This is a thread for public access television. Post your local public access legends.

World Wide Magazine was a public access television show that used to run late night here in Saint Louis. It was headed up by a wacky cab driver named Pete Parisi and an eccentric cast of characters that varied from a genuine black crackhead to toothless Hillbillys. Pete would go around the city and stir up shit and just generally annoy and make fun of people and local events. He always got kicked out of The V.P. Fair (now Fair Saint Louis) and anywhere else he happened to clown around at. A lot if these videos belong in the tritone thread, but since Pete made fun of anyone who crossed his path, I figured I'd group them all in one thread that I will update from time to time. Here's WWM's own crackhead Black Jesus to kick things off:


In this clip, Pete visits Saint Louis Centre, a downtown money sink shopping mall that was destined for greatness but immediately went to shit when people figured out how many ghetto folk inhabit downtown. Tritone will not like this, but Jigaloo will. Skip to 1:50 for fun:



And to be fair to all races, I give you The Fabulous Horner Brothers. Three drunk white trash hoosiers walking around South Grand St. Making fools of themselves:



When I was young, me and my sisters would always stay up late on Fridays to catch World Wide Magazine, because you never really knew what you were going to get. I'm going to try and find the viewer's hotline footage. Pete would play any message left on his machine. From death threats to kids pranking, pete played it. The city fucking hated this guy, but he was always a hero of mine. WWM went off the public airwaves 12 something years ago when Parisi succumbed to a heart attack.

Here's an awesome clip of Black Jesus absolutely terrorizing people at the Missouri Black Expo. Pete manages to get the whole group kicked out and even scams the Convention folk for $20.00

WWM also featured full frontal nudity from time to time. Hoosier ladies flashing titties and so forth. I haven't run into any of that on youtube, but there is some stuff with Tessa, a white trash stripper broad that did vagina stunts on the last episode:

Pete and company harrass the archbishop

Here's another awesome show that used to air here. This guy was a local republican dude that had a call-in talk show. All he wants to do is hold a discussion, but 99.9% of his calls were teenage asshats (myself and my friends included) making pranks. Usually they'll start serious and take him by surprise. Skip to the five minute mark for lulz:

That Metal Show

Seattle people, I forgot the name of the show, but it was a guy late night doing porn reviews. Great show!

I remember that show from when I was staying in a Seattle hotel a long time ago. They would actually show uncensored porn on the show. It was great.

If you guys can remember names, let em loose and I'll try and find them on the various tubes. Public access television from the 80's and 90's is a quirky hobby/pastime for me. I love the bad equipment, the washed out colors, the unexplainable charm of how regular folk conducted themselves in those times and so forth. I have about 60 something hours of World Wide Magazine on vhs in a box somewhere plus their best of videos that were available to purchase locally. I wish there was more videos online of the "I'm hepp" guy out there. Getting high and seeing him get consistently pranked by saint louis idiots never, ever got old.

The Hollywood Kids. Los Angeles, 1980s. They were the best gossip source in the 80s. They put out a little fanzine type newsletter full of blind items and tabloid pics. They were gay as hell and had an amazing underground of industry sources who provided the info. Hair and makeup people, drivers, agency assistants....the gay mafia. They had a little access TV show too. It may have been on Century Cable?

Thanks Mr. Blaster, I will look into it.

In the meantime, here's an awesome little clip of Pete and company visiting the Elvis is Alive museum in Wright City. The stars aligned that day seeing Pete luck out and find himself there alongside a tour group of mentally handicapped people. Of course, he tries to interview them. Great vid, skip to 3:25 to go to hell.

