{"id":28973,"date":"2018-09-14T09:05:29","date_gmt":"2018-09-14T13:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=28973"},"modified":"2018-09-14T09:31:31","modified_gmt":"2018-09-14T13:31:31","slug":"the-bootleg-files-heil-honey-im-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2018\/09\/14\/the-bootleg-files-heil-honey-im-home\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bootleg Files: Heil Honey I’m Home!"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 653: <\/strong>\u201cHeil Honey I\u2019m Home!\u201d (1990 British sitcom that ran for one episode before being cancelled).<\/p>\n

LAST SEEN:<\/strong> On YouTube.<\/p>\n

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO:<\/strong> None.<\/p>\n

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS:<\/strong> One of the most notoriously bad productions in British television history.<\/p>\n

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE:<\/strong> Nein.<\/p>\n

Imagine \u201cI Love Lucy\u201d with Adolf Hitler as Ricky Ricardo, Eva Braun as Lucy and an obnoxious Jewish couple as the Mertzes. Welcome to the production that makes \u201cThe Day the Clown Cried\u201d seem like the pinnacle of fine art: the 1990 British sitcom \u201cHeil Honey I\u2019m Home!\u201d
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Of course, this was not the first sitcom to make fun of the Nazis \u2013 \u201cHogan\u2019s Heroes\u201d got there first in 1965 and ran for six seasons. And using humor to deflate the Third Reich took on a greater degree of brilliance with Mel Brooks\u2019 \u201cThe Producers\u201d and the classic \u201cFawlty Towers\u201d episode \u201cThe Germans.\u201d<\/p>\n

But \u201cHeil Honey I\u2019m Home!\u201d took a wrong turn by trying to place characters from Nazi Germany into a 1950s American-style sitcom. In this go-round, Adolf and Eva cohabit an apartment in Berlin in 1938 \u2013 we\u2019re not certain if they are married \u2013 but they sound like New Yorkers out of a Neil Simon comedy. Their next-door neighbors are Arny and Rosa Goldenstein, who have more pronounced New York accents. Adolf hates the Goldensteins because he thinks they are noisy, crass and overbearing people who fail to respect his standing as Fuehrer. Arny is especially boorish, referring to Adolf as \u201cShorty\u201d due to his considerable lack of height.<\/p>\n

\u201cHeil Honey I\u2019m Home\u201d opens with a curious intertitle card that explains this sitcom was the work of \u201cBrandon Thalburg Jnr,\u201d an American sitcom producer who commissioned the show. The presentation is billed as an offering of \u201clost tapes\u201d found \u201cin a Burbank backlot.\u201d <\/p>\n

The show opens with a bouncy tune based on the title that sounds much like the cheery but disposable themes used in American sitcoms from a bygone era. The entrance of Adolf (played by Neil McCaul) and Denica Fairman (as Eva) are greeted with applause on the soundtrack, another riff on old-school sitcoms. From the start, comic tensions arise: Eva is furious at Adolf\u2019s late arrival home, because she was making schnitzel that wound up being ruined by his tardiness. \u201cWhat a joik!\u201d Adolf exclaims, slapping himself on the forehead for stupidly forgetting to be home on time. When Eva complains that he\u2019s been late for dinner every night, Adolf insists, \u201cI\u2019m a very busy man. I just can\u2019t walk out the job at five o\u2019clock.\u201d Eva angrily pounces, yelling, \u201cLet me tell you something, Mr. Schicklgruber! You may be big stuff in Germany, but I knew you when you were just a house painter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adolf surprises Eva by telling her that Neville Chamberlain is coming to their apartment tomorrow night for dinner, but Eva is not impressed and guesses that Adolf \u201cfinally went one step too far\u201d in regard to Czechoslovakia, hence the British leader\u2019s sudden arrival at Chez Hitler. But Adolf warns Eva not to tell \u201cthose putzes\u201d the Goldensteins that Chamberlain is coming. \u201cYou saw how they were when the Mussolinis was over here,\u201d he bellows, adding that they are terrible busybodies. \u201cWhen I finally get to invade Poland, who\u2019s going to be the first to know? The Poles? No, Rosa Goldenstein.\u201d<\/p>\n

