The Coneheads

Plot synopsis:
Upon discovering a UFO in American airspace, the National Guard sends fighter jets to investigate, and they fire on the craft when it doesn't respond. Activating a cloaking device too late, the spaceship crashes into the Atlantic Ocean, near Manhattan. The aliens aboard, Beldar Clorhone and his life-mate Prymaat, survive and quickly adapt to our human way of life, despite standing out with their conical shaped heads. Beldar was assigned by the Highmaster to conquer earth as a Protoid Re-fueling Station under the title of 'Fuel Survey Underlord of the Wilderness Planet at the end of the Noctolium Solar Chain'. Beldar gets work as an appliance repairman, and when his grateful boss Otto discovers that Beldar has no documentation, he arranges for a false identity, which sends up a red flag that quickly alerts the INS. Meanwhile, after communicating with their world (Remulak) and discovering that a rescue vessel will not arrive for seven "Zurls" (many years), Prymaat informs Beldar that she is pregnant. They now need to completely adapt and safely blend in in order to raise their child among humans. Ambitious INS agent Gorman Seedling and his assistant Eli attempt to capture Beldar and Prymaat, but they are able to elude the two agents.
Months later, Beldar has become a respected taxi driver, and the couple live in his boss's basement. After the birth of their daughter Connie, they buy a home and move to suburban Paramus, New Jersey, adopting the surname Conehead. Beldar begins a new career, this time as a driving instructor. Meanwhile, Gorman gets a promotion and decides to leave the Coneheads' case to the agent replacing him. His promotion, however, is soon held-up by the case's extreme expense, forcing Gorman to continue until it's closed.
Now a teenager, all Connie Conehead wants to do is fit in with her peers, much to the objections of her father, especially when she begins seeing Ronnie, an auto mechanic. This caused tension between Connie and Beldar, who strongly disapproves of Ronnie, with Beldar going so far as tearing the roof off Ronnie's car and threatening him after he tries to sleep with her (an act that angers Connie greatly). Beldar is also preoccupied with winning a golfing trophy at his country club, while Prymaat becomes concerned about her attractiveness to Beldar due to one of Beldar's driving students making a pass at him.
Gorman and Eli track the Coneheads down to their home and pose as Jehovah's Witnesses to gain entry to the Conehead home. During the conversation, Prymaat discovers their communication device to Remulak is beeping, and she promptly tells Beldar that he has a phone call from 'the Big Phone'. This cause Beldar to promptly eject Gorman and Eli from their home. Beldar then receives word that their rescue vessel is on its way.
At a costume party that night, Connie is told that they will be rescued soon. She disobeys her "parental units" by returning home with Ronnie. Once there Connie consummates their relationship using her parents "senso-rings". Beldar and Prymaat walk in on them, just as the INS shows up to take the Coneheads into custody. Their rescue vessel arrives just in time, and Gorman and Eli are taken aboard with Beldar, Prymaat, and Connie.
On Remulak, Beldar is welcomed home, presenting Highmaster Mintot with a variety of 'gifts' from earth, including Gorman and Eli as slaves. Mintot is at first satisfied with what Beldar has accomplished during his time on Earth, until he notices that Beldar got his teeth capped (something Beldar had done as a part of blending in). He accuses Beldar of treason and sentences him to fight the ferocious Garthok ("narful the Garthok"), much to Prymaat's distress.
After the Garthok easily and gruesomely kills others who were sentenced to fight it, Beldar uses his Earthly golfing skills to save himself, killing the creature. For his victory, he is then granted a request: Beldar wishes to return to Earth to oversee its conquest, taking Gorman back with him as a minion. Mintot agrees, and Eli is left behind, becoming the Highmaster's personal lackey, acclimating to his new role rather quickly. Beldar leaves for Earth with Prymaat, Connie, and Gorman in tow. He soon demonstrates that Connie's feelings are more important to him than planetary conquest by quickly faking an Earth attack. Beldar orders his invasion force to retreat to Remulak, while making it look like his spaceship has been destroyed by a superior weapon. For sparing his life, Gorman agrees to give the Coneheads Green Cards in exchange for Beldar proving he has a marketable talent no other American citizen possesses, to which Beldar confidently agrees.
Some time later, Ronnie arrives to take Connie to the prom. Beldar gives Ronnie 55 words of advice, and then uses a massive flash bulb arrangement on his home-built Polaroid camera to document the happy event. As Connie and a now-sunburned Ronnie depart, Beldar and Prymaat look at the oversized photo, saying, "Memories, we will enjoy them".

