Customer Reviews

Mr. Mike's Mondo Video

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Just to counteract the first customer review, let me say that I found a beat-up VHS copy of this a few years ago and became totally obsessed with it. It's wonderfully bizarre and dark, closer in spirit to the National Lampoon Radio Hour than the tame-by-comparison SNL. It's downright amazing that Shout! Factory is rescuing this from obscurity, and it will be a fantastic discovery for fans of Mike O'Donoghue and the other early SNL'ers, most of whom make brief appearances.

I saw Mondo Video 4 times during the week it ran theatrically, because I KNEW it would never be seen again. I wanted to burn it into my brain. Happily, I was wrong. One brave TV station in Pittsburgh actually ran it ONCE and I taped it. Now, SHOUT! has somehow seen fit to preserve it (or most of it) for posterity. Geez! Paul Anka is such a loser to deny permission to let them include Sid Vicious singing "MY WAY". Anyway....

Definitely not for everyone, Mondo Video is for the adventurous who love dark, dark humor and appreciate the celebration of hype - as this is what O'Donoghue is doing here. He endlessly promises the shocking, the perverted, the astounding...and just like the "Mondo" movies he's parodying, he doesn't deliver on the hype. But it's a VERY funny trip.

Much funnier than any of the alleged 'counter-culture' comics around today.

Very twisted. Very funny. A must-have. If you have the cajones for it.

You're either going to love this video or hate it. I fall into the love-it camp because the perverse and dark nature of its humor is entirely in keeping with the decadent style of one of my favorite artists, the great Michael O'Donoghue, brilliant National Lampoon editor and writer for Saturday Night Live. Mr. Mike's world view is on ample display for 70 minutes here, and it isn't pretty. It's twisted, cynical, and frequently marries the heroic to the mundane. If that's not a style of humor you enjoy, you will find this show off-putting and it will probably test your patience. If you believe the human race's worst instincts are fair game for satire, you will revel in how hilariously foolish we can be. Consider yourself warned.

"Mondo Video" was conceived as a summer replacement series for "Saturday Night Live," produced by Lorne Michaels and written and hosted by SNL and "National Lampoon" veteran Michael "Mr. Mike" O'Donoghue. A pilot was shot and rejected by NBC as being too disturbing even for late night. Michaels and O'Donoghue took the pilot to Showtime who showed it...once, then canceled any plans to pursue the series. The show had a very low-key history after that. Showtime showed it again years later just to reassert rights to it. It had a limited VHS release that was marred by Paul Anka (but more on that later), and had a couple of 35mm prints thrown for the festival circuit.

My mother managed to tape the original showing back in 1979, and it's been one of my greatest guilty pleasures. Now, to celebrate its 30th anniversary, it's finally been released on DVD, and to some degree I wish it hadn't been.

The loss of Sid Vicious' performance of "My Way" is understandable, as Paul Anka had blocked its being included in the VHS release, and it looks like they didn't even attempt to try to get the rights this time around as they just reused the scroll from the VHS version, to the point of referring to "this videotape." The loss of one of my favorite segments was a letdown, even if an understandable one.

However, the real problem with this release is the nearly 25 minutes of previously unused material has been restored to the show with the DVD release. With few exceptions (such as a bizarre little piece called "Pat Nixon And The Mondo Video Dancers") the restored material is terrible. Like Saturday Night Live then (and now), the original NBC pilot of "Mondo Video" suffered from the need to fill 90 minutes of material when the writers only had about 45 good minutes. The 50-minute edit aired by Showtime, and beloved by me for 30 years now, shows how much better Lorne and Mike worked when they needed to edit the final product. I don't think there's a single wasted second in the Showtime version of the show, but there are whole sketches (like "Crowd Scene" and two "Dream Sequences") on this DVD that drag on for no good reason. The DVD should have offered the Showtime edit, with the extra sketches as "deleted scenes" instead of re-editing them in.

On the bright side, the DVD also has three of O'Donoghue's "Mr. Mike's Least Loved Bedtime Stories" and Bill Murray's eulogy for O'Donoghue, which by themselves are really worth the cheap purchase price of the DVD. But, really, this "restored version" is probably the biggest hatchet job since Ted Turner considered colorizing the first 10 minutes of "The Wizard of Oz."

Five stars for 90% of the material, negative one star for the final product, averaging out to two stars. A pleasure and a disappointment at the same time. A very mondo effect from a very mondo video.

I agree with Mr. Schildberg. This is a love-or-leave-it type of offering. I give major kudos to "Mr. Mike's Mondo Video" for cluing me into Klaus Nomi: The 'dream sequence' which features him performing the aria from 'Samson and Delilah'. Overall, it's really cool slices of twisted stuff/humor. Not for everybody.

I was amazed and delighted watching live that first year of SNL when it launched in 1975. Prior to that, I was a fan of Michael O'Donaghue when he wrote for National Lampoon magazine, and I would listen over and over again to 8-track tapes I recorded of the Radio Hour (Don't you think... or don't you? Even my wife now occasionally uses the phrase "ironing the oak tree" because I said it years ago. I wonder if Michael wrote those words.)

This video is a near-complete waste of time. Nothing funny at all here. The only thing mildly interesting is the commentary track, a fellow writer talked about Michael, (but not a whole lot about what we were seeing.)

I did see this as a theater release many years ago. It was in intended to have been a "Saturday Night Live" kind of special, but the NBC Network wouldn't run it.. So with some hype, it was released in theaters and it tanked.

It is an assembled collage of staged and public domain clips, arranged in no particular order and not making much sense. Its funny value was lost on me, if indeed there was anything intended with that.

By the end of the 70 minutes, I felt my time had been wasted, and had a strong urge to request my money back.