eddie the flying gimp
The Idiot Box was an American sketch comedy television series created by Tom Stern, Tim Burns, and Alex Winter (of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure fame) which ran on MTV from 1991-1992.
After the success of Bill & Ted , MTV hired Winter, Stern, and Burns to develop a half-hour sketch comedy show for the network. As the channel was still strictly music-oriented at the time, The Idiot Box was mainly a showcase for popular music videos, but with a series of sketches, fake commercials, and parodies shown in between. Therefore, although an episode ran 30 minutes, there were only 7 to 11 minutes worth of sketches.
Inspired heavily by British sitcoms such as Monty Python's Flying Circus , the humor in The Idiot Box was rooted in absurdity and violent slapstick, often in the form of television and movie parodies and commercials for fake television shows (such as "Mumford the Yodeling Mutt" and "Who's A Total Idiot? with Tony Danza" ). Each episode would end with a recap by the Max Headroom-esque VOTAR, "the future of television announcing", as he would criticize each of the sketches in the episode and occasionally quote lines from New Wave songs.
Although the show was a hit for the channel, Winter, Stern, and Burns chose to cease production after six episodes and instead accepted a high-paying deal with 20th Century Fox to write and direct their own feature film. The result was 1993's Freaked , which featured humor very similar to that of The Idiot Box .