Monday, June 29, 2015

Saturtainment: 2 Hip 4 TV (1988)

By the mid-80's, local affiliates stopped blacking out the bottom portion of network Saturday morning schedules. Unfortunately, by 1988, NBC stopped airing shows that kids cared about at that hour.

2 Hip 4 TV was the network's attempt at a lunch hour comedy-variety show, attempting to fill the void created by ABC dumping American Bandstand (which had moved to USA Network and moved back to Friday afternoons). The network brought in comedian Colin Quinn (Remote Control) as series host. Amazingly, Quinn never did any cross-promotion on either show, but he did begin a lengthy association with NBC that would resume when he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live a few years later. Quinn was joined by Ahmet Zappa, the last of Frank's kids to reach television, as brother Dweezil had been a summer VJ at MTV for a few years by this point, and of course, Dweezil and Moon had a duet, "Let's Talk About It", that was in heavy airplay for a while.

However, after the Seoul Summer Olympics, there was a change. Zappa was gone, replaced by comedian Barry Sobel, who'd parlay the gig into a recurring role on NBC's primetime series, 227. As it happened, Sobel didn't last too long, either, as the show was gone before the holidays, with NBC bringing back The New Archies & reruns of the animated Punky Brewster to fill the space, before acquiring reruns of Fat Albert & The Cosby Kids.

Here's a sample clip:



Rating: D.

2 comments:

Silverstar said...

2 Hip 4 TV subsequently turned up as an on-air subject of humor on Colin Quinn's later series Remote Control. One episode of RC was titled "2 Hip 4 MTV", in another, RC host Ken Ober had a question for contestants about Colin's old show; he asked Quinn for some feedback about 2 Hip 4 TV and Colin responded that he didn't want to talk about it, citing "painful memories".

hobbyfan said...

I think Colin taped 2 Hip in between Control seasons, IIRC. Apparently, the "painful memories" come from Sobel replacing Ahmet Zappa as his sidekick. Talk about a downgrade!