SUMMARY: In an animated spin-off from the ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketches, cone-headed aliens Beldar and Prymaat are sent to Earth where they must pose as a normal human family.
WHY IT’S HERE: Based on the very popular Conehead sketches from ‘Saturday Night Live’, this Rankin-Bass produced pilot for a potential animated series based on the characters is an interesting artefact from the TV vaults. Featuring the voices of the original cast from the sketches, Dan Akroyd, Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman, ‘The Coneheads’ feels like the ideal subject matter for an animated series and, despite its dreadful laugh track, the slightly more adult orientated material could have made ‘The Coneheads’ the logical successor to ‘The Flintstones’ as an animated, prime-time comedy show. The voice cast is good and the cornier jokes seem more at home in the bright, Saturday morning style animation but sadly ‘The Coneheads’ never got beyond this pilot, perhaps because the subject matter was just too strange to support a whole series. This certainly seemed to be the case with the 1993 film version, which was a laugh-free comedy bomb.
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