Salami Night Fever

June 10, 2013 11:51 AM

I am trying to find an old (80s-90s) animated short called "Salami Night Fever".

Thus far the only online evidence I have for its existence is the director's imdb page, a Saturday Night Fever fan forum thread, and a youtube comment.

From the YT comment thread it seems that the video may have been shown on Nickelodeon's Turkey Television in the mid 80s, which seems off to me as I had vague memories of it being on MTV's Liquid Television in the early 90s.

The video features stop-motion animation of little salamis in SNF-style leisure suits/disco wear and "dancing" on a small light-up dance floor, and I have been low-level obsessed with it since the first and only time I saw it 20-ish years ago.

plz halp me find it

posted by elizardbits to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

Best answer: I distinctly remember this, and just several years ago had a very similar dig to find the video for(and originally even just the song) for the pizza rocket short that was played on nick a couple times. I actually found the video, but it was only up on youtube(or maybe dailymotion?) for a couple months and is now taken down again for some weird reason. Now i have absolutely no luck finding it, and that song was extremely hard to find until it was recently uploaded to myspace like that.

I had seriously searched idly for years to find it, and only ever saw it again because someone started uploading a whole bunch of VHS tapes of random old nick commercial breaks and shorts to youtube but seemingly got busted for it.

I followed the exact same dead ends. Youtube comments mentioning the video, random other sites/forum posts. Then one day i idly googled it and the first result was a video!.

I've had similar bad luck with finding clips of the hilarious awful TV edit of stand by me, in which they edit down lard-asses name to just "Lard! Lard! Lard! Lard!" in the scene where everyone is chanting it. I know it happened, and no one i know believes me. All i can find is this forum post.

I think you're pretty much going to have to sit and wait for someone to upload a VHS, as other than someone at nickelodeon who manages archives or does scheduling i doubt anyone else has access to the clip who didn't just tape it way back when. Read the story of Cry Baby Lane for example, which was only seen again by anyone since someone had an old VHS copy that they converted and posted a torrent to. And in that case in fact, someone from scheduling at nick posted that they saw it in their system but couldn't get it to load.

So as they say in game of thrones, thus your watch begins. Google it a time or two a week and just wait. The Pizza Rocket thing seriously took years for me, and i had almost started to believe that what i remembered either had never existed or had been fully lost to time.
posted by emptythought at 2:02 PM on June 10, 2013

Best answer: I don't remember it appearing on the Turkey Television myself, although that doesn't mean it didn't appear. A lot of TT stuff has fallen down the memory hole.
posted by JHarris at 2:43 PM on June 10, 2013

Response by poster: sob

my dancing salamis
posted by elizardbits at 5:33 PM on June 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: SCREAM SCREAM SCREAM

EXCITING UPDATE

EXCITING DANCING SALAMIS UPDATE

I AM EXCITE IT IS ON YOUTUBE

BEHOLD
posted by elizardbits at 8:26 PM on January 15, 2014 [2 favorites]

Ah, excellent! Nice to see it's not lost.
posted by JHarris at 7:59 AM on January 16, 2014