We then visit the Goldensteins \u2013 large, bald, roly-poly Arny (Gareth Marks) and tiny but loud Rosa (Caroline Gruber). \u201cArny Goldenstein, you\u2019re a slob,\u201d Rosa complains. \u201cWhatever happened to the glamour? Where did the romance go?\u201d Arny\u2019s response: \u201cHow should I know where you put things? I can\u2019t even find my shirts.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, Eva and Rosa get along wonderfully, and Eva happily lets slip to her neighbor that Chamberlain is coming for dinner. Even better, Chamberlain is coming by himself \u2013 and Rosa has an awkward young niece that she would like to introduce to the British leader. To Adolf\u2019s horror, the Goldensteins crash his party with Chamberlain, with Arny helping himself to Adolf\u2019s cigars and creating a drunken conga line with the visiting leader. <\/p>\n

The problems with \u201cHeil Honey I\u2019m Home!\u201d were greater than the laughs. Geoff Atkinson, a respected and versatile television writer who penned gags for British television icons as the Two Ronnies, Cannon and Ball and Lenny Henry, came up with the idea for this stinker, which he polluted with rotten punchlines and unlikeable characters \u2013 and the ensemble strangely worked in unison to create some of the worst acting in British television history. <\/p>\n

And although the words \u201cJewish\u201d or \u201cJews\u201d are never mentioned, the Goldensteins represent some of the dreariest stereotypes ever put on a television screen. Yes, Arny always gets the best of the flustered Fuehrer, but the humor is so stale and the characters are so irritating that the shtick fails upon impact. <\/p>\n

In a 2017 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Atkinson acknowledged his error on this point. \u201cWith 25 years of hindsight, I think I would have made the Goldensteins more aware of the situation,\u201d he stated. \u201cTheir dilemma in 1938 is, should they leave Berlin? There\u2019s a genuine, dramatic tension there, and I don\u2019t think we got that. We could have underplayed the comedy with the Goldensteins and let the true drama come out a bit more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Incredibly, eight episodes of \u201cHeil Honey I\u2019m Home!\u201d were shot, but only the first episode saw the light of day. The British satellite channel Galaxy broadcast the episode on September 30, 1990, and it was greeted with hostile reviews and condemned by the Board of Deputies of British Jews as trivializing the Nazi anti-Semitism that preceded the Holocaust. The other episodes have never been publicly screened, as Galaxy immediately cancelled the show.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, \u201cHeil Honey I\u2019m Home!\u201d has not been made available in any home entertainment format. Copies of the only episode to air can be found on YouTube<\/a>, and Atkinson told Entertainment Weekly that this bootlegging did not bother him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve certainly never felt embarrassed by it because I know the motives were good,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we were trying to make fun of what happened in the Holocaust, we\u2019d deserve [the hate]. I never felt we were trying to belittle that at all. But to not get it right, that was frustrating. It was fun, but it came at a price, and I wish I could do it again. If as a result of it [being available online], Netflix phoned and said, \u201cOkay, you can do six more episodes,\u201d I would be the happiest person in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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\nListen to \u201cThe Online Movie Show with Phil Hall<\/a>\u201d on SoundCloud, with new episodes beginning on September 24.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 653: \u201cHeil Honey I\u2019m Home!\u201d (1990 British sitcom that ran for one episode before being cancelled). LAST SEEN: On YouTube. AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None. REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: One of the most notoriously bad productions in British television history. CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Nein. Imagine \u201cI Love Lucy\u201d with Adolf […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":28974,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1513],"tags":[1648,2055,2083,2084,712],"class_list":["post-28973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bootleg-files","tag-british-comedy","tag-british-television","tag-heil-honey-im-home","tag-hitler","tag-nazis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28973"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28976,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28973\/revisions\/28976"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}