Minisodes: Snack Sized Campiness

MySpace and Sony Pictures Television today launched their minisode network with an impressive selection from fifteen different shows of yore. Everything from the original Charlie’s Angels and The Partridge Family to the buxom V.I.P. and Sheena are available in easily snacked upon six-minute clips. It’s like Nick at Nite Lite.

Starsky and Hutch – Vampire

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A tour de force of the campy shows that made Aaron Spelling a power broker in Tinseltown, the minisode network currently offers three different episodes from each show. Each minisode is carefully edited to preserve the story arc of the original show (that is if you accept that shows like T.J. Hooker originally had a story arc). However, this is exactly what make the minisodes work. When watching the internet-friendly six-minute clips you’ll wonder how they stretched the story of Starsky and Hutch hunting down a ballet-crazed vampire to a half hour (embedded, for your fanged plié-ing pleasure, above).

As Hollywood continues to rehash these shows into movies, I think the minisodes will find an audience on the web. The eight-second preroll Honda ads aren’t obtrusive; by the time you want to skip them, they’re over. The shows even still have their beginning and end credits so you can see which b-list stars got their start as neoclassical Nosferatus (is that John Saxon!?). All sorts of TV junkies just got a new guilty pleasure.