From a CW network airing of "Dirty Dancing", the 1987 romantic dance sensation that swept many a nation.
TRAVELER NOTE: This video is blocked in Austria and Germany.
COMMENT: The CW pulled a real bait and switch on me Sunday night. Originally, these breaks were to come from an airing of Garry Marshall's romantic comedy classic "Pretty Woman". I was all set to record that, and then . . . and then . . . the CW, all of a sudden, decided to run "Dirty Dancing" that night. The reason for all this seems traceable to what had happened this past January: that month, the CW began a deal that saw it rerun episodes of "The Conners" (a retooled reboot of "Roseanne" that the network doesn't air first-run). It would appear that these reruns have done well in the CW's ratings. So well, in fact, that I suspect whoever's programming that network is hell-bent on milking them to death. Inevitably, "Pretty Woman" was booked for a three-hour slot. Which left NO ROOM for what appears to have been the network's hottest property of late. So to get that half-hour of "The Conners" before it was time for local stuff to come on their stations, the somewhat shorter (in running time) "Dirty Dancing" appeared in "Pretty Woman"'s place. That's a truly cynical way to milk those reruns, but at least it gave a good amount of airtime to one of the most essential and influential films of the late 1980s. On another note, the print that was run of "Dirty Dancing" is from somewhere in the late 2000s, when Lionsgate had inherited probably the worst habit of the film's previous owner, Artisan Entertainment: that of taking old logos off of archival product and slapping the company's own at the beginning (a trait that seems to be the inevitable result of Artisan being owned by one of those private equity firms that my mom going to holler about online someday). Here, the 2005-12 Lionsgate logo is used instead of the silent one for Vestron Pictures (the movie was Vestron's only truly global success as a theatrical distributor). And for a movie whose best known bit of industrial work is in THOSE MOVES, there seems to be plenty of actually industrial ads on here (all for a company called Grainger). And if you want to see THOSE MOVES . . . go somewhere else. If I put even its most famous one in here, this compilation would get blocked. One last note: of all the networks and stations that ran movies in primetime during the 2020s (so far), the CW has to be the most piggish I've seen as far as ad breaks. The breaks from this airing of "Dirty Dancing" total nearly one hour . . . in a two-and-a-half-hour time slot. As someone who collects and posts ad breaks from television broadcasts, I must say . . . in one breath . . . that this is ridiculous!