Sometime in the 80s, a video version of Clue was made. Clue has always been one of my family’s favorite games (and movies), and I’m not sure where my parents got this, or who from, but it involved a series of video tapes, a few decks of playing cards, and some kind of complicated scoring system. The entire game was way too hard for my sister and brother and me (probably somewhere between 13, 9, and 6) to understand or play. So, we would watch the video. Not the videos, because they were really long and boring, but the introductory 10 minute video.
Like, a lot.
We thought it was really funny. The first bit of the video contained scenes of all of the characters around the mansion getting ready for dinner, presumably before Mr. Body is found dead. It’s a total ham and cheese sandwich. Like the videos they make you watch before you do jury duty.
I guess we watched it so often because we really have always loved all things cable access and watched it all the time when there was real cable access. Like the Channel 8 news where the guy literally sat on a stool in front of the camera with no desk, Wine Dine and Leisure Time where this drunk lady and her friends conned restaurants into giving them free food for an on-camera “review”, and the old PBS specials when nobody famous would be caught dead on PBS. Now it’s harder to find stuff like that, unless you root around the Christian networks. But, this Clue video was serious cable access-style entertainment. And we still say lines from it (“I’m the butler, Didit.” “I’ve never BEEN to Sumatra.”) and remember the whole thing down to the parts where Didit (also the host) would tell you to pause the tape and go over the rules with the group you’re playig with almost twenty years later.
All of this Clue love might account for how much I’ve always loved the Saved by the Bell episode Mystery Weekend, which features Zach embarrassing everyone who ever lived, Lisa hiding behind walls, Clark Kent style deception, and Kelly getting angrier than she’s ever been in her life. Kiwi twist, anyone?
