In 1988 Frightmaster Stuart Gordon and SCTV Teamed Up for a Child Safety Video Starring Joe Flaherty as Count Floyd That's Better Than It Has Any Right to Be
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Of all of the outliers in Stuart Gordon’s remarkable career none is stranger or more unexpected than his participation in 1988’s Kid Safe: The Video.
For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, someone apparently saw the fright-master behind The Re-Animator and From Beyond as the perfect person to teach children about basic safety techniques.
That might sound dry and boring. In another filmmaker's hands it'd probably be about as exciting and fun as physics homework but true to form, Gordon took a gig that, on the surface was nothing but dreary obligations and made it his own.
Any halfway decent filmmaker can educate but it takes a subversive genius like Gordon to entertain as well as edify. Kid Safe: The Video is educational and fun in equal measure.
Kid Safe: The Video represents a one-in-a-lifetime collaboration between one of the greatest horror filmmakers our country has ever known and Canadian sketch comedy royalty.
That’s because Kid Safe: The Video stars Andrea Martin as Kathy Tudor, the titular kid who needs to learn about safety while its framing device posits it as a fright flick Joe Flaherty’s Count Floyd is introducing.
Count Floyd always sounds like he’s trying to convince himself, as well as his audience, that what they're about to see is scary and failing miserably in the process.
At that point Andrea Martin takes over as a little girl with a LOT to learn about safety. And everything. It reminds me of The Weird Al Show. Al had to learn a lesson the hard way every episode. That meant that he behaved like a real jerk so that he could learn the errors of his ways.
Kathy similarly screws everything up but is fortunate to have responsible, patient adults on hand to educate her.
Martin resorts to the usual tricks adults employ when playing children. She has pig-tails, braces, a lisp and is wearing an outsized tee shirt that makes her seem even smaller and shorter.
When Kathy’s parents leave her by herself briefly she’s initially full of bravado that dissipates almost immediately once she’s freaked out by a raging thunderstorm and weird noises.
She watches television in an unsuccessful attempt to calm down but everything that she sees just scares her further. She's so scared that her pig-tails stand up out of fright as if she were a cartoon character.
Then, in quite possibly my favorite moment in the video, this small, impressionable child grabs a bottle of gin from off a high shelf and says, "My parents always drink this to calm their nerves” before taking a swig straight out of the bottle.
I love the strong implication that poor Kathy’s parents are alcoholics, binge drinkers or at least people who cope with crises by hitting the sauce.
There’s no narrative reason to establish that Kathy’s mom and dad hit the bottle when times get hard but it’s got Gordon's fingerprints all over it. It's yet another way for Gordon to slip child-unfriendly content into something very overtly made for children.
Needless to say, when Kathy drinks gin straight from the bottle she does NOT like the taste. No one does! People only drink it because it gets them drunk.
The blunders continue when Kathy tries to make toast and winds up starting a toaster fire. In a panic she touches the toaster and is burned. Then, like a real fucking idiot, she uses a fork to touch the flaming toaster and is electrocuted for her troubles.
Feeling the situation get more and more hopeless by the moment Kathy calls 911 but hangs up before she can give her address.
What a maroon!
She’s then terrified by a glowing image outside her front door she’s convinced is a malevolent space man.
Even though she did not give the 911 dispatcher her address a computer was able to trace the call back to her home. Ernie the Policeman (Stephen Lee, who starred in Dolls for Gordon the year before) and Tina the Paramedic (Shuko Akune) show up promptly to teach Kathy, and by extension the audience, a thing or two. Or three. Or four.
But first they establish that the figure at the front door is not a malevolent extra terrestrial but rather Marty, (Meshach Taylor of Designing Women and Mannequin 2: On the Movie fame) a fireman who responding to the house's fire alarm ringing.
Ernie, Tina and Marty aren’t just three responsible grown-ups on hand to solve Kathy’s problems and teach her not to repeat her many, many mistakes. They're also, improbably but delightfully, a love triangle.
In another move designed to soar far above the heads of children and amuse adults Marty and Ernie both clearly have a massive crush on the cute paramedic and also seem to strongly dislike each other for reasons that go beyond romantic competition.
Marty and Ernie are consequently constantly jockeying for position. They seem equally interested in educating a little girl about how to handle herself when her parents are away and impressing their colleague enough to score a smooching date with her.
Having Ernie and Marty dislike each other and like like Tina the Paramedic lends an unmistakable element of tension, drama and comedy to a part of the video that is otherwise devoted to unpacking practical information on safety that is extremely useful but also dry.
Gordon could make the video funny and weird and spooky, with winking nods to the parents and teachers watching but he also had to impart a lot of genuine information of use to children and their families.
In a nifty twist Tina tells a police officer and a fireman who both have the hots for her that she has to to go home to her boyfriend. When Kathy musters up the willpower to say no to strange voices at her front door asking to come in it turns out that she was sending away an all-star collection of beasties and things that go bump in the night that includes a witch, a werewolf, a mummy, an alien and finally Jason Voorhees.
Kid Safe: The Video was originally available through a mail-in offer from Triaminic children's cough syrup. Now it's up on Youtube for children and adults to enjoy.
It does a nifty job serving two distinct audiences. It entertained me, an ostensible adult, but it also contains a lot of information that children can actually use.
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