Word: maniac
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1990
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Maniac Mansion (Family Channel). Dad (Joe Flaherty) is an amiably incompetent inventor, his four-year-old son is a hulking six-footer and Uncle Harry is a housefly. From such nonsense a group of SCTV alums have fashioned the looniest, sweetest family comedy of the year...
Soon after Iraq invaded Kuwait, U.S. intelligence officials conducted an emergency review of their earlier assessment that Saddam is five to 10 years away from developing nuclear arms by enriching uranium ore to bomb-grade levels. "The sense was, 'My God, this guy's a maniac; he'll do anything. Is there any way we haven't thought of he could get the Bomb?' " says an official. The panel came up with only one scenario: Iraq might have enough bomb-grade fuel on hand to fashion a single low-yield atomic weapon in a period of several months to several...
...enough? Now try switching instead to Maniac Mansion, a family sitcom that is not so much off the wall as out of this world. Dad is a mishap-prone inventor whose botched experiments have turned his brother-in-law into a housefly and his four-year-old son into a 250-lb. clone of Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. We learn these things in the show's 10th-anniversary special -- a nostalgia trip that takes place, oddly, on the program's first episode. Weirdest of all, the series is running, virtually unnoticed, on cable's Family Channel...
...Flaherty knows bad movies too; as Count Floyd, the seedy late-night host on the old SCTV comedy show, he used to introduce dreck like Dr. Tongue's 3-D House of Stewardesses. Playing the incompetent mad scientist in Maniac Mansion, Flaherty again shows a flair for sweet dimwittedness. Another SCTV veteran, Eugene Levy, is co-creator of this twisted update of The Addams Family, which was inspired by, of all things, a computer game...
...Maniac Mansion has the old SCTV spirit, mixing the outrageous and the banal with nary a hint that anybody knows the difference. In one episode, Uncle Harry, who is still buzzing around the house, falls for a female fly, then has to console his jealous (and still life-size) wife. "We've got 20 years -- that's a history," he tells her. "That's something I could never have with a fly. Because they only live for -- what? -- two weeks max." Flaherty, meanwhile, is disarmingly oblivious to the havoc he is creating. When he concocts a serum that turns...