The Brandon Stoddard Horror Show

The Day After is unquestionably the greatest horror movie since the last great horror movie. You can see Jason Robards’s hair fall out, and beautiful women turn all horrible, with advanced tooth decay, and nice suburban people with disgusting sores all over their bodies wandering along the roads and fighting for food and shooting each other, because things get that bad. And you can see Kansas City, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, goupina great firestorm, and nice Americans turn decidedly un-nice, hiding underground in shelters, very inhospitable to strangers, and, above all, lots and lots of wonderful makeup jobs of people in really disgusting physical condition, dying in highly repulsive ways. It is, in short, wonderful entertainment for the whole family and you got it absolutely free on prime-time television, provided to you by ABC.

So those of you who stuck with The Brandon Stoddard Horror Show to the last unspeakable groan should be especially grateful to the eponymous Brandon Stoddard, president of ABC Motion Pictures, which spent $7 million of its own money to offer your family this wonderful evening. Because it was only the first half of the movie, the first hour, that ABC thought would be appropriate for those $270,000-a- minute ads because of the appealing subject matter of the story, which is life: with farmers farming, doctors doctoring, neckers necking, some young ladies planning to run off after some young gentlemen to Boston, one young lady playfully hiding another young lady’s diaphragm, while golden wheat shimmers in the fields of Kansas. That kind of Life. When the Living Dead part comes, with everybody dying and looking so awful, it seemed somehow tasteless to advertise such national brands as Preparation H or Mr. Coffee, so ABC had to resort to selling cheapie 15-second spots at knock-down prices for such products as Orville Redenbach- er’s Gourmet Popping Corn. So, I mean, Brandon Stoddard must really have had to rob his piggybank for this. On the other hand, there exists a four-hour version of The Brandon Stoddard Horror Show, and he was only giving us free the two-hour version. There are limits to even the greatest hearts when it comes to generosity, you see. Because the specter of two low-advertising prime-time network hours is one thing, but four hours is another. And Mr. Stoddard might be answerable to stockholders, for all I know. Which is interesting to think about.

RG

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Richard Grenier

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The Day After is unquestionably the greatest horror movie since the last great horror movie. You can see Jason Robards’s hair fall out, and beautiful women turn all horrible, with advanced tooth decay, and nice suburban people with disgusting sores all over their bodies wandering along the roads and fighting for food and shooting each other, because things get that bad. And you can see Kansas City, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, goupina great firestorm, and nice Americans turn decidedly un-nice, hiding underground in shelters, very inhospitable to strangers, and, above all, lots and lots of wonderful makeup jobs of people in really disgusting physical condition, dying in highly repulsive ways. It is, in short, wonderful entertainment for the whole family and you got it absolutely free on prime-time television, provided to you by ABC.

So those of you who stuck with The Brandon Stoddard Horror Show to the last unspeakable groan should be especially grateful to the eponymous Brandon Stoddard, president of ABC Motion Pictures, which spent $7 million of its own money to offer your family this wonderful evening. Because it was only the first half of the movie, the first hour, that ABC thought would be appropriate for those $270,000-a- minute ads because of the appealing subject matter of the story, which is life: with farmers farming, doctors doctoring, neckers necking, some young ladies planning to run off after some young gentlemen to Boston, one young lady playfully hiding another young lady’s diaphragm, while golden wheat shimmers in the fields of Kansas. That kind of Life. When the Living Dead part comes, with everybody dying and looking so awful, it seemed somehow tasteless to advertise such national brands as Preparation H or Mr. Coffee, so ABC had to resort to selling cheapie 15-second spots at knock-down prices for such products as Orville Redenbach- er’s Gourmet Popping Corn. So, I mean, Brandon Stoddard must really have had to rob his piggybank for this. On the other hand, there exists a four-hour version of The Brandon Stoddard Horror Show, and he was only giving us free the two-hour version. There are limits to even the greatest hearts when it comes to generosity, you see. Because the specter of two low-advertising prime-time network hours is one thing, but four hours is another. And Mr. Stoddard might be answerable to stockholders, for all I know. Which is interesting to think about.