Rando! Pray TV (1981) — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

I’ve spent much of my career exploring why some things endure and become bigger, more important and more culturally significant with the passage of time while others fade into obscurity. That was the focus of my Forgotbusters column at The Dissolve, a publication that has only grown in stature and prestige in the half decade since it ceased publication. The extended version of The Weird Accordion to Al book is nothing if not an exhaustively researched, 500 page look into the enduring appeal and preternatural resilience of the “Eat It” guy.

In the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of The Weird Accordion to Al book I devote a lot of time and space to exploring UHF’s triumphant if weirdly inevitable journey from critically derided flop to beloved cult treasure.

I’ve been thinking a lot about UHF, and every other facet of Al’s career as of late as I put the finishing touches on the expanded version of The Weird Accordion to Al. That’s what led me to the scattershot 1981 comedy Pray TV, which Wikipedia lists under “See also” in its page for UHF. Pray TV’s Wikipedia page, meanwhile, notes “The film is very similar in both plot and style to the 1989 film UHF.[2][3]"

So why did one wacky comedy about a nutty local TV station that explodes in popularity when it turns its airwaves over to an outrageous gang of oddballs whose homemade programming proves an unexpected hit with audiences looking for something new fail miserably en route to being instantly and completely forgotten while the other rose to notoriety as one of the major cult comedies of the 1980s?

The most obvious answer is that Pray TV failed to match UHF’s enduring popularity because it fucking sucks. It just does. Funny justifies and excuses just about everything. But when a movie is as brutally, completely unfunny as Pray TV all of its other weaknesses stand out in sharper relief.

The problems begin with Pray TV’s choice of satirical subject. The hypocrisy of holy high rollers preaching the gospel while angrily demanding the faithful’s money on God’s behalf is just too goddamn fat, easy, lazy and exhausted to be conducive to fresh satire. How can any comedian or satirist make Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker look or seem any more ridiculous than they already do?

Even with the thin connective tissue of old time religion fueling the newfangled popularity of oddball television station KGOD, Pray TV is so random and scattershot that it makes the UHF screenplay look like a Chinatown-like work of virtuoso sophistication by comparison. Pray TV doesn’t really have a plot. It’s just one goddamn thing after another.

The directorial debut of Rick Friedberg, father of Jason of Friedberg/Seltzer infamy and eventual director of Spy Hard, Pray TV stars Archie Hahn as Fletcher Peebles, the cheerful station manager of KRUD, a low-rent, low-budget station on the perpetual brink of collapse that gets a massive injection of money and direction when it’s taken over by Marvin Fleece, a big-talking wheeler-dealer working the lucrative religion grift played by Dabney Coleman.

To save the failing station, it receives a Godly make-over, or at least a faux-religious re-branding. KRUD becomes KGOD and the station’s financial fortunes turn around quickly and dramatically.

Fred Wilson (Lewis Arquette), the oddball anchor who uses a ventriloquist’s dummy to help him deliver the news becomes a Christian oddball anchor who uses a ventriloquist dressed like clergy to help him deliver the news. Jack and Joanie, the hapless resident on-air fitness instructors, meanwhile, become hapless Christian on-air fitness instructors.

The feeble gag of Jack and Joanie is that Joanie (Jacque Lynn Colton) is overweight while Jack (Paul Reubens) is an effeminate, bleached blonde homosexual.

Jack is seemingly written as a screaming queen but in his feature film debut, the man who would give us Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure underplays the role so nimbly and subversively that this dopey, mildly racist bit of juvenilia has no choice but to sheepishly acknowledge that being gay is no big deal and certainly nothing to laugh at or snicker about.

In the 1980s seemingly nothing amused lowbrow comedy filmmakers quite as much as the existence and appearance of Hare Krishnas. Just as Burt Reynolds and Mel Brooks both subscribed to the curious delusion that there was no surer recipe for cinematic hilarity in the 1970s than putting the camera on Dom DeLuise and letting the big man rip, in the Reagan decade Hare Krishnas ruled as lazy living sight gags, human punchlines whose appearance anywhere, really, is supposed to garner instant yucks.

