Time travel, green faces, comedy Hitler, and a suitcase full of lingerie

September 1, 2013 7:59 AM

Were you one of a handful of geeky teens watching BBC2 at 9.35pm on Saturday January 16th 1982? Or perhaps you were one of the sports fans who tuned in by accident when the football was cancelled. If so, you caught the first and last British television screening of a surreal, pitch black time travel farce from the pen of Czech sci fi maestro Josef Nesvabda, and you have probably never forgotten it. Now thanks to the Internet, you can watch Zítra vstanu a oparím se cajem, or Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea again at last, after more than thirty years.
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth (16 comments total)

Hm, the full video won't play without installing something that only runs on Windows? Bummer.
posted by jepler at 9:39 AM on September 1, 2013

Yeah, I only got 5 minutes, then it stopped.
posted by MoxieProxy at 9:55 AM on September 1, 2013

Is the video player anything particularly nefarious? Can it be easily uninstalled without leaving any malware behind?
posted by Mokusatsu at 10:41 AM on September 1, 2013

I'm not getting anything like that in Chrome on my Mac. I'm about 10 minutes in, still trying to figure out why this was ever made. For sheer badness I think Battlefield Earth may have finally met its match.
posted by scalefree at 10:56 AM on September 1, 2013

Had no trouble viewing it on Safari on an iPad, but here's an alternative for anyone foiled by the veoh.com link. Horrible rip though.
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth at 11:07 AM on September 1, 2013

I was also able to download the whole thing as an MP4, though I'm starting to question the wisdom of this from a mental health perspective.
posted by scalefree at 11:11 AM on September 1, 2013

Yeah, I only got 5 minutes, then it stopped.

Not to mention it took an age to load, and meanwhile there's an ad blinking at me the entire time.

I suspect I shall have to wait a little longer for this gem to find me.
posted by philip-random at 11:18 AM on September 1, 2013

Okay, I was sold as soon as I saw the parrot say "Heil Hitler!"
posted by chrominance at 11:21 AM on September 1, 2013

So, I take it that no one here was one of the handful of geeky teens who watched this back in 1982.
posted by cropshy at 12:42 PM on September 1, 2013

Watch it? We videotaped it. It became a very intense, but very localized cult.
posted by Grangousier at 1:03 PM on September 1, 2013 [1 favorite]

To see more than 5 minutes, you need to install the Veoh player. And here is the slimmy text that appears at the bottom of the popup for that...

"The Veoh player is powered by the Giraffic Video Accelerator - a secure video streaming technology which accelerates video downloads and helps improve your streaming speed. The Giraffic program is 100% free of adware or spyware and is guaranteed not to harm or slow down your computer in any way."

Uh-huh.
posted by andreaazure at 1:03 PM on September 1, 2013

The beginning looks and sounds like an Eastern Bloc Eurodisco version of a 1940s anti-Nazi film, Schichlegruber Does the Lambeth Walk.
posted by jonp72 at 6:13 PM on September 1, 2013 [1 favorite]

No way this is real. Even if it is.
posted by goatdog at 8:18 PM on September 1, 2013 [1 favorite]

Hitler vs. "The Tomorrow I'll Wake Up" Hitler
posted by benzenedream at 9:40 PM on September 1, 2013

> For sheer badness I think Battlefield Earth may have finally met its match.

You, my friend, need to watch They Saved Hitler's Brain. Afterwards, you will realize this Czech movie is Citizen Kane by comparison. (Backstory and detailed analysis here.) Mach schnell! Mach schnell!!
posted by languagehat at 9:35 AM on September 2, 2013

This was quite funny and not nearly as weird as it sounds. But it was weird.

Note that the real fun starts about half-way through after the first "return" from the mission, so if you get that far you should definitely keep going.
posted by kiltedtaco at 11:45 AM on September 2, 2013