DANGER THEATRE

In the beginning, there were three television channels and, when I came around, we were all still pretending there were. Even though I grew up with nearly one hundred channels in the days of basic cable, one always went back to NBC, CBS, and ABC for the real entertainment.

In the early 1990s, sitcoms were still prominent and 24-hour news was just beginning to be taken seriously (mostly due to the first Gulf War), so those three acronyms were taken much more seriously than there are now.

Also, in the early ‘90s, there was a fourth, Dupont-style television channel which tried, without much success, to compete. FOX offered late-night talk shows, sitcoms, and the like. They just weren’t very good. But, because the network was starving for ideas, I would be lying if some of the shows that came out of that period weren’t a lot of fun and, sometimes, remarkable.

FOX greenlit (and abruptly cancelled) the outstanding hour-long thriller Profit, one of the first shows to reflect Twin Peaks’ call for more engaging television. A cross between American Psycho and a procedural, Profit was so ahead of its time, it barely got seen before it was released on DVD many years later. FOX also took over for the second season of Al Jean and Mike Reiss’ (then reviled, now beloved) The Critic. These were relatively classy shows. The one I’m writing about today was downright stupid—and that was the point.

In the summer of 1993, FOX flung a comedy anthology series against the wall to see if it would stick. It lasted seven episodes, but it was stuck in my mind forever until I rediscovered it on Youtube nearly a decade later.

The show was called Danger Theatre, a slapstick comedy, Airplane!-style, that was presented by Robert Vaughn (best known for The Towering Inferno). Created by Penelope Spheeris, Danger Theatre featured three “series”—Tropical Punch, a parody of Hawaii Five-O with Adam West, 357 Marina del Rey, a parody of Surfside Six with Todd Field and, most famously, The Searcher, a Renegade parody featuring Diedrich Bader. The Searcher was clearly the “hit” of the cult show, beginning every episode and eventually taking over full half hours itself. Bader’s deadpan style, deep sonorous voice, and comic timing were (and are) perection. The humor of the show was clearly aimed at boys under eleven and I was—and I loved it.

The SEARCHER!

Spheeris originally came to prominence with her series of documentaries on punk rock, The Decline of Western Civilization. With her narrative film, career, however, she specialized almost exclusively on goofy comedy, most famously Wayne’s World and film versions of The Little Rascals and The Beverly Hillbillies. Danger Theatre was an outgrowth of this kind of humor—juvenile and sophomoric, yes, but also a self-aware show that made fun of its own network, its lack of a budget, and exposed the inherent banality of the era of Knight Rider and Miami Vice.

The Searcher was created by Robert Wolterstorff (who, with Mike Scott and Pheeris) also “created” the other two segments, 357 Marina del Rey being a last-minute replacement for Tropical Punch, which is endearing now because of West, but was never as funny as The Searcher. Each episode began with the Searcher riding into town on his hog, solving crimes and being beat up more than Super Dave Osborne.

Watching these shows again, which were a hit when they were aired in the United Kingdom, I realized they were also full of sexual innuendo completely lost on me as a child. So much the better. Like other shows of the ‘90s, Animaniacs coming to mind most strongly, the combination of something for the older ones and something for the younger ones was prominent and appreciated.

Today, Danger Theatre would be a late-night animated show on Adult Swim. The humor would probably have been sharper, but I doubt it would be as fun. The entire series can be watched on Youtube.

Watch it before it's gone. And it's gone.