By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Is Click Seattle's "Almost Live" 20 years along?
Seattlest reports on a skit that precedes Adam Sandler’s Click by 20 years: “The premise of Click is pretty thin which is odd for Sandler who normally goes for “high concept” type stuff (moron goes back to school, moron joins the PGA, moron’s the devil). This time a moron gets… hold of a remote control that can manipulate the people around him. Fast forward through his wife’s ranting, pause his boss so he can punch him in the face a few times – that kind of thing. It has to be a difficult gag to drag out over 90 minutes, especially when you consider that [“Total Control,”] the ‘Almost Live’ bit it was stolen from barely manged to strangle three minutes of humor from it [for which] Scott Schaefer won a Northwest Emmy for in 1985.” In an email to Seattlest, Schaefer said, “At the time, we thought it was pretty cool to do the special effect of [a character] walking forward while everyone in the entire Northgate Mall was “walking backwards.” Of course, it was nothing more than shooting Keister walking backwards while holding the remote, then playing the tape backwards. Woo hoo… As an aside, this also highlights the fact that either remote television control technology hasn’t advanced an inch since 1985 or this movie was written by really old guys. In the trailer Sandler uses the remote to pause, fast-forward and play in slow motion. And, sadly, that’s about all a television remote did in 1985 and that’s all it can do today unless you count split-screen/picture-in-picture, menues, pay-per-view purchasing and your basic DVR/Tivo functionality.” [The original “Almost Live” skit is on YouTube here; Link courtesy of the Oregonian’s “Mad About Movies,” collated by Shawn Levy, who notes that “Almost Live” was a wonderful treat—a truly local show that was wedged for 15 minutes between the end of the 11 o’clock news and the start of “Saturday Night Live” on the Seattle NBC affiliate.”]
Well, the basic premise goes even further back than that: William Castle’s 1962 comedy ZOTZ!, about a magic coin that behaves pretty much the same way. Around that time there was also a “Twilight Zone” episode about a literal “stopwatch.” It’s all been done before.