Night Flight
Back in the '80s while most kids were watching their MTV trying to catch up on the newest coolest bands of the day I was forced, due to the fact that my parents didn't "believe" in cable tv, to do my catching up in the wee small hours of the morning most weekend nights. There was a time, it's hard to believe now, when Girls Gone Wild commercials didn't rule the airwaves at two in the morning. Quite often when a channel ran out of programming they just went off the air. Anybody remember waking up at 3am to the National Anthem being played over the Stars and Stripes after of which the screen would go all snowy. "Night Flight":http://night_flight1.tripod.com/index.html was a block of programing produced by the USA Network which aired on cable tv here in the states. Yes, I know. I just stated that my parents didn't believe in cable which was true. In my area of New York on Friday and Saturday nights our local ABC network would complete their broadcast schedule for the day as soon as the midnight movie was over and then go straight to static. Some genius realized that there was an entire generations worth of stoned teenagers and drunken young adults just coming home from partying around this time of night, so why was the network playing dead air? They soon struck a deal with USA networks and now all the cable-less folks of Long Island and the tri-state area had their own 6 hour block of counter culture TV. Night Flight was a hodgepodge of the weird. A typical night included an experimental film, an interview with a Californian punk rock band, a handful of New Wave videos, some off the wall stop-motion animation from the Ukraine, mix in a few comedy sketches, a star-trek blooper reel and finish it off with a 65 minute Japanese monster movie from the '60s. It was the stuff all the best dreams were made of particularly because most of us fell asleep while watching it on the couch in the den an hour after we turned it on. ABC found some valuable commercial time, USA network got some extra cash they weren't expecting and we got hours of the best, mind altering entertainment to be beamed into our suburban living rooms every Friday and Saturday night."New Wave Theater" was a segment hosted by Peter Ivers that started airing on L.A. public access tv then soon switched over to Night Flights weekly broadcasts. The segments usually consisted of the flamboyant Mr. Ivers monologue-ing directly into the camera before introducing "new music" from a host of early '80s New Wave bands. He eventually interviewed many of the Punk and New Wave bands that came out of the L.A. scene at the time. Unfortunately in 1983 he was found murdered in his home and the case has never been solved. The original Night Flight format aired from 1981 - 1988, it was briefly revived for a year in 1990, then went on as a syndicated "Best of Night Flight" show that focused on the early years of the program. The USA Networks finally retired the Night Flight shows in 1996. Many of the original episode's are now surfacing on DVD due to the shows cult following. "Check them out here":http://subcin.com/nightflight.html
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