Rick Right: Rock Songs in Commercials

Obviously, Elton John didn't really object to commercials.

Rick Right: Rock Songs in Commercials
Comedy Central
1990
Stand-Up Comedy
VHS
B-

Right runs through an array of classic rock songs, a line or two for each, showing how they could promote different products, e.g. Elton John's "Philadelphia Cream Cheese."  (To place this more specifically in its time period, in 1987 John Lennon's "Revolution" being used to sell Nike was very controversial.)

Rick Right: "The Songs Are Mine"

Rick Right: "The Songs Are Mine"
Comedy Central
1990
Stand-Up Comedy
VHS
B-

Right does a duet between Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson about music rights, around the time that Jackson bought the Beatles catalog.

Rick Right: Neil the Comic

As seen on Mork & Mindy

Rick Right: Neil the Comic
Comedy Central
1991
Stand-Up Comedy
VHS
B-

The comic with the pink flamingo guitar wonders what it would be like if Neil Diamond were a stand-up comic.  The jokes are corny but meant to be and the guitar-playing is good.

Mork & Mindy: Mork and Mindy Meet Rick and Ruby

Mork & Mindy: Mork and Mindy Meet Rick and Ruby
ABC
March 26, 1981
Sitcom
DVD
C+

This McRaven & Johnson story feels like such a wasted opportunity.  Rick & Ruby were a comedy musical act, with Brian Seff and Monica Ganas, but within the context of this show they're the members of a band called the Stupids, which they live up to offstage as well as on.  Now, Seff, under the name Rick Right, later in the decade and on into at least the mid-'90s (when I started to lose track of the comedy scene), had a sharp satiric edge and he was a fine musician as well.  Here, well, he plays his pink flamingo guitar but that's about the only resemblance.

The other wasted aspect is that Mindy stands up for Ruby's right to work, in this case for chauvinistic Remo, while pregnant, but this issue is blurred because Ruby is such a moron that she doesn't even know what month she's in.  And then Mork gets up and sings, despite Mindy's discouragement, even though he already showed he could sing on the Nelson Flavor Saturday morning TV show.  Not a terrible episode, and it certainly has its moments, but just as frustrating now as it was at the time (when I of course didn't know who Brian Seff was, but was disturbed by the idea of such idiots reproducing).