More USA Up All Night (the great conundrum)

I'm going to take a shot in the dark and guess the reason USA's Up All Night is the numero uno way that people find this blogorium has something to do with the hopes it will someday be on dvd. Alas, unlike The State, there doesn't appear to be any plans of bringing this basic cable cult classic to the digital versatility disc world.

This is a shame, because it's not as though having something like an "Up All Night" collection would detract from the film experience. Similar dvds exist for Elvira: usually a double feature that with "breaks" that you can toggle on and off. There isn't exactly a "Monstervision" series but Joe Bob Briggs did put out a few discs (like Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter) where he filmed and introduction and an optional commentary.

What we really want - and I admit, I'm guessing on your behalf, one time visitors - is something with the host segments. The one thing that keeps me from having a USA Up All Night marathon isn't the creeping terror of watching Silk Stalkings again, but not being able to have the appropriate Rhonda Shear / Gilbert Gottfreid clips to punctuate the movies. For me, the ingredients are pretty basic:

- one awful comedy from the 1980s or early 90s
- one reasonably bad horror / sci-fi film from the 1980s
- the host segments
- one episode of Silk Stalkings
- one episode of Tales from the Darkside
- one episode of Monsters

This replicates the experience of sleeping downstairs in front of the tv and watching USA's late night programming. I have (sadly) many of the movies shown on UP All Night, including ones I wouldn't know existed otherwise (I'm looking at you, Killer Klowns from Outer Space), and Tales from the Darkside is making its way to dvd. Silk Stalkings is, um, available now but I can't say I'm in any hurry. It's more of a formality to bridge the movies with the anthology shows.

As you've already noticed if you read my other Up All Night piece, clips are available on Youtube, but in a catch-as-catch-can way that doesn't allow for placing them strategically throughout a film. Like many of you, I've also looked around the internet and not found much regarding Up All Night, something I consider to be a link in the chain between "Horror Hosts" and that show on FX that plays dvd extras during commercial breaks*.

What would be fun, since dvd versions of Up All Night seem very unlikely, is if USA put together an On Demand service for their older shows**, as they do right now for more recent programming. I sincerely doubt that movies like Neon Maniacs and Rock n Roll High School Forever are getting more expensive to upload in their Up All Night format, so maybe we should give USA a gentle nudge in that direction.

Unless you folks dropping in know something that I don't, like a "keep circulating the tapes" version of Up All Night... is there one? Is there???

Alas, until that day my only hope of an Up All Night Marathon in the meantime is to cobble on together with what's availble and edit it onto a VHS. Or travel back in time and tape them all! Yeah, that's the ticket! Let me nuke up the Delorean and get right on that! I'll see you all in the past with hours and hours of Up All Night.



* Which is nowhere near as entertaining.
** They might actually do this, I don't have digital cable or satellite.