Badmovies.org Forum

I noticed in one of the forums at DVDTalk,mention of Mr Belvedere on DVD.Someone posted a link to clip featuring a promo where that little smart ass kid claims to have been "touched".Someone also mentioned an episode that was similar to Misery.I never watched that show,but the idea of Belvedere strapped to a bed by a crazy woman sounds hilarious.
What are some of the "very special episodes"that you remember?They might have been "serious"at the time but I gotta' admit,they make me laugh now.
FACTS OF LIFE:I vaguely remember a date rape episode where the victim is Natalie(??!).
DIFF'RENT STROKES:They were on for what,8 seasons?And there were a lot of "VSE's".I like the one where Kimberly had an eating disorder.Off screen,you hear her making these sounds as though she is vomiting.Funny stuff.Arnold and Sam got blamed for the missing cake,but it was actually Kimberly that ate it and than puked it up.
The episode where Willis had a bit of marijunana and when Mr D found out,all he had to say was,"Willis,i am shocked!"
I still remember the ad for the episode where Willis got caught smoking.The ad mentioned,"and when Dad finds out,he's gonna burn his butt!"
And towards the end of the series,wasn't every one getting kidnapped?
The last "VSE" I recall seeing was a Clueless dealing with teen pregnancy.

Diffrent Strokes- The one with the bike shop guy who was molesting kids or whatever it was.  That was weird.
7th Heaven- EVERY episode was a 'very special' episode.  The first five years, all the Camden kids would be like, "Mom, I met a new kid at school.  They're cool.  Can they come to dinner?"  "Sure honey, I'll set an extra spot."  Cut to the scene where they reveal that they're a drug addict, or have a cutting problem, or anorexia, or a pregnancy, or are abused in some way, leaving the reverened to then "Save" them from said situation, with a phone number to call at the end of the episode.

SAVED BY THE BELL:  So many very, very special episodes.  But by far the best was when Jessie gets involved in drugs... was it smack? meth? pot? no... it was caffeine pills.  The epsiode gave Elizabeth Berkely her big chance to "act", convincing producers she might be able to handle a more emotionally complex role, like, say, a lapdancer...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hnrkc70taA

That term has become a cliche and will always remind me of the New Zealand episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, on Travel Channel. He was riding this four-wheeler up and down these dunes and the thing flipped over on him and rolled and it was one of those coin toss situations where he was either going to walk away without a scratch or get seriously injured. Fortunately he didn't get hurt, but he was more shaken up than I've ever seen his cool self be, and he jokingly said if he'd been killed, couldn't you just hear the commercials billing that as "a very special episode." I had to laugh.

MASH: When Hawkeye is blinded, possibly permanently.

Star Trek TNG: When the Enterprise gets in the middle of a trade arrangement, where the people of one planet work soley to pay for medicine needed to treat their disease, which turns out to simply be withdrawls from the medicine, which is really a narcotic and the providing party knows it.

Family Ties: When Michael J Fox's cahracter gets addicted to speed (actually diet pills)

Diffrent Strokes: When Willis joins a gang (The Tarantulas I believe).

Hill Street Blues: When Bobby Hill beats the crap out of Dennis Franz in a straight-up fight, after Franz sucker-punched a fellow cop (Renko I believe).

Soap: When Burt is abducted by aliens.

Night Court: When Feilding was deployed to a war zone in the arctic and his plane crashes, he is missing presumed dead, and the rest have a funeral.

Yea, I'm getting a little off-course, sorry. .

On Home Improvement the wife had a cancer scare and  I'm sure one of the Taylor brats got high or beat up or knocked up or something. Didn't Al get hooked on mustache wax?

When did the very special epsiode thing start? They had a ton of them on Blossom and Boy Meets World. Not that I..ahem...ever watched those shows. And I think Family matters had a few episodes that dealt with racism and gang violence. And then there was the time Carlton on The Fresh Prince got attacked and went out and bought a gun.

Oh man, I gotta lay off the boxed dvd sales on Amazon while I've been  :drink:

Blossom had a very special existance.  They skipped the "Special episode" thing entirely and made it just one long "Very Special."

We all watched Boy Meets World, and it's a good thing.  Show was great.  I don't remember them doing a whole hell of a lot of 'very specials' though.  Full House did though, didn't it?

God I love these episodes. 

Webster (I think) - Webster overhears one of his teachers molesting a student after class.

Family Ties - The episode where Alex's friend dies in a car accident and he goes to see a shrink.

Silver Spoons - The episode where Ricky goes hunting and cries like a little b!tch when he has to shoot a deer.

Punky Brewster - Punky's friend locks herself in an old fridge outside during a round of hide and seek.  I think she almost dies or something. 

As mentioned by Rev, the Saved By The Bell one is great.  "I'm so excited...I'm so excited...I'm so scared..."

Every episode of Full House was "very special".  There was always a life lesson to be learned at the end.  Most of it was 100% crap that I couldn't suspend disbelief for in the long run.  I recall when Stephanie ran Joey's car through the kitchen and they talked about it.  I'd be a dead kid back in the day if I did that. 

I remember one episode where DJ has to take the two little sisters with her on a date to the movies and they sneak the little ones in. DJ and the boyfriend are going to see a PG-13 movie. Stephanie and Michelle object because of the rating and there is no parent there with them. "No parent, no guidance, no movie." So they have to be snuck into a G rated movie.. Seriously what kid is going to object to seeing a PG-13 movie simply because there is no adult? Great realistic portrayal of kids there FH...

