Post by veritableVariableGuestUser on Jul 5, 2020 16:39:41 GMT
I remember owning a VHS tape as a young child, containing a surreal segment about a suburban family and a literally-broken fourth wall. At some point, we ended up losing this video when moving, and I haven't seen it since. Memories of this segment have stuck with me throughout my life, and I've always been curious about what it was, exactly, that I saw. I've made a few attempts to find out in the past, but never got any helpful information.
I saw this at some point in my early childhood, most likely watching it for the first time between 1993 and 1995. I don't know when it was made, but I'd venture to guess, judging from the tropes and aesthetic, that it was probably produced in the mid 80s at the earliest. I'm pretty sure I watched it on multiple occasions
Description:
It was a live-action segment. In it, a family was in their living room watching TV. I think it was a family of four (parents and two kids; a boy and a girl). There may or may not have been a dog too.
I'm not certain of this, but I think the TV was in the corner of the room, and the right side of the couch was up against a wall, and plenty of space behind the back of the couch. I also recall the living room being brightly-lit, with a white or beige carpet.
One family member had the remote and was flipping through channels. They landed on a channel with an evil-looking clown driving a car towards the screen head-on, laughing maniacally. The lighting of the scene was bluish and suggested it was night-time.
This is where it gets weird: the clown's car actually collided-with and shattered the glass of the family's TV screen. The glass kinda exploded outwards radially in slow motion.
They changed the channel again before the clown could escape the TV. Now, the channel they were on displayed the logo for some studio. It seemed to have a starry background and might have incorporated a sphere or globe (possibly the Universal Studios logo). Perched atop the logo was a cartoon bird, who may have been the mascot for the studio.
Now that the glass barrier was missing from the television screen, stuff on the screen could interact with the real world. After saying a scripted line, the bird noticed the family and started talking to them. After a brief exchange, the bird flew right out of the screen and landed in the living room.
Shortly after this, the bird somehow transformed the family's remote into something that looked much more futuristic. I recall radiant red bands of light on it, but not much else. This remote allowed them to teleport into the TV (though I'm not sure why they needed this, as they could have just physically climbed into the TV at this point.)
The family used the remote to transport themselves into the movie the studio logo preceded, which was supposedly about dinosaurs. I don't remember seeing any dinosaurs, but I somehow got the impression, possibly from the dialogue. They appeared in a desert or on a beach, right next to a forest or jungle, with the forest on the right side of the screen. It was day, with a clear blue sky, and I think the colors in this part looked a bit washed-out. This part seemed to use a low-quality green-screen effect, with the family all standing together, looking out-of-place in the scene.
This is where the recording ended, leaving me kinda frustrated and wanting to know what happened next.
Additional Notes:
I suspect it may have been a partial recording from TV, as it was weirdly short and seemed to end abruptly and without any sort of resolution. It wouldn't have been unusual; my family recorded a lot of stuff from TV, and it often ended up interspersed into home movies, which I watched a lot of at that age.
My current best guess is that this may have been a promotional segment for a movie or studio, though I can't be certain.
I've had it suggested to me that this might be from the 1992 film Stay Tuned, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't, judging from what I've researched about the film.
This memory has been with me for a long time, and it would be a huge deal to finally find out what it's from. The bizarre dream-logic, in addition to the mixture of family-friendly and somewhat frightening elements, makes me wonder what the heck I watched exactly.
