Canned Film Festival

Canned Film Festival
Canned Film Festival logo as used by the Dr Pepper Company in 1986
Genre	Comedy
Created by	Young & Rubicam
Directed by	Jonathan Heap
Starring	Laraine Newman F. Richards Ford Laura Galusha Patrick Garner Philip Nee Katheryn Rossetter
Country of origin	United States
Original language(s)	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	13
Production
Executive producer(s)	Jeff Lawenda Michael Yudin
Producer(s)	John Gilroy Margot Breier
Running time	approx. 92 minutes
Distributor	LBS Communications
Release
Original network	Syndicated

The Canned Film Festival is a comedy-based motion picture television series that was nationally syndicated during the late night hours in the United States for a single season in the summer of 1986. With only a one-letter difference in the spelling, the name is an intentional play on the name for the Cannes Film Festival, the annual world-renowned film-screening celebration in Cannes, France. Not to be confused with the latter, the Canned Film Festival featured B movies as the centerpiece for each television episode, and was composed of short vignettes interwoven throughout the films. Boasting the tagline "late night with the best of the worst", the series was promoted and sponsored by the Dr Pepper Company, whose then-tagline "out-of-the-ordinary" echoed the show's collection of odd and strange movies. The series was created by Young & Rubicam, developed for television by Chelsea Communications, and distributed by LBS Communications.

Although similar in style to the successful Mystery Science Theater 3000 series that aired a few years later, the Canned Film Festival differed in that its comedy scenes occurred strictly during the commercial intermissions instead of adding peanut gallery type satire during the actual run of the movies. In addition, the script, although comedic in nature, often reflected upon the serious contextual and cultural subjects contained in the featured movies, sometimes providing historical insight into their production. An example is seen during the episode featuring Project Moonbase, where female spaceship commanders were discussed as an accurate future prediction by the 1950s era movie, as were cordless telephones and big screen televisions. The featured B movies of the series were not full-length, and edited to fit the show's approximately two-hour timeframe per episode.