The Canned Film Festival is a comedy-based motion picture television series that was nationally syndicated during the late night hours in the United States for a single season in the summer of 1986.

[1] Boasting the tagline "late night with the best of the worst", the series was promoted and sponsored by the Dr. Pepper Company, whose then-tagline "out-of-the-ordinary" echoed the show's collection of odd and strange movies.

[5] Although similar in style to the successful Mystery Science Theater 3000 series shown on cable TV a few years later, the Canned Film Festival differed in that its comedy scenes occurred strictly during the commercial intermissions instead of adding peanut gallery type satire during the actual run of the movies.

[6] With the exception of popcorn and Dr. Pepper, these confections were completely fictional, with names like "Butter Lumps", "Chocolate Covered Lug Nuts", and "Diet-Free Nutra-Cal Bars", and were occasionally the source for minor script material.

The women included Doris (Kathryn Rossetter), a middle-aged aficionado of romantic drama stories, and Becky (Laura Galusha) a girl in her early twenties who offered a young feminist perspective to the movies.

Together with the middle-aged Fitzy, the two manifested the stereotypical male-oriented fascinations for lowbrow action, crude sexual innuendos, and took morbid pleasure in making fun of some of the movies' more macabre themes (such as nuclear warfare in the feature Rocket Attack U.S.A.).

What role Chan's character brought to the series is less clear, although he sometimes provided a childlike response to the episode plots, such as taking a spin in one of the lobby's clothes driers after being inspired by the outer-space setting of the featured movie Project Moonbase.

Prior to merging with the Seven Up Company in May 1986, Dr Pepper brand development conceived The Canned Film Festival as means to reach a target audience of consumers between ages 12 and 24 by promoting the soft drink as a novel and unconventional refreshment that stood out against the larger cola rivals of the time.

[1] Although the fictional setting for the show was in Texas, according to Rick Ford's biography in IMDb, scenes within the Ritz theatre were actually filmed inside an old movie house in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Perhaps motivated by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (or its more recent 1984 sequel, 2010), a Diet Dr. Pepper commercial was aired during the series which included a monolithic-type alien spacecraft visiting a rural trailer-home couple in search of intelligent life.

[20] Either way, due its 11-season run (as opposed to the single season Canned Film Festival) it is clear that MST3K was much more successful in the B movie satire genre despite the lack of a large sponsor like the Dr Pepper Company.