Retro Television Review: St. Elsewhere 3.8 “Sweet Dreams”

Posted on February 6, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988. The show can be found on Daily Motion.

I miss when this show on Hulu and available to rent on Prime. The Daily Motion uploads are not the best (especially where sound quality is concerned) but, for now at least, that’s what I’m having to go with.

Episode 3.8 “Sweet Dreams”

(Dir by Mark Tinker, originally aired on November 14th, 1984)

This week’s episode was all about sleep and the dreams that might come with sleep.

Westphall, as usual, gets the most depressing storyline. He can’t sleep. He has insomnia. Of course, he does. Anything depressing that doesn’t happen to Dr. Morrison will inevitably happen to Dr. Westphall instead.

Dr. Craig tries to figure out why one of his patients died in his sleep with a terrified look on his face. Can a nightmare cause someone to have a heart attack?

Dr. Cavanero diagnoses a man with sleep apnea.

Meanwhile, we get a peek at the dreams of three members of the St. Elsewhere staff.

Luther dreams of being kicked out of the hospital by two security guards. Fortunately, ZZ Top is standing outside of the hospital and they order three women to kidnap Luther in a big red car and turn him into a sharp-dressed man. Luther and his new friends invade the hospital, toss out the security guards, and invite Warren Coolidge to come hang out with them. ZZ Top performs Legs, which seems odd since the song is about a woman who has legs and knows how to use them but Luther is the one getting the makeover. Well, whatever. It’s a cute dream and a nice break from Dr. Westphall looking depressed.

Both Victor and Jack agree to take part in a sleep study. Victor is yanked out of the study by Dr. Craig but, before that happens, we do get to see Victor’s dream of washing up on an island that is ruled by Amazons.

As for Jack Morrison’s recurring dream, it’s just about as dark as you would expect when it comes to the only character who has suffered more heartache than Dr. Westphall. In Morrison’s dream, he finds himself wandering around the deserted hospital. He hears someone playing Led Zeppelin in the morgue. He goes down there and discovers Peter White waiting for him.

Morrison and White speak. Even in death, White is whiny and defensive. Morrison repeatedly asks whether or not White was the ski mask rapist and, every time, White refuses to give a direct answer. However, when Morrison is about to leave the morgue, White is suddenly wearing a blue ski mask. Morrison wakes up from each dream with a jolt, terrified to face the truth about the man who he defended against his better judgment.

(I have to admit that, if I was a nurse or a doctor at St. Eligius, I would have mixed feelings about Morrison. Yes, he seems to be well-meaning and he’s suffered his share of tragedy. But the fact that he continued to be a friend — albeit with a certain ambivalence — to Dr. White would make me very uncomfortable. I know that Morrison would probably point out that Dr. White was acquitted but everyone at the hospital knew he was guilty. Everyone but Morrison, apparently.)

This was a good episode and a bit of a reset after all the drama of the Peter White storyline. Well-directed, well-acted, and very atmospheric, this was St. Elsewhere at its best.

Cinemax Friday: School Spirit (1985, directed by Alan Holleb)

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Though he’s clearly in his late 30s and doesn’t have much of a personality, Billy Batson (Tom Nolan) was the most popular student at Lavatoire University. Not only did all of the ladies love him but Billy was also Hogmeister, the king of school’s annual Hog Day. Everyone at the university loved Billy except for crusty old President Grimshaw (Larry Linville). Sadly, Billy was killed in a traffic accident that was entirely his fault. He had gone down to the local roadhouse to use their condom machine and he was so excited afterward that he dropped the condom while driving. When he reached down to grab it, he took his eyes off the road and one thing led to another. The lesson? Safe sex kills. That’s not a great lesson today and it was an even worse one in the 80s but what are you going to do?

Billy’s dead.

Or is he?

No, don’t worry, he’s dead. At the hospital, his spirit rises out of his body and he’s greeted by his deceased Uncle Pinky (John Finnegan). Pinky says that it’s time to go to Heaven but Billy wants just one more day so that he can oversee Hog Day and get laid. Pinky says no way but then he gets distracted by a comely nurse. Billy escapes from the hospital and returns to the campus.

Even though he’s dead, Billy still appears in corporeal form and everyone can talk to him. The only special power that Billy has is that he can wave his hand over his head and turn invisible. Billy uses his powers once or twice and there’s the expected trip to the girl’s shower but that’s really the extent of School Spirit‘s supernatural angle. The movie doesn’t really seem to be committed to the idea of Billy being dead. Also, at no point in the film does Billy Batson say “Shazam!,” and that really is unforgivable.

Billy wants to sleep with snooty Judith Hightower (Elizabeth Foxx) but then he gets distracted by Grimshaw’s wild daughter (Marta Kober) and also by Madeleine Lavatoire (Daniele Arnaud), who is visiting from France. It doesn’t take long for Billy to realize that Madeleine is the one for him but how can he fall in love with anyone when he’s going to have to go to the afterlife at midnight. Appropriately, it all ends with a case of deus ex machina. The ending makes no sense but neither does the rest of the movie so give School Spirit some credit for being consistent.

School Spirit is a stupid movie and, with the exception of Larry Linville and Marta Kober, the cast is a forgettable. This is the type of comedy that used to show up regularly on late night Cinemax. What it lacked in laughs, it made up for in boobs and that was really what the majority of its audience was watching for. People who stayed up late to watch Cinemax were not the most demanding viewers in the world. Today, the film will mostly appeal to people nostalgic for 80s sex comedies. Why they would watch School Spirit instead of something like Risky Business, I don’t know. Maybe they needed a movie to review for a blog.

Tomorrow, I finish off my Police Academy reviews by taking a look at Mission to Moscow!

Music Video of the Day: Legs by ZZ Top (1983, directed by Tim Newman)

Posted on June 5, 2019 by Jedadiah Leland

“I was driving in Los Angeles, and there was this unusual downpour. And there was a real pretty girl on the side of the road. I passed her, and then I thought, ‘Well, I’d better pull over’ or at least turn around and offer her a ride, and by the time I got back she was gone. Her legs were the first thing I noticed. Then I noticed that she had a Brooke Shields hairdo that was in danger of falling. She was not going to get wet. She had legs and she knew how to use them.”

— Billy Gibbons, on the inspiration behind Legs

With Legs, the third of their Eliminator videos (following Gimme All Your Lovin’ and Sharp Dressed Man), ZZ Top showed that they knew better than to mess with a good thing. This video follows the same plot as the previous two videos, except this time it’s a young woman (played by Wendy Frazier) getting the help of the ZZ Top girls instead of a young man. I don’t know how the video’s heroine ended up working in the Hellscape that opens this video but it’s a good thing that the ghosts of ZZ Top were around to help her. As the video makes clear from the start, she does have legs and, after a trip in the Eliminator and a makeover, she knows how to use them.

The three ZZ Top girls were played by brunette Jeana Tomasino, blonde Daniele Arnaud, and Kymberly Herrin, who is identifiable by the red top she’s wearing. Tomasino and Arnaud appeared in the previous Eliminator videos while Herrin made her first appearance in this video.

Like the previous two videos, Legs was directed by Tim Newman. Though the girls and the Eliminator would return for one more video, Newman would not. Sleeping Bag would be directed by Steve Barron and we’ll see how he did tomorrow.

Enjoy!