Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Saturdays, I will be reviewing the Canadian sitcom, Check it Out, which ran in syndication from 1985 to 1988. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!
After celebrating Thanksgiving and my sister’s birthday, all in the same week, I’m exhausted but I still managed to review yet another episode of Check It Out! So, I guess …. check it out below!
Episode 1.8 “….Or Get Off The Pot”
(Dir by Ari Dikijian, originally aired on November 20th, 1985)
As this week’s episode opens, Edna (Dinah Christie) is excited because it’s her 7-year anniversary with Howard! Seven years ago, Howard took her out to celebrate Secretary’s Day and they ended up going back to his place. What some people would call a clear breach of workplace etiquette, Edna calls the beginning of something wonderful. She can’t wait to see what Howard is going to do for their anniversary!
And what is Howard planning on doing? He’s planning on going bowling with the guys.
YIKES!
Realizing that Howard seems to have real issues with commitment, Edna follows a friend’s advice and she demands that Howard join her in seeing a relationship therapist. Howard is not a big fan of therapy and he tries to get out of it by moving back his bowling game and offering to take Dinah to a theme restaurant afterwards. (The restaurant’s theme? Bowling!) Edna does not agree. Therapy it is!
Needless to say, the therapy doesn’t go well. There’s only one happy couple at the session and they’re married but not to each other. Everyone else is miserable, despite the fact that their therapist is played by Helen Seymour, who played the nice (and doomed) laundromat owner in the original My Bloody Valentine. Edna eventually gives Howard an ultimatum about proposing to her but she changes her mind after Howard apologizes for taken her for granted. After a night of anniversary sex (“You apologized several times,” Edna says), Howard agrees to marry her someday and Edna agrees not to run off with her building’s gardener.
Meanwhile, the employees of Cobb’s pool their money to buy Howard and Edna an anniversary gift. Why would they do that? Like seriously, they’re always talking about how little they get paid but now, they’re pooling their money to buy a gift for someone else’s anniversary? Anyway, Christian takes their money and buys Howard a new golf club. Good for him!
This episode didn’t add up too much but, on the plus side, Don Adams and Dinah Christie had more chemistry in this episode than they had in previous episodes. This is the first time, since I started watching this show, that I’ve believed Howard and Edna as a couple. That said, their relationship is still probably the least interesting part of this show. So far, the best episodes of Check It Out! have been the ones taking place not in the office but on the salesfloor.
Next week, someone is stealing the store’s pricey gourmet food! Can Howard catch the Phantom of the Market!?
I think I was twelve when I first saw Heavy Metal. It came on HBO one night and I loved it. So did all of my friends. Can you blame us? It had everything that a twelve year-old boy (especially a 12 year-old boy who was more than a little on the nerdy side) could want out of a movie: boobs, loud music, and sci-fi violence. It was a tour of our secret fantasies. The fact that it was animated made it all the better. Animated films were not supposed to feature stuff like this. When my friends and I watched Heavy Metal, we felt like we were getting away with something.
Den (directed by Jack Stokes, written by Richard Corben)
On a space station orbiting the Earth, Captain Lincoln F. Sternn is on trail for a countless number of offenses. Though guilty, Captain Sternn expects to be acquitted because he has bribed the prosecution’s star witness, Hanover Fiste. However, Hanover is holding the Loc-Nar in his hand and it causes him to tell the truth about Captain Sternn and eventually turn into a bloodthirsty giant. Captain Sternn saves the day by tricking Hanover into getting sucked out of an air lock.
In the film’s final and most famous segment, Taarna, the blond warrior was featured on Heavy Metal‘s poster, rides a pterodactyl across a volcanic planet, killing barbarians, and finally confronting the Loc-Nar. She sacrifices herself to defeat the Loc-Nar but no worries! We return to Earth where, for some reason, the Loc-Nar explodes and the girl from the beginning of the film is revealed to be Taarna reborn. She even gets to fly away on her pterodactyl. Taarna was really great when I was twelve but today, it is impossible to watch it without flashing back to the Major Boobage episode of South Park.
Through the Shattered Lens 