As a teenager in the 80s, it was all about cable TV. First there were ONTV & SelecTV. Then the
uber sweet Jerrold Starcom II "12 button" wired click cable box. The box if you pushed the right buttons at the
same time and dialed the little dial just right you could get all the channels...All THE CHANNELS!
uber sweet Jerrold Starcom II "12 button" wired click cable box. The box if you pushed the right buttons at the
same time and dialed the little dial just right you could get all the channels...All THE CHANNELS!
Cable access was what they called the local "home brew" if you will, TV shows. There were a couple
I was just in love with. One was called Guess What?. Created by two nuts...Kirk R Gross and Bob Nash.
Here is an article about that show from the LA Times.
I was just in love with. One was called Guess What?. Created by two nuts...Kirk R Gross and Bob Nash.
Here is an article about that show from the LA Times.
Awesomely funny show - especially for a 14 year old. More on Guess What? later.
Back to Wally!
Another cable access show I couldn't get enough of was Hot Seat.
Borrowed this, but pretty much sums it up!
Back to Wally!
Another cable access show I couldn't get enough of was Hot Seat.
Borrowed this, but pretty much sums it up!
I have been informed that some of you may not be lucky enough to know who Wally George is or why he was one of the most talented and intelligent individuals to ever exist on this planet or Venus. Wally George ran a little show called "Hot Seat," the follow up to his previously popular "The Wally George Show" which aired on AM radio in the late 1970s. Although "Hot Seat" premiered in 1983 on public access television in Orange County, California, it was decades ahead of its time, presenting thoughts, themes, and principles which television producers are still attempting to grasp.
Basically, every "Hot Seat" show would follow the same format:
1) Wally George would enter and begin blabbering about God knows what for five minutes. Sometimes he'd complain about the quality of the meal he consumed the previous night. Other times he would bitch about a certain person he met the night before. Occasionally he would whine about a particular product or service which he encountered less than 24 hours previously, often during the night. These stories would go nowhere and really serve no purpose except to get Wally's coal-chugging braintrain running for the next few parts of the show.
2) George would announce his guest, often using such creative insults as "this stupid moron" and "this dumb jerk" to describe them and their dumb jerk political viewpoints. His guests would all differ in the fact that some of them had 38 functioning brain cells while others had up to 57, but they would all be united by one common trait: they weren't conservative Republicans. This infuriated George, a die-hard right wing political activist (assuming you can describe "shouting at bearded abortionists and then throwing a piece of legal paper at them" as political activity).
3) The guest would come out and state their controversial opinions on whatever they were paid to talk about. They would never do so in an intelligent or reasonable manner; instead, they would sneer and insult the audience members as they spoke. The "Hot Seat" crowd would be worked up into a furor, shouting and yelling incoherently at every chance they received. This would serve as a catalyst for summoning Wally George's talk show rage,
as seen in the next step:
George had more American flags than all the textile manufacturing companies in China.
4) George would spend the next spend five minutes calming down the studio audience by saying, "hey! Hey! Hey! Wait! Wait! Wait! Guys! Guys! Guys! Hey! Hey! Hey! Stop! Stop! Stop!" while making intricate hand gestures. Eventually the audience would grow bored of shouting a mixture of intellectual "boo" and "go back to Russia" quips, so they'd shut up and resume thinking about monster trucks. George would then take that opportunity of relative silence by insulting his guest in some horrendously retarded way which would get you beaten up in a grade school playground if you tried to use it. One of Wally's favorite lines, and I'm not making this up, was "this guy makes Pee Wee Herman look like Sylvester Stallone!" Like I said, I wish I was kidding, but I'm unfortunately not. In one single episode of "Hot Seat," Wally George used this line on two different guests. He would spend five minutes calming down the audience, chanting things like "hey! Hey! Hey!" and "Okay! Okay! Okay!", and once they quieted down, he would look directly at them and launch into the moment which defined television history. "Hey you guys," he would begin, nodding his head and getting ready to deliver a crushing insult. "This guy over here! This guy right here, look at this guy! He makes Pee Wee Herman... LOOK LIKE SYLVESTER STALLONE!" This would trigger a meth-fueled hysterical ruckus in the audience, waving around their highly pro-American signs which read "AMERICA IS GRATE" and "USA #1" and the "#1" would be somehow misspelled some bizarre way.
