Genre: Drama
Director: John Lewellyn Moxey
Starring: Purnell Roberts who totally won't be replaced by Lloyd Bridges once this pilot goes to series
MST Season: 6
The Movie
A pilot film for a dramatic series on NBC, San Francisco International centers on...San Francisco International. This airport based drama centers on all the episodic...action and...drama...that you'd see at an airport setting. Which is to say not very much.
It's difficult for me to say who exactly would have thought making a series at an airport was a good idea. Maybe the box office success of the movie Airport made people believe people would watch it weekly, but despite how many people from different backgrounds come and go through San Francisco International, there seems to be a limited amount of premises that a series can play with. Even this pilot movie really strains itself to make itself interesting. There are a half dozen stories at play, and they're all pretty boring and don't entice me to watch another episode. I would have changed the channel after about twenty minutes.
San Francisco International did go to series, amazingly enough, as the only cast member to return from this pilot being Clu Gulager. Most involved with the pilot didn't seem to think positively about it, and those involved with the eventual series didn't seem to care for it either, including the eventual main star Lloyd Bridges. San Francisco International Airport (the series filled out its title when it went weekly) only lasted another six episodes, which is all that was ordered. The series was meant to be a part of a rotation TV series where a show would play for six weeks then switch out for another series the network was trying out. The other shows debuting in this "Four in One" block of programming were MST fan favorite McCloud, Rod Serling's Night Gallery, and another drama series called The Psychiatrist. McCloud and Night Gallery proved to be popular enough to be renewed, while San Francisco International Airport and The Psychiatrist fizzled and were cancelled.
As far as I can tell, there are no further episodes of the series seem to be widely available, though prints likely are rotting in a Universal Studios vault somewhere. It seems like the only reason this show is known at all today is because this pilot was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. While this seems like enough of a notoriety to get box sets of shows like The Master released on DVD and blu-ray, I don't think we're missing much if we just let this show die.
The Episode
Well, it seems like the people involved in MST3K took The Skydivers and The Starfighters as a personal challenge to find the most boring airplane related movie ever made. This week we have this TV pilot, which is already a strike against it, but it has more event in it than The Starfighters. That being said, somehow it has less personality.
As far as the riffing goes, the primary virtue of this particular movie is that the drama is so stoic that there is a lot of staring and looking serious, which means quips can fit in quite easily. The bad news is that it's really hard to make this movie interesting. The attitude in the theater seems to be dismissively sarcastic. They're goofing on it pretty hard and some of it is funny enough, but the dullness of the movie just sinks the entire experience. It's not a fun watch and there really isn't enough here to make it fun. I have trouble maintaining attention to this particular episode and I zone out pretty quickly. Eventually I snap back to attention, but there there isn't much to keep me from zoning out again.
The host segments are essentially a long road to a single joke. The idea is that Mike is dressed up as the character of Urkel from the then-hit sitcom Family Matters, who was inexplicably the hottest TV personality of the time. The once side-character exploded in popularity and that particular show began getting overwhelmed by storylines devoted to him instead of the actual main characters. The host segments seen here are kind of a cute little commentary on how Urkel's existence amused a lot of people through seemingly little effort, only to have everyone get sick of him after a while. One does wonder if they needed three whole host segments to make that point though. Also featured here is the Bots in a political debate about nonsense and the Mads doing some renovation work.
Some people seem to click with this episode, but I just can't connect with it. I find the whole affair too dull to keep up with and the episode just makes me drift off. It makes the episode tough to review, because then I can't get into any true specifics about it except that I'm threatening to fall asleep. If an episode is doing that to me then something went really wrong with it, and that's the bottom line.
Not Recommended
The DVD
This episode was featured on Shout Factory's Volume XXXII collection. Video was spotty though the audio was pretty good. The sole special feature was Sampo Speaks! A Brief History of Satellite News. This is an interview with Chris "Sampo" Cornell, who runs Satellite News and talks about how they became the largest fansite in the franchise's history.
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