Always controversial All in the Family had it's share of Very Special Episodes, but the ones I most vividly remember are Edith almost gets raped on her 50th birthday (a two-parter! She foils the rapist by shoving her hot birthday cake in his puss, as I recall) and Archie's transvestite friend Beverly LaSalle gets killed when he and Mike are mugged on Christmas Eve, causing Edith to renounce her religion. 

WKRP in Cincinnati had one. It was based on an event that had happened a month or so before so the episode was written a few days after the incident, filmed and released in about a month. On December 3rd (IIRC) 1979 at a Who concert in Cincinatti a bunch of people were trampled to death. The episode starts off with the cast at WKRP going to the show only the next morning they learn the sad truth of what happened. Also a law was passed later that month banning the general seating (aka standing room only) at concerts there. The WKRP crew discuss that a law needed to be made. There is a note at the end of the episode telling of the incident and the law being passed..

We all watched Boy Meets World, and it's a good thing.  Show was great.  I don't remember them doing a whole hell of a lot of 'very specials' though.  Full House did though, didn't it?
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 I know they sometimes dealth with serious issues but maybe they didn't do it in the  Very Special Format.  Or maybe I was thinking of Growing Pains. I watched that show because I had a crush on Judith Kearns and because they had a character named Boner. I think Matthew perry died on that show from a car crash after he drove drunk. Or maybe I was thinking of Webster.

Maybe Punky Brewster? :bouncegiggle:

The Mr Belvedere/Mysery thing sounds  kind of like the Brocktoon sketch on SNL: http://www.morethings.com/fan/saturday_night_live/mr_belvedere_fan_club.htm (http://www.morethings.com/fan/saturday_night_live/mr_belvedere_fan_club.htm) (Ran into this when I was looking for that:http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=21178 (http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=21178).

It seems like around the time TV started changing over to color, sitcoms became really gratingly, cloyingly inane. Mabe all the old radio-silent movie-vaudville writers died off around that time, or maybe that's when radio and movies stopped being serious competition with TV, or maybe it was when Andy Griffith was Raped By The Panda but the ratings stayed about the same that they realized we would pretty much just watch whatever they put on the air. That seems to be when laugh tracks got really obtrusive, and lots of shows had a gimmicky, one joke premise (like something can talk that shouldn't be able to, but only to one guy, and he has to keep it secret).
Then, when people got REALLY sick of that, MASH and All In The Family came out with all that '70s social relevance crap. For awhile, EVERY sitcom wanted to be about rape or something. This was the TRUE Dark Age of the American sitcom. That stuff is really even lazier writting than formulaic humor is. They were passing off Charlie Chaplin impressions between house-fires and cancer diagnoses as humor. The zany neighbor archetype devolved essentially into comic relief characters (Schneider in One Day At A Time, Mel in Alice). Any time it's too hard to think of a joke, they'd just have someone go blind or something so they could say they were intentionally not being funny. The Bob Newhart Show was practically the only funny sitcom on in the '70s. Barney Miller was OK, but they did special episodes quite a bit. Three's Company seemed to kind of start a trend toward sitcoms being OK with just being sitcoms. The '80s were kind of a transitional period, sitcoms weren't all trying to be All In The Familiy, but they still had the Very Special Episode to fall back on, and that made them lazy with the funnyness. I heard Seinfeld put up an actual sign in his writter's room to the effect of "No Very Special Episodes. No learning, no hugging". So I still kind of consider Seinfeld the savior of sitcoms, and get a little touchy when people complain about sitcoms being innane or insufficiently "relevant". Would you seriously want sitcoms to try to be "relevant"? Then go back to 1973, hippy!

Andy Griffith was raped by a panda????   :question:

 I know they sometimes dealth with serious issues but maybe they didn't do it in the  Very Special Format.  Or maybe I was thinking of Growing Pains. I watched that show because I had a crush on Judith Kearns and because they had a character named Boner. I think Matthew perry died on that show from a car crash after he drove drunk. Or maybe I was thinking of Webster.
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They had some serious issues on Boy Meets World.  Like Shawn became an alcoholic after trying 1 beer, and his dad and mom abandoned him for a while.  Growing Pains was the one with Matthew Perry dying in the drunk driving thing.

I heard that the phrase "jumped the shark" had jumped the shark, so now I say "got raped by the panda" after the exact moment when The Simpsons jumped the shark.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_vs._Dignity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_vs._Dignity)

I wonder what the first very special episode was?
I am thinking,maybe Leave it to Beaver?
One episode was when one of Beavers friends parents were divorced.Beaver had it in his head that the kid sure was lucky because he got extra presents.Than the kid let Beaver know that he was jealous of Beav because his parents were still together.
In another episode,there was some older fella that I think was doing odd jobs for Ward???Anyway,it turned out that this guy had a drinking problem.Beaver showed Wally the bottle,Wally takes a sniff and tells Beav that it's whiskey.How Wally knows this,we're not told.
And while not a very special episode,I remember seeing one episode several years back on TV Land that seemed like it was influenced by The Twilight Zone.
I don't recall the exact details,but Beav was supposed on TV for some reason so the teacher allows a TV to be set up in the class room so that they can all watch and see Theodore on the tube.
It turns out that Beav misunderstood about when it would actually air.When Beavs classmates accuse him of being a liar,the camera pans to Beav and as he makes strained expressions,we hear him thinking to himself something like,"If I wasn't at the tv studio yesterday,than..where was I...??".