5) The guest would launch a retaliatory attack against Wally George, usually making an insightful, creative comment such as "yeah well at least I'm not stupid like you" or "yeah well at least I'm not as old as you." Wally would respond by making this faux-shocked facial expression, almost as if he was mortally wounded by their insult and couldn't even begin to determine the appropriate reaction. In a sense, I'm sure this was true, as George was well aware his two permutations of the phrase "you make Pee Wee Herman look like Sylvester Stallone" could only be used so many times within a 24-minute time period.
6) Steps four and five would be repeated for five minutes.
7) George would then invite callers to phone in and share their opinions of his loony liberal guest. If they disagreed with him, he would instantly hang up and proceed to call them names and insults when they weren't able respond because "Hot Seat" apparently only had one phone line and George took it off the hook after he hung up on his callers.
8) To break up the monotony and really wrap up the interview, Wally would then shout some lame insult at his guest and throw a glass of water or a cake at them in the ultimate sign of protest, demanding they "get off the stage" shortly before kicking them from the show. This would energize the crowd almost as much as a free greasy KISS tank top giveaway, and they'd redouble their efforts to create the largest concentrated mass of raw idiocy the Earth has ever witnessed outside of the Fark.com comments section.
Let me take this moment to describe the average audience for "Hot Seat." If aliens discover a VHS tape of this show one day in the distant future after mankind has been decimated by nuclear war and countless reality television shows about wacky homosexuals, I am convinced that any rational extraterrestrial intelligence will do the logical thing and spend all their energy creating a time machine to travel back to the early 1980s so they may personally murder us all before we have a chance to do it ourselves. The typical Wally George audience member showed up wearing a neon tank top, Jams shorts, and some kind of horribly idiotic hat or sunglasses which the Salvation Army would refuse to accept on the grounds that it would make them seem cheap and tacky. These brain dead cretins, perhaps driven insane by their lousy fashion sense or self-destructive hobby of funneling model airplane glue directly up their ass, screamed, shouted, and spastically convulsed at the slightest provocation by Wally George. The producers of his show, if there were any, undoubtedly made the audience fill in a form before they would be let on, an application which looked something like this:
Basically, every "Hot Seat" show would follow the same format:
1) Wally George would enter and begin blabbering about God knows what for five minutes. Sometimes he'd complain about the quality of the meal he consumed the previous night. Other times he would bitch about a certain person he met the night before. Occasionally he would whine about a particular product or service which he encountered less than 24 hours previously, often during the night. These stories would go nowhere and really serve no purpose except to get Wally's coal-chugging braintrain running for the next few parts of the show.
2) George would announce his guest, often using such creative insults as "this stupid moron" and "this dumb jerk" to describe them and their dumb jerk political viewpoints. His guests would all differ in the fact that some of them had 38 functioning brain cells while others had up to 57, but they would all be united by one common trait: they weren't conservative Republicans. This infuriated George, a die-hard right wing political activist (assuming you can describe "shouting at bearded abortionists and then throwing a piece of legal paper at them" as political activity).
3) The guest would come out and state their controversial opinions on whatever they were paid to talk about. They would never do so in an intelligent or reasonable manner; instead, they would sneer and insult the audience members as they spoke. The "Hot Seat" crowd would be worked up into a furor, shouting and yelling incoherently at every chance they received. This would serve as a catalyst for summoning Wally George's talk show rage,
as seen in the next step:
George had more American flags than all the textile manufacturing companies in China.
