Andy's Youtube Uploads - Post-Siskel & Ebert SNEAK PREVIEWS Archive Unearthed

[AndyDursin]

Very proud of our son Theo, who did a spontaneous lemonade stand last summer, and decided on his own to donate the funds to Hasbro Children's Hospital.

We received a note from the hospital CEO, and they later asked him to do a promo video for their new renovations. This was shot in April and just went live.

[Monterey Jack]

That's awesome...!

[AndyDursin]

Winding my way through the movie review archive, we come to the penultimate broadcast(s) of PBS' SNEAK PREVIEWS which signed off for good in early June 1996 after nearly 20 years on the air. These later Jeffrey Lyons/Michael Medved shows seldom get screened (I was probably the only one taping them all!) but I've uploaded a few. I find they make an interesting contrast to Siskel & Ebert.



...and a BACK TO THE BEACH special (a rebroadcast of a 1995 show):

[AndyDursin]

I've nearly run through my entire S&E episodes (at least shows I recorded myself) so I'm emptying out the archive this month with scattered Sneak Previews (the Jeffrey Lyons/Neal Gabler years) and Entertainment Tonight fragments, which include some Leonard Maltin reviews.

Next month I will be uploading some more Lyons/Gabler-era Sneak Previews from the webmaster of the S&E fan site that he's been gracious enough to dub for me. That's one of the great things about the internet -- meeting similarly minded people, and being able to use MP4's to send across the digital spectrum has ended tape and disc dubbing!

In the meantime here are a few of my favorite recent uploads, starting with Leonard Maltin's LIFEFORCE review!









Plenty more at my channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5bpfN ... h7BgAl7x1g

[AndyDursin]

Like I wrote last month, the gentleman who runs the Siskelebert.org fan site has managed to unearth a ton of old Sneak Previews from the post-Gene and Roger years. He doesn't want them on his site, but he's passed them onto me so I'll be uploading them on my channel weekly, now through the end of the year and well into 2023 (it looks like!).

First up: a Best/Worst of 1983 episode. Now, Neal Gabler and Jeffrey Lyons were kind of on an island at times -- no RIGHT STUFF incredibly in their respective lists -- but it's interesting still to hear their take on things. (Also weird on this episode: repeated film clips...someone, somewhere messed up in the WTTW post-production room).

[AndyDursin]

My friend Larry has plundered a number of rarely shown AT THE MOVIES episodes with Rex Reed and Bill Harris. Here's the first, covering THE FLY, MANHUNTER and STAND BY ME.

Spoiler -- REX HATES THEM ALL

[Eric Paddon]

Andy you'll probably want to give this a look when it comes out!

[AndyDursin]

I saw that was coming a little while back -- obviously I will check it out! Truthfully I felt this narrative which someone wrote a decade ago nailed it and was pretty comprehensive in terms of interview coverage, so I wonder (outside of interviews with their respective widows), how much info will be divulged from this book.



I confess several chapters related to their respective deaths doesn't make me want to read this necessarily either. Someone reviewing an advance copy said it's heavy into that.

[jkholm]

Andy, do you have more of the Lyons/Medved episodes to upload? I've been watching these lately and they're quite entertaining. They don't have the combative nature of Siskel and Ebert but they do play well off each other and are both good at expressing their views to the camera. I find it amazing the Medved became a conservative talk radio host!

[AndyDursin]

John, I've got another couple of months of weekly shows left, unless my friend Larry finds more and sends them along. After that I might just upload all the old Siskel.and Ebert Sneak Previews from the IMDB archive because they were taken down. Other people have put them up but I have them directly ripped so it'd be nice to add to my channel.

I'm glad you are enjoying them! Half the YouTube comments are negative (and were initially hostile coming from people who I think were watching the Siskel & Ebert shows I uploaded) but as time has gone on I've gotten a lot more positive comments from people. I've always enjoyed Medved as a movie critic and a writer in general. He wrote a book Hollywood vs America back when I was in high school that was a big seller and got him on the national spotlight as a family values guy. I think he had started his radio show right around that time (it had the Silverado theme as its opening) and the history episodes he did as part of the show were always fantastic...I bought his mp3 archive on American History years back and usually return to it every few months.

Ebert snidely mocked him on a few shows but the book was a good conversation starter back in the 90s. He was also nice enough to write back to me a few times, especially when I was in grade school and read his magnificent GOLDEN TURKEY AWARDS book. We corresponded a few times and when I was a senior he did a few minutes on the phone with me as part of an independent project I did associated with his book. That year I also interviewed Mike Clark from USA Today who was awesome and Mick LaSalle who wrote the Video Movie Guide (a competitor to Leonard Martin's book).

Medved wrote about his political conversion in RIGHT TURNS but it's a shame he never wrote more movie oriented books. Some of the chapters in the two Golden Turkey books (inchon, The Greatest Story Ever Told and another on the Moustapha Akkad produced Messenger movie) and the later HOLLYWOOD HALL OF SHAME are hilarious and so well researched I heartily recommend them... at this point you can probably find used copies cheap. It's great movie history and just flat out hysterical at the same time.

[Eric Paddon]

I think the first thing that sent Medved from Left to Right politically was when he detected the clear anti-Semitism that exists in so much of the American Left that we've seen explode more recently.

[AndyDursin]

My friend's archive of Lyons/Medved/Gabler shows dried up so I'm just re-upping the 100+ episodes from Gene and Roger's PBS SNEAK PREVIEWS run, one each week. These were put up by someone at PBS for IMDB and then removed last year. I'll be at it a while but I don't have much time to invest right now so I dump a few dozen weeks at a time and schedule them out.

This week is a good show -- imagine THE WARRIORS, THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY and HARDCORE all in theaters at the same time. A whole different universe than the crap sent out to audiences today.

[Paul MacLean]

This week is a good show -- imagine THE WARRIORS, THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY and HARDCORE all in theaters at the same time. A whole different universe than the crap sent out to audiences today.

I liked The Warriors myself, but (as you probably recall Andy) was laughing during much of Hardcore! I agree with Roger that The Great Train Robbery was entertaining, but can't refute Gene's charge that it gets slow in places.

But yeah, those were the days, when movies as a general rule were mostly good!

The best part of this video tho is the old PBS logo at the end!

[AndyDursin]

A time when movies were aimed at adults and not 12 year-olds is more what I meant to say. This is not the cinema of 2024 which is one recycled concept after another.

I agree with Gene on Great Train Robbery...a movie you want to like...but it's stilted and dull. I've only managed to get through it once and have not wanted to go back.