DAILY CALL SHEET: JULY 21, 2025

UHF (1989) Shiftless goofball George is put in charge of a failing UHF channel (look it up youngsters) which his uncle won in a poker game. However, George's new job looks to be short lived until he and Station 62's janitor Stanley Spadowski go for broke and flood the airwaves with off kilter shows like Wheel of Fish and The Flying Pope. Unfortunately, crosstown rivals Channel 8 aren't happy about Channel 62's sudden rise to the top of the ratings chart and plot to destroy them. This sadly bombed at the box-office because the geniuses at Orion inexplicably thought a small Weird Al comedy was the right movie to release against Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, and Batman. Those that did go to see it, though, became lifelong fans and to this day demand others watch it, as they should. 

TIL: At the peak of his television career, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was drawing about 10 million viewers a week, a feat which earned him an Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Television Personality in 1953. Now that he's on the road to beatification, you think his achievements would make him a shoe-in for patron Saint of television. The thing is, somebody else already has that title. In 1958, Pope Pius XII declared Saint Clare of Assisi the patroness of television despite the fact that she was born centuries before the boob tube was invented. His reasoning? Once, when Saint Clare became too sick to go to church, it's said the Holy Spirit projected real-time images of the Mass on her bedroom wall. Basically, she was the first person to get to watch TV in bed.

Evil of Dracula (1974) A new psychology professor arrives at a girls-only boarding school only to discover lots of pale women walking the halls at night, a coffin in the basement, and strange puncture marks on the breasts of a number of students. It doesn't take a math teacher to see this adds up to vampires. The third time is not quite the charm in this final entry in Toho's Bloodthirsty trilogy, but even though it's the lesser of the three films, it's still a kick watching the studio that brought us Godzilla produce a Japanese take on the tried and true Hammer horror formula. It's also kind of ironic they copy the English style so well considering one of the underlying themes of the Bloodthirsty trilogy is that these kind of vampires wouldn't even be a problem in Japan if stupid westerners hadn't brought them into the country to begin with.

TIL: The Japanese love/hate relationship with western culture goes all the way back to the 16th Century when the Portuguese first blundered into the country, eventually bringing the Jesuits along with them. The Japanese were actually pretty accepting of Christianity at first, but the misguided attempts at evangelism on the part of some missionaries combined with native Shogun isolationism eventually resulted in Christianity being outlawed until the late 1800's. That hasn't stopped Christianity from slowly permeating the culture, though. These days, 60 - 70% of all weddings in Japan are Christian-style, and the celebration of Christian related holidays like Christmas and Valentine's Day are on the rise. Of course, the Japanese currently have little interest in the doctrine behind such celebrations, but given a few more centuries, that's likely to change as well.