It’s not just the clothing and habits of Hare Krishna that Pray TV finds inherently guffaw-inducing. It’s similarly of the mindset that Orthodox Jews, priests, nuns, preachers, gurus and shamans are so innately funny that they render jokes unnecessary; it’s enough to simply put them all on parade on the same kooky station in roles traditionally filled with the secular and unGodly.

Pray TV was written by three very different men: director Friedberg, Dick Chudnow, a Milwaukee-bred Comedysportz guru who also plays a series of broad caricatures of the mildly racist variety in addition to co-writing some of the songs and finally Nick Castle, whose fascinatingly all over the place career involves distinctions as varied as playing Mike Myers/The Shape in Halloween, co-writing Escape From New York, and directing The Last Starfighter, Major Payne and Mr. Wrong.

Castle and Chudnow also collaborated on songs that make Pray TV the most half-assed of semi-musicals, a slapdash affair full of original ditties that act either as a greek chorus commenting on the action or reflect the godly convictions of the bible-thumpers who fill KGOD’s line-up.

For example, a black prisoner played by Roger Moseley of Magnum P.I sings a nifty Smokey Robinson pastiche about the pragmatic benefits of being born after first stabbing his way through a curtain reflexively and then just as intuitively running from a spotlight as if it were cop’s flashlight or headlights.

One of the reasons I wanted to watch and write about Pray TV is because it features rock Gods Devo as the Christian band Dove, which is of course an anagram for Devo. How fucking amazing does that sounds? Devo rocking out for Jesus in a zany 1980s comedy? How could that be anything less than awesome?

Alas, Devo’s appearance turns out to be a bait and switch. This is no Human Highways: Devo is onscreen for maybe a minute and a half and thoroughly fail to redeem or distinguish the proceedings.

As it wobbles to a close, Pray TV makes the unwise decision to try to get us to care about the soul of its impossibly white bread hero when he follows Fleece’s lead and sells out his ideals for the sake of a fat paycheck to the chagrin of a love interest who is even more achingly forgettable than Fletcher.

Pray TV is so forgettable that it is already fading from my memory like the pictures of Michael J. Fox’s family in that photograph in Back to the Future.

Then again, I am more than a little distracted. Between watching Pray TV and finishing this essay I got back the final edit of the bonus material for the extended Weird Accordion to Al book from “Weird Al” Yankovic, who copy-edited and fact-checked the new stuff in less than twenty-four hours AND praised it effusively and sincerely.

I’m not gonna lie: it made me feel great. I very much hope the public and “Weird Al” Yankovic fans love the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Edition of The Weird Accordion but the fact that Al himself sincerely digs it really makes me feel like my work is already two-thirds done.

I’m so excited about a milestone in my career as an author that it’s making it difficult, if not impossible, to concentrate on work that would be negligible under any circumstances. Weirdly enough, the last time this happened was when I sold my memoir The Big Rewind to Scribner for one hundred thousand dollars in 2008, which made it similarly hard to concentrate on my primary work for the day: reviewing the Friedberg/Seltzer abomination Meet the Spartans.

Yes, every twelve years or so I hit a wonderful professional milestone in my career as an author that makes it substantially more difficult to concentrate on the shitty lowbrow comedy from the Friedberg family I also have to write about that day.

What achievement/Friedberg atrocity will 2032 bring? Spy Hard and a Pulitzer Prize? Date Movie and a five book deal with Simon & Schuster? Who knows? Whatever incredible literary honor looms in the distant future, it will make it very difficult to churn out a decent review of whatever Friedberg joint I’m cursed with writing about because not only are these movies terrible; they barely qualify as movies.

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And, this is VERY exciting, but you can also pre-order the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL with dozens more illustrations and a new cover as well as over a hundred pages of new material covering every facet of Al’s career, including The Complete Al, UHF, The Weird Al Show, the fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang! and the 2018 Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour for just $23.00, signed copy . tax + USA domestic shipping included here release date: July 27th, 2020