Heil Honey I'm Home!

As a Jewish person of course I find anything related to the nazi's and late 1930's - 1945 events very insulting. But somehow this was pretty funny . Not that much and there where a few part that where unfunny or corny but I thought it was a okay premise.

Living in a small Berlin apartment with a Jewish couple for neighbours, the Hitlers (Der Führer Adolf Hitler und Frau Eva Braun-Hitler) bicker and squabble in the years leading up WW2. The single broadcast episode (of 8 made) of the tactless Brit-com is remarkedly unfunny, considering that it is a parody of the easily parodied American sitcoms of the '50s and '60s (especially the shows with a 'gimmick': witches, genies, talking cars, etc.). 'Heil Honey' does a good job of replicating the look and sound of its targets (the predicable jokes, the intrusive laugh track, the canned applause when characters enter the scene, etc.) and with a bit more cleverness might have made for a memorable 15-minute skit on Monty Python or SNL, but as a 30 minute episode of a proposed TV series, it wore itself out by the end of the first act. Needless to say, the show was vilified for making light of Hitler, of antisemitism, and of the events leading up to the war, but, while it no doubt offended many people, 'Heil Honey, I'm Home' was clearly intended as an over-the-top parody not to be taken seriously whatsoever (in the same vein as 'Hogans Heroes', 'The Producers', or any of the multitude of satirical cartoons, songs, movies, etc that came out when the war was still being fought). The only parts I found amusing was the image (referred to but not shown) of Herr Joseph Goebbels at the Berlin airport holding up a cardboard sign reading "Neville Chamberlain" while awaiting the arrival of the British Prime Minister and the show's alternate 'animated opening'. Of interest only of you want to prove to yourself that the show actually existed or to see what 'all the fuss was about' (I first heard of it when surfing 'worst' lists).

It's a spoof of 1950's sitcoms starring Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun and their wacky interactions with their Jewish neighbors. Yes, that's the plot. Are you laughing yet?

This was a show that was cancelled after just one showing. It was something that for the longest time existed only as legend and some thought it was never real but some wacky late night sketch show that people had mistaken for an actual sit com. But no, it was real and it was incredibly unfunny.

I'm not the type that says that there are certain subjects you can't make fun of but there is this thing called "tone" and how it's used. The tone for this show is all wrong. I get what it was they were going for. It's a spoof. They use all those tropes from the 1950's with catchphrases, wacky situations and colorful characters but it's just not done properly. This could have worked had they just added a little more subtlety.

But no, it was a failed experiment and it's remembered strictly for the fact it was cancelled after one episode. There are copies floating around out there if you care to see it out of curiosity but don't expect to laugh.

First broadcast on UK Satellite TV in 1990, 'Heil Honey…' is a parody of 1950's sitcoms similar to 'I Love Lucy'. Watching the pilot episode 18 years after it was pulled off television, it's hard not to draw comparisons to the 'adult-comedy' shows of recent times. Compared with the newer animated shows like 'Family Guy', 'South Park','Drawn Together' - even a sitcom making the most evil man of the 20th century look like Jackie Gleason, seems tame by today's standards. In fact, it could have easily passed as a quick 60 second cut-away on 'Family Guy'.

One show that springs to mind is the short-lived sitcom parody: "That's My Bush!" (2001). Both embrace the formulas of their target genres, while using the absurdity of having these historic figures as the protagonists in such a trivial medium.

It's hard to rate the series as only the pilot episode was broadcast (a copy, which was taped on a home viewers VCR, can be found on YouTube). So it's not fair to judge whether or not the one-note joke would have gotten old or if the show would have taken a different direction.

It's rumoured that eight episodes of the series were filmed. With the master tapes being wiped, after the flood of complaints from that initial screening (although there have been reports of the show screening outside the UK). If the master tapes are still out there in some warehouse, we may yet see a DVD release of this lost example of proto-South Park humour.

There is quite a lot to be said about this series and I'm gonig to try to be as fair as possible.

The main basis of this show is combining two different scenarios, one being Nazi Germany and an American sitcom. Both situations are very different and therefore trying to merge them did not work in my honest opinion. Sitcoms which make light of wartime situations are not uncommon. Examples include Allo Allo, Goodnight Sweetheart and Blackadder Goes Forth were successful despite using a theme which was quite sensitive.

Heil Honey I'm home, just does not appear to have the same sort of steam. Quite frankly Hitler became so Americanised that he was quite similar to Oliver Hardy.

I can't blame the people involved for trying to think of a different comical situation which has not been used before. Quite a few Jews were involved in the making of it, so I wouldn't have thought it would have been that bad based on this.

Another interesting fact is that it was shown on a satellite channel in the UK in a time when satellite TV was not very common, therefore how many people actually saw it? What would the general reaction be if it were to be shown today?

I've only seen the first episode and I remember it being quite tedious with very little comical bite. I can't help but wonder what the other episodes were like and seeing them may help form a better opinion on the series as a whole. Considering Hitler was supposed to be plotting to kill his Jewish neighbours though doesn't fill me with much confidence that it would be good to watch (by the way, I'm not Jewish).

I can't blame them for making this programme and I think it has served as a learning curve for programme production (worth watching once for this) but it is a shame that effort was clearly put in but the results were very disastrous.