A fuzzy MTV clip making the rounds advertises the 1991 “SACRIFICE YOUR DAUGHTER TO GWAR!!!” contest, and it’s so good that it might give the very young a mistaken impression of what MTV’s programming used to be like. In fact, before that terrible Ugly Kid Joe song came out, the network showed almost nothing but the videos for “Janie’s Got a Gun,” “Silent Lucidity,” “More Than Words” and “Every Little Step.” In other words, it was a fat, sad sack of shit, and you would have been waiting a long time if you were waiting for Downtown Julie Brown to cue up live video of GWAR doing “Sick of You” in Antarctica. No, the GWAR contest was not part of MTV’s regular programming, but a sketch on the network’s best original show to date, The Idiot Box.
Even if he had never achieved fame as Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the Bill & Ted series (part three now in the works!)—even if he was not currently slated to write and direct the official documentary about the life and work of Frank Zappa—Alex Winter would still be deserving of two Kennedy Center awards, a statue in every town square and a place in every American heart, because he is the director of the Butthole Surfers’ immortal Bar-B-Que Movie, for which John Ford would have gladly schlupped out both his and John “Duke” Wayne’s prostate glands and let them splat upon the floor, proclaiming, as he prised out both organs with one fluid motion of two callused hands, that’s cash on the barrelhead, son. Nor do Winter’s contributions to our culture end there.
Bar-B-Que Movie surfaced in 1989 on the first (and only?) issue of Impact Video Magazine, directed by Winter and his frequent collaborator Tom Stern. (The pair met as film students at NYU, where they directed the short Squeal of Death.) I haven’t seen much of Impact, but the roster is unimpeachable; along with the Buttholes short, the video included interviews with Public Enemy and Robert Williams, comedy from Bill Hicks, and footage of Survival Research Labs. Armed with this small triumph and the success of the first Bill & Ted movie, Winter and Stern scored a sketch show on MTV: the six-episode run of The Idiot Box.
Though some of the show’s references are now ancient, it holds up quite well on its own. What is hard to communicate is how demented, sick and bad it seemed in the context of the time. Back then, some citizens complained that The Simpsons was obscene and harmful to children, and the vice president of the country inveighed against the corrupting influence of a sitcom for the elderly called Murphy Brown. It was in this inhospitable cultural environment that Eddie the Flying Gimp took wing. Who can say how much higher he might have soared in friendly skies? (This analogy falls apart because Eddie the Flying Gimp is from outer space, but I had a long day and I did my best.)
Hideous Mutant Freekz: Alex Winter and Tom Stern on the cover of the June 1993 issue of Film Threat
After The Idiot Box, Winter and Stern co-directed their gut-busting first feature, Hideous Mutant Freekz, released as Freaked in 1993. Twenty-three years on, I have yet to meet the person to whom I would not recommend this movie. Visit the Freekland channel on YouTube for more Winter and Stern video madness. (The first episode of The Idiot Box is here.) And even if you never got a chance to be baptized by Oderus’ body fluids in person like I did, you can still purify your soul with days of long-form GWAR videos.
Below, in the last episode of The Idiot Box, the GWAR contest appears at 1:43: