ULTRASUEDE IS FUNNY

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

To watch reruns of American Bandstand, Dick Clark's 30-year milk-fed grooveathon currently airing weekdays on VH1, is to wonder whether the sexual revolution ever actually occurred. The network is showcasing Bandstand episodes from 1975 to 1985. They remain transfixing, not so much for the musical acts--the ABBAS and the Sheila E's--but for the constrained, robotic movements of the voluminously coiffed dancers who orbit each other so stiffly, their smiles as synthetic as the Qiana on their backs. This was the decade of gettin' down? In funky town? Somehow most of these young men and women manage to dance without ever moving their heads.

In the brief three months it has been on the air, the Best of American Bandstand has become one of VH1's top-rated programs, aiding the network in its haphazard quest to be seen as something other than a buzz bin for all things Celine Dion. The reruns, each featuring newly taped introductions by the still chipper Dick Clark, prove that VH1 has mastered the Nick-at-Nite art of repackaging cheesy old shows as found-object satire. It's so easy! And so hip--a lesson that has eluded the minds at MTV, VH1's cooler sister network, where they generally work very hard at being hip, sometimes too hard. A perfect example is the new Squirt TV, a talk show picked up from public access. The host is a detached 17-year-old, Jake Fogelnest, who is as committed to ironically appreciating the 1970s as any Gen X Bandstand fan despite the fact that he became sentient only around 1981. The question for the target audience for these two shows is: Do you want your ironic appreciation of the 1970s straight up or painfully contrived?

Bandstand is tailor-made for late twentysomethings still wallowing in the absurdist culture of their youth. The most frequently rerun episode has John Travolta in a skintight turtleneck giggling his way through an interview with remarks like "I'm going to get to dance in a film in January, and it's going to be hot!" But the real celebrity fun comes with the far less recognizable faces--the Corey Harts and Quarterflashes that dominated the mainstream pop of the late '70s and early '80s. In one segment John Waite performs his only hit single, Missing You, wearing a gauze scarf and looking like David Duchovny digitally reinserted into a Wham! video. If that isn't diverting enough, there are always plenty of women dancing in handkerchief skirts while Dick Clark plays his role of well-preserved geezer-voyeur to a tee. Chatting up a perky audience member with feathered hair, he marvels, "Now how do you do that?"

There is little as comparably amusing on Squirt TV, with Fogelnest playing host out of his sizable bedroom. This is a somewhat more elaborately produced version of the cable-access show in which he debuted in New York City at the tender age of 14. On the MTV show Jake, who has dressed up his "set" with a new comforter, sits smugly self-assured in oversize pants and Airwalks and asks people like Adam Sandler who their favorite character was on What's Happening! ("I've had on every guest I've wanted," Jake bragged to TIME. Oddly, his wish list has so far been mostly limited to former cast members of Saturday Night Live.) In one episode, for no apparent reason, he showed a clip from the 1979 film The Warriors. Occasionally, Jake has his best friend, Frankie, hit the streets and inquire of passersby, "Which Brady kid do you identify with the most?"

Squirt TV is supposed to be hip--indeed, that's the only possible reason for it to exist--but the humor is depressingly reminiscent of The Single Guy or any of a dozen other network sitcoms mired in '70s TV references. Nevertheless, MTV executives obviously think Jake's is a unique voice. His cable show first caught the eye of former MTV programming heads Doug Herzog and Eileen Katz (now at Comedy Central), who signed Jake to the network. Indeed, Jake has many fans at MTV. "We loved the low-fi-ness of it all," notes Lisa Berger, vice president of development at MTV. "We loved it because it was about Jake and his realness." But there remains something very unreal, or pathetic, about a teenager in 1996 sitting on his bed underneath a Saturday Night Fever poster and asking comedian Janeane Garofalo if she's ever considered doing blaxploitation films.