The Coneheads

A decade before the Conehead family made the transition from "Saturday Night Live" to the silver screen, there was a brief detour into prime-time. Yep, somebody had the idea to bring the Coneheads to TV in their own weekly series. Instead of shooting a live-action version, it was decided that the series would be animated. Unfortunately, there hadn't been a successful weekly prime-time animated series since "The Jetsons," and there wouldn't be another until "The Simpsons" debuted in 1989. Adding to the factors going against "The Conheads," the animation production team at Rankin/Bass butted heads with "SNL" writers Al Franken and Tom Davis over the vision of the show. The result is one of the strangest half-hours of television ever produced.

Basically the live-action CONEHEADS film was a remake of the animated pilot. Thing is, the movie had something going for it that the cartoon didn't: it was kinda funny. Despite the continuous intrusion of a canned laugh track, there's little humor and little of it works. Even an outer space prologue/credits sequence doesn't help; it's flat and unimaginative. Despite its overwhelming flaws, there is a certain morbid appeal... I mean, how did this thing even get made?

The special aired a grand total of once, but was quickly issued on home video, and the tape was re-released in the '90s to capitalize on the expected-success of the film. The special's now out of print, but the special has surfaced on You Tube and other online video sites.