Fans of SCTV remember it well: Brooke Shields (played by Catherine O’Hara) treats the “Farm Film Report” hosts to a frenetic, off-key rendition of Rod Stewart’s “Young Turks” before suffering the fate of all the show’s guests and blowin’ up real good.
Watch the bit on Netflix, though, and you won’t hear Stewart’s song. O’Hara dances to different music, and she sings lyrics that sound like: “Waa wippee wichee ta wenny any lenny catcherom dream, woo!”
It’s changes like that—sometimes smooth, sometimes jarring—that allowed the classic 1976-84 sketch series to make its long overdue streaming debut this year, arriving first in Canada on Amazon Prime Video in March, then in the U.S. on Netflix in September.
Up until then, the show—which earned critical acclaim, influenced generations of comedians and launched the careers of O’Hara, Martin Short, and John Candy—could be seen only in bits and pieces online, and on an incomplete DVD set.
Why the delay?
The same bugaboo that kept other essential shows of the ‘70s and ‘80s off streaming: music licensing. Back in the day, producers plugged in songs without much heed to acquiring long-term rights. That oversight came back to bite series including Saturday Night Live, which has left many sketches offline for lack of music rights, and the rock-heavy sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, whose soundtrack was considerably altered for DVD releases.
Any distributor of a show of that era must decide whether to cut questionable music, replace it, or secure it with a potentially pricey deal with its owners.
“The original sin of SCTV was that when they first aired it, literally none of the music was licensed,” explains Jesse Case, who spent a year revising 134 SCTV episodes for streaming.
“So we had to figure out: What did we already own, what could we license, what did we need to re-create? And how could we do all of that within a budget that’s substantially short of what it would take to license the music wholesale?”
As music resource coordinator for comedy institution Second City, which created SCTV and still owns it, Case was charged with maintaining the show’s humor while stripping away any uncleared melodies that could imperil licensing deals with streamers.
That meant, among other things, finding a way to remove problematic music while leaving intact the dialogue it was underpinning. “We discovered that there were some AI tools that could take it out,” recalls Case, who did the revising at his studio in rural Illinois.
But the technology was just one piece of the puzzle. Case had to work with Second City execs, lawyers, and a licensing specialist to determine which tunes were worth spending time and money to lock down. Netflix viewers now are seeing the results of their decisions.
What’s In
Guest performances
Musical guests booked during the two SCTV seasons that aired late-night Fridays on NBC were enlisted to participate in comedy sketches, which led to such incongruous moments as John Mellencamp (then John Cougar) morphing into Ed Grimley and Hall & Oates racing with eggs and spoons in a Chariots of Fire parody.
But they performed from their songbooks, too, and “we really prioritized our limited budget towards getting those and securing them,” Case says.
Among them is his favorite musical segment on the show, when the real-life Tony Bennett cheers up Bob McKenzie (Rick Moranis) and brother Doug (Dave Thomas) with a rendition of “The Best Is Yet to Come” after their variety special falls apart. Case considers it a perfect demonstration of how SCTV could integrate song and story.
“[At first] we weren’t gonna be able to get it,” he says. “I can’t really speak to the specific hoops that our licensing contact went through, but I know that it was work. And we really, really pushed to get it.”
Songs crucial to the comedy
“There are things that really hinge upon the song that’s playing under them,” Case says, and pinning down those tunes was another goal.
So, yes, Netflix viewers do hear “Ride Like the Wind” as Michael McDonald (Moranis) races to record his brief vocal contribution, and “MacArthur Park” remains the soundtrack as singer Richard Harris (Thomas) dances to exhaustion during the instrumental break.
“A, it’s freaking hilarious,” Case says of the latter. “And B, [the song is] absolutely central to the core of that scene.”
Bits and pieces
From the languid stylings of Perry Como (Eugene Levy) to the uptempo polka arrangements of the Schmenge Brothers (Levy and Candy), brief covers of pop hits fueled several SCTV fan favorites that remain unscathed.
While Case couldn’t address the specifics of those scenes, he noted the legal concepts of parody and fair use—which allow unauthorized use of copyrighted music in certain situations—factored into decisions about what stayed and what went.
What’s Out
Insurmountable clearance issues sent a few beloved bits to the cutting-room floor, including:
- Barbra Streisand (Andrea Martin) and Slim Whitman (Joe Flaherty) dueting on “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.”
- Thomas’ character Bill Needle singing the Exodus theme in an Ocean’s 11 spoof.
- Martin Short’s master turn as Jerry Lewis belting “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at a Champs-Élysées concert. (But his portrayal of Lewis covering Bob Dylan tunes stayed up.)
Beyond the musical realm, other segments went away because they don’t fit today’s cultural sensibilities, including Thomas’ many appearances as the Asian character Lin Ye Tang and Flaherty in blackface as a disguised private eye.
A whole Season 1 episode showcasing broad ethnic humor also was pulled from the rotation. (A Second City spokeswoman says original SCTV cast members requested the cuts.)
What’s Different
The theme song
SCTV tended to change up opening theme songs from season to season, and Second City never owned any of them. Rather than tap into the budget to license one of those, Case wrote his own. It was a tough decision, but he’s happy with the cheery, bouncy results. “I put a lot of love and care and thought into creating something that felt authentically of the show,” he says.
Pop hits out, new riffs in
Case’s composition skills also came in handy when a potentially expensive pop song (or songs) could be shed and substituted without compromising the comedy.
Example: A new melody replaced the Flying Lizards’ cover of “Money (That’s What I Want)” as the theme song of Eugene Levy’s “Money Talk With Brian Johns” segments.
Another bit had a keyboardist (Moranis) auditioning to back up the cut-rate commercials of Edna Boil (Martin) by playing famous riffs from prog-rock songs. “I tracked the motions of his fingers and re-created music that felt of the genre and similarly impressive—and matched the motions—that we could replace all of those songs with,” he says. “The joke still lands, because the point is not necessarily referential to those specific songs.”
As for the Brooke Shields bit, Case wrote new accompaniment to supplant the “Young Turks” track and, with AI and audio mixing, removed and substituted O’Hara’s vocal. It’s still O’Hara who is heard, over new instrumentals, on the Netflix version.
“We did a little bit of zhuzhing of her vocal, to make [the lyrics] sound just a little bit more unidentifiable,” says Case. “But with the intent of still preserving, ultimately, what’s funny about the performance, which is her character and her gibberish and her energy, and the fact that she was just really the worst singer.”
Besides making the episodes legally pure and more accessible, Case also sees the lengthy and difficult licensing process as a mitzvah for the many musicians who contributed, sometimes unwittingly, to the show’s success.
“Not to crap on the charming guerrilla approach of the first seasons,” he says, “but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that we’re having to pay people for their work.”
The Netflix deal runs three years—enough time for the show’s old fans and newcomers to work their way through the voluminous body of work that spawned catchphrases from “Oooo! Scary, kids!” to “Take off, hoser!”
“There’s a lot of pride in the fact that it’s sort of this underground show—‘your favorite comedian’s favorite TV show,’” Case says. “And I really hope, above all else, what streaming allows us to do is show more people this incredible piece of history and piece of comedy. And make more people, as many people as possible, love it the way that we do.”
SCTV is streaming now on Netflix, which will premiere a documentary on the series, SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of, on Oct. 30. Segments continue to be added to the official SCTV YouTube channel.
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