Night Flight

What another great USA Network show from the 1980's, daddy-o! Night Flight was a great showcase for rock videos, cult and B-movies, and off the wall shorts. I always did kinda have the hots for the babe who did the voice over work for the show too. And Frankie Pace was a comedy stud as the host of Rick Shaw's Takeout Theater too! Long live Night Flight! I miss the show's opening CGI footage of those mountains too.

I realize it now. When it's 2am and I am flicking channels, skimming over the endless infomercials. I am looking for something, anything that might be as cool as Night Flight was. It was the most influential television show in my life, exposing me to so much that I am still interested in 20 years later.

This is the TV show that introduced so much of middle America to cult movies, punk rock, reggae, deconstructionist video, the Church of the Subgenius and so much more. Television had never been so anarchic and probably never will be again.

Highlights are showings of the silent short, "Mystery Of The Leaping Fish" with Douglas Fairbanks playing a drugged up detective named Coke Ennyday, showings of the reggae movie "Countryman" , Peter Ivers on "New Wave Theatre" presnting Punk bands from dingy clubs. Black & White cartoons, old commercials, showings of school films, atomic bomb scare films and anything they could find.

Sadly with the homogenization and demogrification of TV (as well as most media), we won't see a show like this again. Infomercials now rule the late-night landscape and it is apt to stay that way, informercials bring in income, shows like "Night Flight" only brought in viewers, and who cares about them anymore? And due to copyright infringements by the show, they were very casual about obtaining permission to air stuff on 'Night Flight' it will probably never be shown on repeats, not as it originally aired anyway. Those who saw it, enjoy your memories.

If the early 1980s marked your high school/college years, there's a good chance you either held-on for dear life to the decomposing remains of that beast called disco, or you embraced the European invasion of punk/new wave subculture which was rarely brought forth to the general American public before this iconic show emerged. "Night Flight" was a brilliant clip-art collage incorporating cutting-edge/avant-garde music, challenging art-cinema, hi-camp vintage Americana, racially insensitive old cartoons, and a whole lot of fashion incentives(VERY "Fiorucci"). This was an exotic dish lovingly prepared for a very select target audience....a unique and conceptually inceptive experiment which, for a short time, separated "us" from "them", aesthetically speaking.

Unexampled, unforgettable 80s time capsule...we need another show like this one NOW, and more than ever. 10/10

This show, which left you COMPLETELY clueless as to what to expect each Friday and/or Saturday night, other than knowing you were going to see some kinda bizarre or otherwise unusual movie, some good pre- AND post- early ('79 or '80 to around '83 or so?) MTV rock/new wave/punk/etc. videos, weird movie shorts, and so much other stuff (rare interviews with bands - one on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young comes to mind, the Doors, and so on, and on...), etc., etc., etc...

And another good thing about it (I think each "Flight" was either 3 or 4 hours long) was that it repeated itself, first starting at 10 or 11 PM, maybe even midnight in the Central time zone and lasting until daybreak! 6 AM if I'm not mistaken - just the thing for a Night Owl like myself, AND making it possible, if there was another movie that you just HAD to see that was on for a couple of hours, you could watch it and still be able to catch up with what you had missed on the second airing (which seems to have become the norm with a LOT of cable stations today - airing shows back to back, and most of them you wish they wouldn't!).

It was just a perfect show for a Rock loving weirdo like me, or for anybody who wanted to see some weird short films, hear some music, or to get some inside info on the Sex Pistols, David Bowie, or any of a number of bands of various genres backstage - footage that now seems to be something that would be impossible to get a hold of. I wish I had taped every episode (kinda like the way I wish I'd taped every episode of "Beavis & Butthead" when they ORIGINALLY aired, with them commenting on the different music videos they were always watching and "huh-huh-huh-huh-huhing" to all the time, the copies of the old cartoons you can buy today are alright, but you just don't get the whole "B&B Experience without their "Commentary"), because I doubt there's anyway to get copies of it now.

It'd sure be nice if USA still had all the old shows in their entirety, I'd love to see them ALL again.

An overall GREAT TV show and one that I would love to see revived - with no changes - just exactly like it was.

For a long time I've talked about this show to friends and no one seemed to remember it. I felt like I was in some movie where everyone's mind had been erased and for some reason I was the only one left to remember this bizarre show. As a kid I'd stay up late, quietly as to not alert the parents, and I'd watch Tales From the Darkside and other strange shows. Then, really, really late at night one local channel began replaying episodes of Night Flight. My mind was blown and was never to be the same again. Night Flight was an amazing show, nothing like it before or ever since. As many comments have mentioned this is a show that will never exist again. It was a rare gem that slipped through the cracks during the 80s to enlighten the few who were lucky to catch it. It finally dawned on me to look up the show on IMDB. I wasn't surprised at all to find it and i was pleasantly surprised to find so many others who had witnessed this one of a kind late night feast for the mind.