Fractured Flickers

1960s tv comedy series

What would you get by mixing a silent movie with audio track, but audio track from completely different story? You would get a fractured flicker...

A 1963 unusual comedy series - the creators took old silent movies, cut them to pieces and put together with the audio track to fit a new story they were trying to tell. In a way it is what years later Mystery Science Theatre 3000 did with early movies, but in Fractured Flickers they were using only the silent movies from 1920s and 1930s. Of course since the Fractured Flickers were developed in early 1960s and were made for TV they could hardly contain anything too risky when it comes to humour, so the flickers were wide range of educational or promotional materials, sometimes parodies of known stories remade using old clips, but usually they were just average stories that were possible to make from a single old movie.

The production of Fractured Flickers was a long process, so between the silent movies there were scenes with the host, experienced actor Hans Conried, who did surprisingly well as continuity announcer and during sort-of interviews (or rather interview-like scripted sketches), usually making fun of the program itself. While they were suppose to be just addition to the main part of the program in most cases Conried was the main part while flickers were not that impressive. The authors tried several different approaches to the idea, some of them were better, some of them worse, but after a while it looked like they lost the passion for the job, because they were using same old footage clips over and over again or were trying to build segments of the program that were used in following episodes, but most of them were just average.

For the 1960s the concept was very original (later improved in MST3K idea), but some of the episodes were under developed and the flickers themselves were just addition to Hans Conried and his segments.

Rating	4.8
Funny	4 / 10
Entertaining	3 / 5
Characters	2 / 5
Nonrepetitive	3 / 5