4) George would spend the next spend five minutes calming down the studio audience by saying, "hey! Hey! Hey! Wait! Wait! Wait! Guys! Guys! Guys! Hey! Hey! Hey! Stop! Stop! Stop!" while making intricate hand gestures. Eventually the audience would grow bored of shouting a mixture of intellectual "boo" and "go back to Russia" quips, so they'd shut up and resume thinking about monster trucks. George would then take that opportunity of relative silence by insulting his guest in some horrendously retarded way which would get you beaten up in a grade school playground if you tried to use it. One of Wally's favorite lines, and I'm not making this up, was "this guy makes Pee Wee Herman look like Sylvester Stallone!" Like I said, I wish I was kidding, but I'm unfortunately not. In one single episode of "Hot Seat," Wally George used this line on two different guests. He would spend five minutes calming down the audience, chanting things like "hey! Hey! Hey!" and "Okay! Okay! Okay!", and once they quieted down, he would look directly at them and launch into the moment which defined television history. "Hey you guys," he would begin, nodding his head and getting ready to deliver a crushing insult. "This guy over here! This guy right here, look at this guy! He makes Pee Wee Herman... LOOK LIKE SYLVESTER STALLONE!" This would trigger a meth-fueled hysterical ruckus in the audience, waving around their highly pro-American signs which read "AMERICA IS GRATE" and "USA #1" and the "#1" would be somehow misspelled some bizarre way.
5) The guest would launch a retaliatory attack against Wally George, usually making an insightful, creative comment such as "yeah well at least I'm not stupid like you" or "yeah well at least I'm not as old as you." Wally would respond by making this faux-shocked facial expression, almost as if he was mortally wounded by their insult and couldn't even begin to determine the appropriate reaction. In a sense, I'm sure this was true, as George was well aware his two permutations of the phrase "you make Pee Wee Herman look like Sylvester Stallone" could only be used so many times within a 24-minute time period.
6) Steps four and five would be repeated for five minutes.
7) George would then invite callers to phone in and share their opinions of his loony liberal guest. If they disagreed with him, he would instantly hang up and proceed to call them names and insults when they weren't able respond because "Hot Seat" apparently only had one phone line and George took it off the hook after he hung up on his callers.
8) To break up the monotony and really wrap up the interview, Wally would then shout some lame insult at his guest and throw a glass of water or a cake at them in the ultimate sign of protest, demanding they "get off the stage" shortly before kicking them from the show. This would energize the crowd almost as much as a free greasy KISS tank top giveaway, and they'd redouble their efforts to create the largest concentrated mass of raw idiocy the Earth has ever witnessed outside of the Fark.com comments section.
Let me take this moment to describe the average audience for "Hot Seat." If aliens discover a VHS tape of this show one day in the distant future after mankind has been decimated by nuclear war and countless reality television shows about wacky homosexuals, I am convinced that any rational extraterrestrial intelligence will do the logical thing and spend all their energy creating a time machine to travel back to the early 1980s so they may personally murder us all before we have a chance to do it ourselves. The typical Wally George audience member showed up wearing a neon tank top, Jams shorts, and some kind of horribly idiotic hat or sunglasses which the Salvation Army would refuse to accept on the grounds that it would make them seem cheap and tacky. These brain dead cretins, perhaps driven insane by their lousy fashion sense or self-destructive hobby of funneling model airplane glue directly up their ass, screamed, shouted, and spastically convulsed at the slightest provocation by Wally George. The producers of his show, if there were any, undoubtedly made the audience fill in a form before they would be let on, an application which looked something like this:
I'm convinced at least 80% of the people in his tapings weren't even aware they were on a television show; they were simply looking to hang out in some place with air conditioning while their wife ran into Wal-Mart to pick out a wedding dress. The audience from "Hot Seat" was utterly remarkable in many regards. For example, I would've normally assumed that such a large gathering of the world's most profoundly mentally challenged individuals would either cause a black hole of stupidity to open up and engulf all of California, or result in God sending us a message from Heaven explaining how he really fucked up with the whole "mankind" thing and now regrets it. How were such monumentally retarded people able to find reliable transportation to Wally George's show? Who prevented them from trying to lick and swallow the engine on the trip there? Shouldn't there have been large governmental organizations preventing these people from interacting with normal members of society? I would assume my tax money goes to keep people like these off the streets, preferably in those machines which constantly ground up stuff and turn it into dog food.
