SilentComedyMafia.com

This was a series which aired on Irish TV back in the mid to late '70's on silent cinema. It was hosted by Doug Fairbanks Jnr.
Does anybody know anything about it? Who produced the series? Is it available in any form?

It aired in the US on cable in the 80's. Fairbanks was always a good host. I suspect that this series has gotten overshadowed by Brownlow's HOLLYWOOD series, even though these programs took in the broader view of world cinema.

Yeah, I always enjoyed Fairbanks in that show. It was my introduction to silent cinema and I'd be interested in seeing it again. There were a lot of clips if I recall correctly. I've been unable to track it down in any form, but, I guess it's worth asking around.

This appears to be all that was posted online, no part three to the Comedies episode that I could find. THE AMAZING YEARS OF CINEMA was indeed a terrific program that has seemed to have fallen through the cracks to some degree. It did show some rare and interesting early world cinema clips, they even paid Al Detlaffs ransom and showed clips from the 1910 FRANKENSTEIN (including the creation scene). It was the first place I ever saw excerpts from the 1911 Italian L’INFERNO, and there were also clips from then hard-to-see Danish, Norwegian, and Russian films, all from before 1920.

One hopes it would get released on DVD by someone one of these days, I know of a certain mafian who has a VHS copy recorded off cable that I’ve been trying to get to cough it up for years so I could make a DVD transfer, but he does not seem to be able to dig it up from amongst his stacks.


RICHARD M ROBERTS

Thanks for those Richard. Yes, this is the first place I ever saw the FRANKENSTEIN clip.

I can understand why HOLLYWOOD may have cast this into the shadows somewhat, though from what I can remember, AMAZING... would only compliment HOLLYWOOD. A release would be nice.

Didn't recall the name of this series at first but after looking at the first few YouTube uploads it all came back, I also watched this during it's 80's broadcast. The comedy episode contains some wonderful scenes.