Holy Crap!
SKIDOO’s On Your TV Tonight!

Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. I don’t normally post here on the Coax side of things... at least not since the last time Herc administered a savage beating to me for trying... but I’ll take my chances today. This news is worth it. When I was just reading various stories around the web, I stumbled across the news over at CHUD.com that SKIDOO is playing tonight on Turner Classic Movies. If this news doesn’t excite you, it may be because you’ve never heard of SKIDOO. And chances are you’ve never seen it, since it’s never been released on video, allegedly at the wishes of Otto Preminger, the film’s director. This is one of those legendary freakshows of a movie that is famous primarily for being unseen. You often hear people talk about bizarre films, and it’s become a total cliché by now to describe a movie as “THE PARENT TRAP on acid,” as an example. Well, SKIDDO is actually “SKIDOO on acid,” and I don’t mean that metaphorically. This is a no-shit acid movie, inspired largely by Preminger’s experiments with the drug during the period. At the time, acid was so much a part of pop culture that it was inevitable you’d get a few major filmmakers trying to deal with it. However, the film was roundly rejected by audiences and critics alike at the time, and Preminger eventually considered it a major mistake. I’m so excited to finally get a chance to see it, and since I haven’t, I’m not going to pretend I know what the fuck it’s about. Here’s some of the synopsis from the Turner Classic Movies site, where they’ve got a pretty great piece about the film:

A retired mobster named Tony (Jackie Gleason) is called upon by his former Mafia boss (Groucho Marx, simply referred to as “God”) to make one last hit. His one time friend Blue Chips Packard (Mickey Rooney) was sitting pretty in solitary confinement in Alcatraz after being busted, but has since become an informer against his old gang. Tony is instructed to sneak into the jail and eliminate Packer. Meanwhile, Tony’s teenage daughter Darlene is in dubious company herself, hanging out with members of San Francisco’s hippie community. She starts dating a tuned-out long hair (John Phillip Law) and espouses the ideals of peace and love. Tony’s wife Flo (Carol Channing), the more sympathetic of the couple, feels for her daughter and invites the whole psychedelic clan back to their house to live. Tony is none too happy about this new crowd, yet befriends a hippie in the clink known as "The Professor" (Austin Pendleton, the unsung hero of the film). He turns Tony onto acid accidentally one day, and during his trip, Tony begins to understand the pitfalls of his violent past. He decides to “make love, not war” against ol’ Blue Chips.

2 a.m. ET Saturday / 11 p.m. PT Friday. TCM.