Dr. X

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 • Horrorthon Posts

This is just some random excellence I came across the other day. I’ve been moving through the fantastic (and extremely overdue) DVD sets of SCTV episodes from the early 1980s. SCTV was arguably the greatest sketch comedy/variety show ever. It was one of my favorite TV shows at the time (and I had a small coterie of high school friends who were as into it as I was; one of them actually recorded the audio of the show onto cassette tapes he distributed, since this was in the days before everybody had a VCR.) “Dr. X” is an eight-minute genre-parody sketch I’d never seen before, featuring Dave Thomas as a noir detective with uncanny powers and John Candy as the hapless police chief who’s constantly calling him in to help with mysterious cases. The sketch is very funny, but also very atmospheric and well done (it’s shot in black-and-white). I was struck by this beautiful title card (above) and thought you guys might like it too.