Weird Al Yankovic Looks Back at 'UHF' 25 Years Later

“Weird Al” Yankovic is the king of the pop parody. He reigned supreme in the ’80s (“Eat It”), ’90s (“Amish Paradise”) and ’00s (“White and Nerdy”), and his July LP Mandatory Fun became his first no. 1 album in the U.S. There was a time, too, when he also made a play to rule Hollywood.

Yankovic’s 1989 comedy UHF, about ne’er-do-well who takes over his uncle’s fledging TV station and turns it into a local sensation by programming absurdly weird shows like Wheel Of Fish and Stanley Spadowski’s Clubhouse, was expected to make the comedian-musician a movie star. Its distributor, Orion Pictures (which went out of business in 1998 before relaunching this year), was so convinced that UHF would take the box office by storm that it slated the movie for a primetime July release. It bombed badly though, in a historic summer ruled by blockbuster heavyweights like Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The film’s initial failure took a toll on Yankovic, but in the years since its release, UHF has slowly and steadily achieved cult status. It’s why the movie is getting a shiny new 25^th Anniversary Blu-ray release, which becomes available today. We caught up with Weird Al to talk about how he views UHF these days and how, in some ways, the film’s off-the-wall shorts inadvertently prophesized a little site we call YouTube.

So UHF just turned 25. You think it still holds up?
I think most of the physical humor and most of the gags still play. Some of the parodies are a little dated: I’m not sure how many people 25 years later remember the whole Al Capone phase of Geraldo’s career…. I know there’s still a lot of young fans of UHF that maybe don’t get all the pop culture references in the movie, but still appreciate it on a certain level.

Do you revisit it often?
I’ve seen the film more times than any healthy person probably should over the course of my life. It seems like once or twice a year, I go to a Q&A screening of the movie somewhere in the country.

When you look back at it, is there anything you wish you’d done differently?
Oh, yeah. Starting the opening weekend of the movie when it didn’t perform so well, I’ve been second guessing things I should have done, things I could have done better, and I guess that’s a natural reaction.

The film came out against some tough competition summer of ’89, and as you said, it didn’t fare so well. I understand that was a pretty tough time for you?
If the movie had been released during a sleepier time of the year, I’m sure it would have done quite a bit better. But it tested so well in the screenings that Orion figured that it would be competitive during the summer, and there was talk that they thought that this movie might even save their struggling studio. But it did not have that effect, and it actually disappeared kind of quickly.

It did a little bit of a number on my head because Orion had sort of built up my expectations. They were calling me their new Woody Allen, they were gearing me to start a full-on movie career, and after the opening weekend, that all dissipated immediately. So I wouldn’t say that it brought me to a spiraling depression, but it was definitely a bummer and it took me a little bit of time to get out of my funk and to move on with my recording career.

But of course audiences would ultimately discover it and cherish it. When did you realize that the movie was turning into a cult classic?
It was a very gradual thing. Fans discovered it eventually first on cable TV, I think, and then through VHS rentals. And I think everybody started realizing that this was a thing when the DVD was released 13 years after the theatrical release, and it was a top 10 bestselling DVD. Nobody expected that. That was very gratifying, and to this day I meet fans that have seen the movie almost as many times as I have, fans that have gotten UHF-related tattoos. It’s definitely got its hardcore fans.

What’s the moment from set that most vividly sticks out in your mind?
Oh, there were so many. One is the Wheel of Fish day because that was the worst smelling set I’ve ever been on. Those were not fake fish — those were real fish that were purchased at the Tulsa, Oklahoma, fish market that morning and they were literally nailed to a wooden wheel in a hot studio for an entire day.

The other thing that really sticks in my mind is the very first day of shooting, which is when we were starting to shoot Spatula City, and there were all these trucks and tractor trailers full of equipment lining this residential street. And I thought, “This is just some weird, stupid idea I came up with at three in the morning one night about spatulas and now there’s, like, an army of people working on this.”

In some ways this movie kind of prefigured YouTube and the phenomenon of user-generated viral videos.
I’ve read some editorial pieces that have said as much. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but the movie was definitely, in retrospect, sort of a YouTube movie. There are so many little bits and pieces in that movie that seem like they’d be custom-made for YouTube videos or for viral videos today.

That Beverly Hillbillies-Dire Straits “Money for Nothing” video may have been one of the first mashups.
I’d love to take credit for that, but I can’t say that it was. The first mashup that I remember hearing — and they were probably not the first either — was something I heard on the Dr. Demento show by Little Roger and the Goosebumps called “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island.”

And a little bit of trivia: I approached Prince a number of times for a parody, and he always turned it down. In the original script for UHF, that was supposed to be “Let’s Go Crazy” mashed up with The Beverly Hillbillies, and Prince thought otherwise. But Dire Straits worked extremely well. That’s such an iconic video, and Mark Knopfler couldn’t have been a better sport about it. In fact, he played a guitar on the song.

How do you think some of the shows from UHF would play on YouTube today?
Well, hard to say. I think it might even be a successful YouTube channel if those were all actual shows. Some of them were just funny titles, and I’m not sure how they would actually play out in reality. But there’s a lot of odd stuff on the Internet, and I think a lot of those shows would probably find their place.

Like, for instance, we never got to actually see Bestiality Today, a show listed on Channel 62’s programming board.
But I’m sure there’s a YouTube channel dedicated just to that.

Do you ever reunite with the cast? Do you guys ever get together?
I bump into them off and on. When I did The Weird Al Show for CBS, I tried to cast as many UHF members as I could, because even back then, people were starting to clamor for a sequel to UHF, which I’ve always said is not going to happen. But I loved all the people that I worked with in UHF, so when I did my Saturday morning show I got Gedde Watanabe, I got Kevin McCarthy, I think Victoria Jackson did a thing.

So you still don’t want to ever do a sequel to UHF?
Probably not. I mean, that’s something that I’ve been asked a lot and fans have offered to start Kickstarter [campaigns] and tried to crowd-source it, but if I were to do a whole new movie, my first choice wouldn’t be to do a sequel to UHF. I know that by and large major motion picture studios aren’t anxious to finance sequels to movies that bombed 25 years ago [laughs].

Your pop career is still soaring, but how come we don’t see you in more movies?
It’s not from lack of trying. I’ve made cameo appearances in all the Naked Gun movies. A couple years ago I did a brief cameo in Halloween II for Rob Zombie. I would love to do more feature film work.

So you haven’t given up on your quest for an Oscar?
No, I’m going for my EGOT, slowly, but surely.

Photos: AP, Shout Factory