The SBP Archives - Your less than frequent dose of SBP!

The intro for this 1980s TV Ontario show called Magic Shadows was, at the very least, inventive (and perhaps the animators were experimenting with LSD). As a kid, I would see this intro often after finishing up a different program (Dr. Who, Fables of the Green Forest, Dr. Snuggles I think was another) and it would FREAK ME OUT. I'm not sure much of it makes sense, for instance, the tiger wearing the business suit whose head would disappear, only for an octopus to then come flying out of the neck! What exactly does that mean? Anyway, the song and the smoking Marx Brothers were burned permanently in my brain, and I'm sure it may have been responsible for a nightmare or two growing up. But, I still look upon this program intro with nostalgia and just decided to look it up on YouTube for fun to see if it was up for viewing and luckily for me, it was there.

As an interesting sidenote, the host, Elwy Yost, had a son named Graham who went on to have a successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter, having written the screenplay for movies such as Broken Arrow and Speed. Speed would actually be the last film Elwy would host on television before retiring in 1999 on a different TV Ontario show, Saturday Night at the Movies.