Here's a great article about Pete and the show. And to correct myself, Pete died of diabetes complications not a heart attack:

Jim Varagona; Not ready to forget Peter E. Parisi: Saint Louis' Most Colorful Radio and TV Personality

CreativeSaintLouis-

Posted by Thomas Crone

This article was originally posted by Creative Saint Louis-02/11/2010. Here's an article penned by Jim Varagona, or Diabeto Boy. Jim is in support of a cause, along with many other Saint Louisans. Yes, World Wide magazine hasn't had a new show since...I'll have to consult Jim, and WWM's been off the air, I think since maybe 2002? Correct me if I'm wrong. But, thanks to modern technology, Jim provides many, many great WWM clips on youtube.

Loocking Back at World Wide Magazine By Jim Varagona

When Pete Parisi left us in January of 2002, succumbing to complications from insulin-dependent Diabetes, the city of Saint Louis lost a genius, although most probably didn’t realize it. Parisi was the man behind World Wide Magazine, a public access program that ran for 15 years in the Saint Louis area entertaining its inhabitants, hoosiers and all.

One of the taglines for the show was fittingly “50,000 Hoosiers Can’t Be Wrong.” The show averaged about a new show a month during its run and aired three-four times a week on what was known as Double Helix at the time (later dhTV and now KDHX-TV).

Parisi originally worked on the show while driving cabs. I don’t recall setting aside the time to watch WWM, at least at first; it was such an odd program that it drew you in and halted your channel surfing. It can’t really be classified as a certain genre. There were goofy skits involving the wild cast of characters that Pete always managed to find, but at its best it was a documentary of the side of life that we all know about but don’t really see on television like a visit to the Elvis is Alive Museum that used to be located in Wright City, which I’m sure the local news made it out to, but Pete happened to take the tour with a group of mentally handicapped people.

Parisi had a knack for finding strange people and places and creating interesting situations. He had a cast of regulars that his viewers grew to know like kooky members of our own families. Well kind of. Through the years we got to meet Watt Davis (and his magic feet!), Vladimir “The Mad Russian” Noskov, wrestlers “Dumptruck” Dave Perry, The Giant Assassin, and Big Daddy, Hung Wei Lo, Uncle Nunzio, the Feeney Brothers, Mike Perez, the Hoosiermooners (Ruth and Big Mike), the Horner brothers, “Little Songbird” Vanessa Vargo, Miss Kathy, and Pete’s girlfriends Denise and later Linda.

There were Vince and Marty, a couple of portly guys that were paired together in skits and doing commentary. We’d see them in grass skirts dancing with a hula girl or giving a somewhat correct history lesson while walking over the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. Don Wayne, known as Black Jesus, was a gravelly talking man that Parisi would put in outrageous stereotyping situations for a black man. He would discuss going back to his homeland of Africa to visit his family while grainy black and white footage of tribal people would be playing.

For those not accustomed to the WWM way, that may sound racist, and surely it was, however Parisi did it all tongue planted firmly in cheek, showing the absurdity of life. When the Parks Department was amassing and escorting him off the grounds of the 1991 VP Fair (now known as Fair St. Louis), Pete edited it by intercutting it with footage of Nazi soldiers marching. Strangely enough, now stored at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial is World Wide Magazine’s coverage of the ’91 fair (scroll to #248 on this list: http://www.nps.gov/jeff/historyculture/av_collection.htm).

People hear the term “Public Access” and they think of boring programs of dark sets with a couple of potted plants. They think of talentless people looking for an outlet. You may not agree with Parisi’s style, but the man was a great entertainer. His editing skills were impeccable, mixing in old film and commercials and laying a fantastic jazz soundtrack throughout. Many people that lived in St. Louis during the time the show aired would instantly recognize “Tiger Rag” by Fletcher Henderson as the theme of show (actually the second—“China Boy” by Red Nichols was the first).

The South Side Fellini, as Parisi was sometimes known, made a great series of shows during the Great Flood of 1993 going places and talking to folks that the local news stations weren’t getting to. Mike Perez, who was a cameraman for Pete, suggested that those tapes be put in a museum as a historical document along with WWM shows covering white supremacy groups. St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Jeff Daniel suggested after Parisi died that we “elevate World Wide Magazine from controversial cult phenomenon to necessary historical document.” I’m working on it, Jeff.

