CBS' Interference
Major creative conflicts occurred between CBS, which considered the show an educational children's series, and Yankovic, whose humor style was more adult-oriented. The show was canceled after one season, along with several other series in the CBS Saturday morning lineup.
CBS sent various notes to the writers of the show after reviewing the scripts, asking the writers to "Yankocize" (i.e. make funny) the commercial-break bumper announcements that the network wrote to reinforce each episode's lesson (or as Al put it, make them suck a little less), as well as remove any "imitable behavior" from the scripts that children might want to mimic after seeing on TV.
The writers were often surprised not at what the censors took out, but what they left in — for example, a sketch (written and submitted as a joke) in which Baby and Papa Boolie commit suicide after listening to one too many of Fred Huggins' songs was being seriously considered by the network for use on the show. (The sketch was later rewritten to have Papa Boolie call a mental hospital to take Fred away.) The unused script of the unedited Fred Huggins sequence is role-played in an audio commentary for an episode on the DVD.
See also: E/IRead more about this topic: The Weird Al Show
Famous quotes containing the word interference:
“The truth is, the whole administration under Roosevelt was demoralized by the system of dealing directly with subordinates. It was obviated in the State Department and the War Department under [Secretary of State Elihu] Root and me [Taft was the Secretary of War], because we simply ignored the interference and went on as we chose.... The subordinates gained nothing by his assumption of authority, but it was not so in the other departments.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)