when their parents are...away for reasons.

But they are the background support team and C-Plot here. Yes, Darryl has some Chekov's A/V Skills that will be important in later acts, but Diane is just there so Darryl has someone to convince that there is a Michigan J. Frog afoot (this is a Warner Bros. movie, so why not have that be a thing?). The majority focus is on the aforementioned husband/wife dynamic, with Roy Knable (the late, great John Ritter) being less Jason Seaver-meets-Cliff Huxtable-meets-Mike Brady than he is so obsessed with watching TV that he can recite any episode of any show (even at first viewing?) line-for-line, and ignores his wife, Helen, even though she looks like Pam Dawber.

When Helen smashes the family television, though, who should happen to show up with a "free" television, satellite dish, and universal remote (the literal plot device from Click, but fourteen years earlier) than Spike! There are several hints (six hundred sixty-six channels, soul contract, show and movie title puns like Three Men and Rosemary's Baby, etc.) that Spike is a demon, but Roy only hears "free TV with tons of channels" and a movie needs to happen, so like a modern software user, he clicks "I Agree" without reading the EULA.

Huh. Spike doesn't show up until Helen smashes the TV. Spike is a demon. Helen Knable. Hell Enable? Did they pick that surname just so she could be a foreshadowing pun? Am I infuriated or impressed? Should I be infuriated or impressed? Questions for later? Questions for later.

Anyway, Roy and Helen fight in the backyard when she finds out about the new TV, and when she goes to smash it, too, it does the thing that the shrink ray did in Honey, I [past-tense verb] the Kids, and the couple get sucked into a twisted TV multiverse by a pretty decent digital warping effect for the time. It then turns into kind of a good "video game movie for people who don't like video game movies," with each show and channel serving as a mini-game, challenge, or level that has a gradual (relative to the runtime of a feature film) effect on the Knables' relationship.

The level of inspiration and effort that goes into these sequences varies as the film goes on (a game show over a pit of Hellfire, a pro-wrestling match--with no defined rules because Helen just decides it's a Hardcore match at one point and starts spamming foreign objects like a noob playing WWF No Mercy on the hardest setting--announced by Mario "Fuck You, Luigi" Mario himself, Captain Lou Albano, a Looney Tunes-esque animated sequence supervised by the Chuck Jones, a Salt 'n' Pepa music video, and eventually just a collage of Family Guy-meets-The Critic cutaway parodies like Northern Overexposure, Driving Over Miss Daisy, The Exorcisist--the main reason I remembered this movie by name--and the aforementioned Three Men and Rosemary's Baby). As a child of the 90s who grew up on classic TV, I appreciated then-relevant references to the Maxwell Audio commercial, the Three Men movies, Three's Company (Ritter's most famous TV role prior to 8 Simple Rules), and numerous other nostalgia kicks. The film even has a few industry meta gags, like acknowledging formulaic noir/gangster movie deaths, showing off anachronistic firearm choices in period sequences, and having the broadcasting industry literally being run by Hell.

Oh, yeah; if you didn't get the reference at the beginning of this review, there's a whole Hell economy that's hinted at and pretty richly explored when we're not watching the Knables evade certain death at the mercy of mechanical cartoon cats, demon wrestlers, heavily armed gangsters, the French Revolution, exploding trains, or CGI/green-screen/practical/real wolves (the compositing in the Northern Overexposure sequence is obvious, but done well enough that I still enjoyed it). Basically, all of those channels are a cosmically agreed-upon proving ground for souls that also serve as a soul-based economy and a form of entertainment (similar to Death Race 2000, The Running Man, The Hunger Games, etc) for Satan (a.k.a. "The Boss" because of family-friendly censorship practices), in which demons like Spike, Crowley (the ageless and always identifiable Eugene Levy), and Pierce (a demon rallying for Spike's job because impalement puns, played by a young Erik King--Doakes from Dexter) have soul quotas that they fulfill if their targets die or do not escape the TV multiverse within twenty-four hours (which puts a ticking clock on the narrative). Crowley becomes sort of a sidekick/gatekeeper for the Knables' adventures, and shows that he can be lovable, even when he's playing an undead denizen of Hell.

Things drag when the parodies get more derivative or focus shifts to the kids, and especially when the false climaxes start piling up, but this is John Ritter's movie all the way. Stay Tuned shows that he was game for anything, whether it be voice acting, noir physical comedy, dressing in drag, getting destroyed by professional wrestlers (One Man Gang, and stuntwoman Faith Minton), parodying The Man With No Name, or hip-hop dancing with Salt 'n' Pepa. Ritter is an American treasure gone too soon.

After a thematically appropriate scene where Darryl uses his established technical expertise to save his father from dying in a French Revolution historical drama broadcast from Hell by pretending to be the voice of God, a prolonged channel-hopping sequence, and Roy dressed as Clint Eastwood saving Helen from Spike, dynamite, and an oncoming train, things resolve as the modern moviegoer would expect from a film of this type and era, and the credits promise "Next Season on HTV" with a montage of more hellishly punny TV show parodies. However, the film only brought in $12 million on a $15-20 million budget, so whether or not there was intended to be a sequel (likely with a new family and Erik King replacing Jeffrey Jones), there was no talk of a sequel or reboot treatment until AMC considered a TV adaptation in August 2020. And those of us with sense know what happened in 2020. Also, there's the current SAG/AFTRA strike to think about if you have fond but disturbing memories of the movie like I did, and you want more Stay Tuned in your sensory brain-holes.

I trash, pass, and praise movies in near-equal measure on this platform, so as a print critic and aspiring visual content creator, I'd like to make it clear that nothing I say or do is meant to discount the various levels of passion, effort, and funding that go into finished products like this. Work is work, and I stand behind those who were denied their dues in a constantly fluid landscape of physical and streaming releases, questionable usage of digitized likenesses, and countless other, contractually omitted unknowns.

Stay Tuned is a clear product of its time with a few pacing issues, but underneath the initial premise of Honey, I [Verbed] the Kids-meets-Monty Python-meets-Evil Dead, it is lore-rich beyond its years with a recognizable and (mostly) lovable cast who are game for anything.

Nostalgia may have brought me back to it, but the sheer fun of Stay Tuned kept me from channel surfing.

A-

Before I go, I'd like to share a couple of funny clips from the movie that stuck with me.

First, there's this one, for obvious reasons:

And then watch the kid's lips in this parody commercial for "Yogi Beer":

His dialogue here is mixed louder than the other characters (a clear sign of early/cheap ADR (automated dialogue replacement) or dubbing. He says, "gimme another one, babe!" But if you look at his lips, they used a take where he said, "gimme another one, bitch!" and recorded cleaner dialogue that they overlayed in editing to keep the film's PG rating. The boy is played by Shane Meier, who went on to play the lead in The Matthew Shepard Story and have a long list of TV guest credits and voice acting roles.

I've decided not to answer those questions I was saving for later because I enjoyed the movie too much to think about them. So please remember to comment at the bottom of this post, Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook to like and get the latest news on my content.

Stay Tuned, and

Ticketmaster,

Out.