I actually met Pete once back in 1997. A few friends and I went up to a WWM picnic in Carondelet Park. I shot some video of Tom Horner, drunken with white makeup wearing a cowboy hat with a pacifier dangling from it. A group of people including my friends convinced him to roll down a hill in a dirty park trash can—twice. Someone saw that I had video and took me to Pete. It was like meeting the Diabetic Godfather (I too have Type 1 Diabetes). He told me he’d give me a call and we’d meet up to get him the footage. I ended up going to his apartment with two buddies and we chatted for a couple of hours about the show and working with video as he chomped on a cigar. It was very surreal.

Late in 2002, I made a documentary on Pete, entitled “P.E.P.” for a project at Webster University. I interviewed The Mad Russian, Big Mike, and The Feeney Brothers, as well as Pete’s mother and sister. It ran late at night a couple of times on KDHX-TV, but won’t go much farther than that. All of Pete’s material has copyrighted music, so it’s difficult to get air time or make a DVD aside from underground copies.

If you search for the show on YouTube, a lot of those were posted by me, and some were pulled due to copyright infringements. I’m not the shows biggest fan, as far as the amount of shows I’ve seen or can recall, but I am it’s and Pete’s biggest advocate. I’ve tried to compile as many video clips and news clippings that are out there on my WWM fan sit (http://wwm.diabetoboy.com –pay attention, it’s not www) and in the past year, the fan page on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/worldwidemagazine) has grown and become more active. I even own his ¾” tape decks and video mixer.

I understand that Pete Parisi may have been an offensive, grumpy old man to some, but he captured an angle on an era that no one else did in a way that no one else did. His style was before his time and that has been reinforced by witnessing the popularity since him of the extreme comedy of Tom Green, the Direct Cinema documentarian Michael Moore that gets involved with his subjects, and reality television in general. This reality TV certainly had its own South Saint Louis flavor to it, with the humor of an Italian from New Jersey. It captured simple moments that sum up a lot like when Pete was at Grand and Gravois asking people in traffic about what makes St. Louis so great and three hoosiers in a truck scream “KSHE 95 rocks your ass!” (Thanks to Johnny Vegas Moynihan for reminding me of that moment.)

My hope is that the hoosiers come out of the woodwork to talk about the show, share mementos and clips, and Pete Parisi gets some overdue accolade, whether it be a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame or an exhibit on classic local TV in Saint Louis at the

Painstaking mobile cut and paste cut off the last line. It wasn't important, just some bullshit about a history museum or somethin or another.

I couldn't track down any footage, but I found a great article about the show you mentioned, Faceblaster.

http://articles.latimes.com/1990-03-09/news/vw-2279_1_hollywood-kids

I would copy and paste it, but it's four pages long and aint nobody got time fo' dat'.

I also ran across part one of a documentary about Hollywood public access, so there may be some memorabilia in there for you. My phone's being a fag and the cards are in the world series so I'll watch it later. I did manage to see a gaudy fat chick rolling around with a guitar, so I'm sure I'll get a kick out if it.

Not exactly public TV, but the old Sports Channel Chicago's "Jim Shorts Cavalcade of Sports" was stoner heaven.

Those shows always took on a new sense of charm while on drugs.

Wasn't Colin's Sleazy Friends , was it?

Colin's Sleazy Friends was on public access in Los Angeles but it may have appeared in other cities. I don't remember him doing reviews, but he had porno broads on his show and usually got them naked by the end of the episode. He actually was in "The Strike" episode of the ninth season of Seinfeld. That was the episode where the concept of "Festivus" was unleashed. He played one of the sleazy guys at the OTB who gets invited to the Costanzas house for Festivus by Kramer.

He was also in HBO's Mr. Show with Bob and David. He was in the Taint Magazine skit among others.

Mr. Show is my favorite sketch comedy show of all time.