Randy (right) and Richard way down on Level 31 as they host their 1985-1987 show The Texas 27 Film Vault.
In the middle 1980s/ Way down on Level 31 …
Balladeer’s Blog continues its marking of the FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY year of The Texas 27 Film Vault, which debuted on February 9th of 1985. (MST3K debuted on November 24th of 1988.)
EPISODE ORIGINALLY BROADCAST: Saturday February 22nd, 1986 from 10:30pm to 1:00am. Broadcast throughout Texas and Oklahoma.
SERIAL: Before showing and mocking the movie machine-gun toting Randy and Richard, as members of the fictional Film Vault Corps (“the few, the proud, the sarcastic”) showed and mocked another chapter of the Republic Serial Radar Men from the Moon (1952).
FILM VAULT LORE: Our Film Vault Technicians First Class would pull the usual Movie Host duties like providing background info on the films and serials, and would also do comedy sketches centered around their fictional Film Vault Corps before and after commercials. They protected their duty station from menaces like giant rats, cellumites, a subterranean race of Drones and other threats.
That duty station – Level 31, Core 27 of the Film Vault System was accessed via an industrial park behind KDFI Channel 27’s headquarters off Highway 183 near Dallas. The show was directed by Karl Newman, who often good-naturedly bemoaned Randy and Richard’s tendency to ad-lib. Sometimes in print interviews Newman would joke that if they used a script they would need far too many takes for Clower and Malmos to read their lines right, hence the ad-libbing.
THE MOVIE: Blood Beach (1980) was one of the least effective horror films of the 1980s. It had a half-decent premise – a monster beneath the sand at a California beach sucking victims down into its hellish maw – but squandered that premise with incredibly slow pacing.
The inane dialogue spouted by the annoying characters didn’t help matters. Continue reading
FILM VAULT LORE: Our Film Vault Technicians First Class would pull the usual Movie Host duties like providing background info on the films and serials, and would also do comedy sketches centered around their fictional Film Vault Corps before and after commercials. They protected their duty station from menaces like giant rats, cellumites and other threats.
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