I'm not exactly sure how long "Hot Seat" was on public television in southern California, but if I had to guess, I'd estimate it was around 14 billion years. Once George retired from "Hot Seat," he started up "The Wally George Show," in which he played clips from "Hot Seat" in between his rambling incoherent stories and advertisements. Let me tell you something: you haven't lived until you've heard Wally George go on and on and on about nothing in particular. He'll start off shows by waving around a newspaper clipping, repeatedly saying, "I can't believe this news article. I just can't believe it. I just... can't believe this. Wait until you hear what this.. what this BOZO says," and then he'd immediately launch into a story about how his eyes were irritated last night. I'm not making that up; during one show, he began talking about how his eyes felt like they were "on fire" the previous evening and how he suspected Howard Stern put a curse on him. That is 100% completely true, and I suspect this fabled "Curse of Howard Stern" might even be somehow responsible for George's untimely death. When Wally would go off on his tangents and begin blabbering about his trip to the store the previous evening, he would start staring at the people operating the camera or standing offstage. After a while, he would begin talking with them, which wouldn't really be a problem if, oh, there was a microphone on them. Half of George's show would be dedicated to his one-way conversations about bran cereal with some mysterious entity off camera. Part of me believes there wasn't even anybody there and George was simply talking to a coat rack of cardboard cutout of Tom Selleck.
Wally George's strict conservative views often clashed with his guests, adamant liberals that he could bicker and argue with until the guy holding the camera ran out of film. Nowhere in "Hot Seat's" history did George ever remotely approach engaging somebody in a logical debate, which suited his audience just fine because most of them couldn't even spell the word "logical," much less track down a dictionary and literacy lessons necessary to look it up. The show was simply 30 minutes of juvenile name calling, screaming, audience shrieking, and grade school playground antics; it was American television at its finest, media which defined entertainment as we know it today. Wally George, you may not be a Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, but you're still a truly heroic individual who deserves to be remembered for decades to come. I can only hope and pray that you're in Heaven right now, telling some limp-wristed sissy liberal dummy that he makes Pee Wee Herman look like Sylvester Stallone.
I'm not exactly sure how long "Hot Seat" was on public television in southern California, but if I had to guess, I'd estimate it was around 14 billion years. Once George retired from "Hot Seat," he started up "The Wally George Show," in which he played clips from "Hot Seat" in between his rambling incoherent stories and advertisements. Let me tell you something: you haven't lived until you've heard Wally George go on and on and on about nothing in particular. He'll start off shows by waving around a newspaper clipping, repeatedly saying, "I can't believe this news article. I just can't believe it. I just... can't believe this. Wait until you hear what this.. what this BOZO says," and then he'd immediately launch into a story about how his eyes were irritated last night. I'm not making that up; during one show, he began talking about how his eyes felt like they were "on fire" the previous evening and how he suspected Howard Stern put a curse on him. That is 100% completely true, and I suspect this fabled "Curse of Howard Stern" might even be somehow responsible for George's untimely death. When Wally would go off on his tangents and begin blabbering about his trip to the store the previous evening, he would start staring at the people operating the camera or standing offstage. After a while, he would begin talking with them, which wouldn't really be a problem if, oh, there was a microphone on them. Half of George's show would be dedicated to his one-way conversations about bran cereal with some mysterious entity off camera. Part of me believes there wasn't even anybody there and George was simply talking to a coat rack of cardboard cutout of Tom Selleck.
Wally George's strict conservative views often clashed with his guests, adamant liberals that he could bicker and argue with until the guy holding the camera ran out of film. Nowhere in "Hot Seat's" history did George ever remotely approach engaging somebody in a logical debate, which suited his audience just fine because most of them couldn't even spell the word "logical," much less track down a dictionary and literacy lessons necessary to look it up. The show was simply 30 minutes of juvenile name calling, screaming, audience shrieking, and grade school playground antics; it was American television at its finest, media which defined entertainment as we know it today. Wally George, you may not be a Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, but you're still a truly heroic individual who deserves to be remembered for decades to come. I can only hope and pray that you're in Heaven right now, telling some limp-wristed sissy liberal dummy that he makes Pee Wee Herman look like Sylvester Stallone.
