UHF Brought Weird Al’s Silly but Sincere Satire to the Big Screen

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35 years ago this weekend, UHF marked the big-screen debut of beloved music parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic. After becoming a comedy star in the ‘80s, churning out artist-approved spoofs of pop hits from the likes of Michael Jackson, Madonna, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Devo and others, Yankovic had more ideas for parodies—not just of music, but also movies and television.

The movie itself does have somewhat of a plot to give all these skits a reason to exist. Yankovic plays George Newman, a modern-day Walter Mitty whose knack for excessive daydreaming gets him unemployed and, eventually, on the outs with his long-suffering girlfriend (Saturday Night Live alumna-turned-conservative loon Victoria Jackson). He gets his chance to do something with his life when his uncle (Stanley Brock) hands over Channel 62, a low-rent UHF station he won in a poker game. The station comes with a skeleton crew of eccentrics, including a receptionist/aspiring news reporter (a pre-The Nanny Fran Drescher), a diminutive cameraman (dwarf icon Billy Barty), and a kooky tech guy (former General Hospital heartthrob Anthony Geary) named Philo—an obvious nod to Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of the television set.

George also snags a childlike janitor named Stanley Spadowski, played by Michael Richards, practically doing a test run of the spastic slapstick that would make him a star on Seinfeld. Spadowski just got fired from network affiliate Channel 8, run by a cartoonishly villainous general manager (Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ Kevin McCarthy) and his gang of goons (which includes Sopranos baddie David Proval). These guys become a problem for George once people start switching over to U-62. George breathes some fresh air into this station by creating original programming like Wheel of Fish, Bowling for Burgers, Celebrity Mud Wrestling (with special guest Mikhail Gorbachev!) and, the most popular of them all, Stanley Spadowski’s Clubhouse, a children’s show where a lucky little one can get blasted with a fire hose if they find a marble in a kiddie pool of oatmeal.

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Much like the music he’s made a career dropping, UHF is playfully juvenile. It relentlessly serves up random, nonsensical, quasi-un-P.C. jokes and gags that would make a 13-year-old giggle uncontrollably. (That was the age I was when I discovered it.). It’s basically a PG-rated Kentucky Fried Movie, with Yankovic and manager/co-writer/director Jay Levey dropping the same absurd, anarchic gags sketches—but without the naked women.

Of course, the most inspired bits are the ones that skewer popular movies and TV shows. The film begins with Yankovic recreating the famed opening from Raiders of the Lost Ark, where he assumes the role of Indiana Jones and gets chased by a runaway boulder after snatching, in this movie, an Oscar. Another fantasy sequence has George all buff and roided-up as Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo, making enemy soldiers explode with just a bow & arrow and launching missile strikes on landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum. (Considering how insanely violent and jingoistic the Rambo sequels later became, one can’t help but think Stallone picked up a few pointers from this spoof.) We also get the movie-trailer spoofs Conan the Librarian (don’t you dare turn in a book late!) and Gandhi II, where the world-peace icon (played by Levey) is now a Charles Bronson-style street vigilante.

Yeah, the critics eviscerated the hell out of this. Siskel and Ebert thought it was unfunny and desperate. Jonathan Rosenbaum called it “awful by any standards.” Rex Reed said his head almost exploded the week he had to review this and Young Einstein, a movie that was supposed to introduce the U.S. to Aussie comedian Yahoo Serious and eventually bombed here that summer.

Yankovic reads some of these pans on the audio commentary from the movie’s 2002 DVD release. (The commentary also appears on a 35th-anniversary Blu-ray/4K UHD set of UHF that was recently released from Shout! Studios.) As Yankovic himself stated at a Comic-Con panel in 2014, with the way he and Levey flimsily conceived this film, he could understand why fans of coherent, competent filmmaking would have a problem with this cruddy-looking shits-and-giggles fest. “We just wanted to do a lot of gags and commercial parodies and movie parodies and TV parodies,” he said. “And if I had to go back and do it over again, I might’ve had the actual plot be a little bit more interesting.”

Most of UHF could’ve been made into a sketch show like SCTV, which Yankovic has admitted was an obvious influence. After all, he was already doing that kind of humor with the Al TV specials he would periodically do on MTV. And, yet, it’s become a cult favorite for those who have a soft spot for silly but sincere satire. As critic Noel Murray once said, “UHF has become a cult favorite for much the same reason a lot of people love Yankovic’s music: It’s agreeably goofy, and it feels like something anyone could do, even if that’s not the case.”

Yankovic, who has never had a mean bone in his lanky frame, is that rarest of pop-culture piss-takers—one who makes fun because he simply wants to make fun. And that’s all over UHF.

Craig D. Lindsey is a Houston-based writer. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @unclecrizzle.