It's a "Kids in the Hall" Hyperfixation

I've found my latest rabbit hole.  

I became a Kids in the Hall fan like so many other Americans of a certain age, by watching the reruns of their show on Comedy Central, which ran it constantly in the '90s and early 2000s.  Eventually, I rented their movie "Brain Candy" and their tour videos, but that was pretty much it for me for over a decade.  I know I watched the miniseries "Death Comes to Town" at some point, but don't recall much about it.  Now it's 2022, and after watching the revival season of "The Kids in the Hall" and their new "Comedy Punks" documentary, I'm nowhere near ready to be done with these guys.

Amazon Prime, AMC+, and various other streaming platforms have all the old episodes.  It turns out that there are a ton I haven't seen - or haven't really seen, because Comedy Central showed heavily edited versions of everything.  I've been slowly making my way through the entire series, while checking out what the Kids have been up to while I haven't been paying attention.  I've liked some of the projects that the individual troupe members have been involved in, like Scott Thompson and Paul Bellini's band "Mouth Congress," and Mark McKinney in the Guy Maddin film "The Saddest Music in the World."  However, I've been mostly fixated on their media appearances related to "The Kids in the Hall," especially interviews and press ephemera.  It turns out that a lot of it is remarkably ephemeral. 

Now, the Kids have been around so long that a lot of their material predates the internet.  Some media, such as a 1994 Conan O'Brien episode featuring both Isabella Rossellini and her double, Dave Foley in drag, is probably gone for good.  What interests me most is the content that was online a few years ago, but has disappeared.  It's stunning how fast things can go.  There's a 2008 "Funny or Die" sketch where Buddy Cole becomes a parent that is no longer anywhere on the site.  Clips of a 2010 episode of E! Online's "The Soup," where four Kids members appear garbed as former child beauty queens (and Mark McKinney is heard offstage), have been linked to from multiple places.  The clips, however, are no longer online.  There are no videos on the E! site from before 2016.   And who knows what happened to all the interviews on the Nerdist Youtube channel after Chris Hardwick got himself cancelled.

A few things are still accessible, like Scott Thompson's appearances on "The Colbert Report" in 2014 and clips of Dave Foley's Canadian sitcom "Spun Out," where the rest of the troupe show up in Goth wear to enforce an old suicide pact.  However, going through the old "Kids in the Hall" fansites and online groups just brings up a ton of dead links.  Social media accounts have been deleted.  Whole websites have died or stopped hosting older content, which means a ton of interviews, promotional material, and the occasional web exclusive are gone with them.  Because it's not physical media, there's no way of hunting any of this down the way I can with the old DVDs and their extras.

I'm not too hung up on the gaps, because of the sheer amount of "Kids in the Hall" material I'm still sifting through.  I mean, the number of Conan O'Brien interviews with Dave Foley that don't involve Isabella Rossellini is not insubstantial. There's literally thirty plus years of material out there, and I've been doing my best to pace myself.  So, I'm going to focus on the series rewatch first, via Amazon Prime because I want another season (please, please, please), and I'm saving Siskel and Ebert's notorious fight over "Brain Candy" for a rainy day.    

And by save, I mean I'm literally downloading the clip from Youtube and holding on to it until I'm ready to watch it.  You can't be too careful these days.

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