Tags: cult, psychedelic, satire

Review:
A bit Mibs. When going through the first four seasons of Saturday Night Live it is always a pleasant surprise when a Coneheads sketch appears. Sure, not everything they say and do is hilarious, but they're alien ways are always strangely endearing and wonderfully weird. They certainly never make me groan like some other recurring characters on SNL do nowadays. So I was really excited to find the obscure animated Coneheads pilot episode on Youtube. Beautifully animated by Bankin-Rank, with the original writers and cast all present and correct, it still turned out to be a bit Mibs, unfortunately.Most of the story serves as a prequel to the original sketches and unsurprisingly the script by Franken & Davis stays true to the original concept of Beldar and Prymaat being selected to seize the tiny planet of Earth and enslave the humans. Even the the speech that Beldar ends up losing is the same. We also learn why the Coneheads came to claim they came from France. This leads to a lot of French artifacts stuck to the walls in the backgrounds, like a portrait of Charles de Caulle and a poster of BB in 'Et Dieu... créa la femme'. There's also a Bob Dylan album cover, but I don't quite get the reference. We get to see the birth of Connie, who apparently emerges from Prymaat's cone (this is however tastefully covered by a blanket). It isn't till the end that the show starts to cover the same territory as the first couple of SNL sketches did: Beldar reveals the family's true heritage to Connie and she starts dating Ronnie (not voiced by Billy Murray). All the while there is a laugh-track telling us when to do just that, but somehow it seems to be a bit out of sync, for the canned laughter always comes up in places that didn't seem particularly funny to me. For instance, when nosy next door neighbors the Paisners invite themselves over for a visit, their main comedic shtick is to mispronounce the name 'Conehead' several times. I did like it when Beldar and Prymaat started playing with the edible sensor rings (a giant glazed donut, or 'coffee ring') the Paisners brought along.Of course a lot of this material was used again in the movie version produced exactly ten years later. The bit with Prymaat using her mouth as a vacuum cleaner seems to originate from this 'toon. But near the end, the fact that the show is merely a pilot is enforced when the Coneheads learn they are stuck on Earth for a while yet. Instead of taking advantage of the animated format and ending on something spectacular, the episode ends the same old gag of Connie being scolded for swiping one of her parents sensor rings (a non edible one). Clearly Franken & Davis were aiming too much for an animated sit-com. It's just a bit too mature for the kids and rather too silly for adults. But for us SNL fanatics it's still a companion piece to the sketches and film. 7 out of 10. Okay for a single episode. "The Coneheads" is an American short film of under 25 minutes and as it is directed by Rankin and Bass, it is of course animated. The characters in here, the ones mentioned in the title, are people whose heads look like cones. You may have heard of or even seen the live action film about them. That one actually includes several actors (including then not yet Oscar nominee Dan Aykroyd) who also perform with their voices in this little film we have here. And actually some of them (again including Aykroyd) also participated on SNL when the Coneheads were invented. But back to this little film here. It was mildly entertaining I'd say. I am not sure if I could be interested in watching a show if they had followed-up after this pilot episode, but for slightly over 20 minutes, it was a somewhat entertaining watch, occasionally even funny. The central characters come from space to conquer Earth, but things don't go at all as planned as they have to run away from stray dogs right away. The family of Coneheads moves into a house and not much later they seem like normal earthlings actually. Yes there are some oddities, like with this gift brought by the neighbors, but also for example daughter Conehead quickly has a human boyfriend and it seems she adapts to college/high school life really quickly. And finally, the family is informed that they will not be taken back by their own any time soon because of the short budget. Hey who cares if people are stranded on a distant planet. We'll need the money for other stuff. Okay little film, a bit unusual to watch sci-fi by Rankin and Bass, but it's working I guess. Watch it if you like old animated films.