The Weird Al Show
| The Weird Al Show | |
|---|---|
The Weird Al Show - The Complete Series DVD cover
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| Created by | "Weird Al" Yankovic |
| Presented by | "Weird Al" Yankovic |
| Starring |
Brian Haley Gary LeRoi Gray Judy Tenuta Paula Jai Parker Danielle Weeks |
| Country of origin | United States |
| No. of seasons | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 13 |
| Production | |
| Location(s) | NBC Studios Stage 11, Burbank, CA |
| Running time | 23 minutes |
| Production company(s) | Ear Booker Productions Dick Clark Productions |
| Release | |
| Original network | CBS |
| Original release | September 13 – December 6, 1997 |
The Weird Al Show was a television show hosted by "Weird Al" Yankovic. Produced in association with Dick Clark Productions and taped at NBC Studios, it aired on Saturday mornings on the CBS TV network. New episodes ran from September to December 1997; after that, the episodes were repeated until September 1998. The show was released on DVD on August 15, 2006.
Al's television set is called "Al TV", the name of a number of Yankovic's television specials.
Each episode would start with a narrator introducing today's lesson to the viewers. Then, Al would be in a common situation in his mancave that he would address to the viewers. Afterwards, he would go watch TV of parody shows and commercials that are related to the day's show. Most of the time, Al's friend Bobby the Inquisitive Boy stops by and asks him a question. In turn, Al would play him an old-fashioned educational film to help answer his question. Sometimes, the show would also feature an animated cartoon called, "Fatman", which is about Weird Al as a fat superhero. At the end of the show, there would be a commercial parody being shown followed by a band performing a song. Sometimes, Al would review today's lesson before closing out the show.
Major creative conflicts occurred between CBS, which considered the show an educational children's series, and Yankovic, whose humor style was more adult-oriented. The show was canceled after one season, along with several other series in the CBS Saturday morning lineup.
CBS sent various notes to the writers of the show after reviewing the scripts, asking the writers to "Yankocize" (i.e. make funny) the commercial-break bumper announcements that the network wrote to reinforce each episode's lesson (or as Al put it, make them suck a little less), as well as remove any "imitable behavior" from the scripts that children might want to mimic after seeing on TV.
The writers were often surprised not at what the censors took out, but what they left in - for example, a sketch (written and submitted as a joke) in which Baby and Papa Boolie commit suicide after listening to one too many of Fred Huggins' songs was being seriously considered by the network for use on the show. (The sketch was later rewritten to have Papa Boolie call a mental hospital to take Fred away.) The unused script of the unedited Fred Huggins sequence is role-played in an audio commentary for an episode on the DVD.
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