I’ve always loved seeing punks in movies and TV, ever since the episode of Silver Spoons where Ricky and future actual punk Corky Pigeon (he played drums in the criminally underrated The Gain and a bunch of other bands) inspired me to cut the fingers off of my batting glove and wear a black wristband in 3rd grade. I would love to see someone do a comp of a fake bands from tv and movies, here would be my my top 3 picks for that comp. Tru punx is overrated here are three underrated fake punk bands.
The Queen Haters
This is from Mel’s Rockpile on SCTV. Martin Short kills it on vocals, John Candy’s Emotionless drummer is perfect, Andrea Martin’s sneer is amazing, Eugene Levy’s guitar solo rules and Joe Flaherty’s motionless nervous looking bass player leaves you unsure if he is the genius who wrote all the Queen Haters songs, or if he has no idea what he’s doing. I love the band, but it’s clear the audience does not, despite Mel’s best attempts to get them into it with his dance.
Mayhem
This band was created for Quincy, a show where Jack Klugman was a coroner who for some reason felt the need to go out and do detective work as well. In this episode a kid gets stabbed at a punk show, and of course Quince just needs to leave his morgue and go out and solve the crime. This band has the worst look of all the bands on this list, I mean really, what the fuck is with that hair. The thing I really like about all the 80’s punk scare very special episodes is that you know the next day there were hundreds of new mohawks all across the country. I feel like this one probably led to a lot of really bad looks the next day.
Pain
If you have seen this episode of CHiPs you knew it would be on here. This ladies and gentleman is the single greatest punk scare episode of any TV show ever! There is so much to love about it, in this clip alone you get bummed out new wavers, punks wrecking the dance floor, a self righteous speech from John (who is the only person we actually see destroy anything in this scene!), stage rushers getting guitar whacked, a fight, and most importantly the GREATEST TV punk song of all time. The episode just keeps getting more and more insane, you get a cop teaching Ponch and John the difference between the pogo and the slam, which reminded me of one of my favorite scenes in another state of mind, and once the evil punks are defeated, you get Ponch performing Kool and The Gang’s Celebration in the best outfit ever before a crowd of happy New Wavers. If 13 year old me would have saw this episode when it aired, I would have totally ended up shaving a mohawk into my head, instead of just shaving my eyebrows off and telling everyone I lost a bet.