Copyright slashfilm
For just about as long as he was on the air, Johnny Carson was the undisputed "King of Late Night." From 11:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. on NBC, the native Midwesterner's "The Tonight Show" was the talk show to go on if you were promoting a movie, an album, or trying to launch your stand-up comedy career. Everyone took a seat on Carson's couch. Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali, Grace Kelly, Burt Reynolds, Bob Hope ... no one was too big for "The Tonight Show." Almost. There was one big guest who snubbed Carson in favor of the upstart Arsenio Hall in 1989. Johnny Carson never hosted mass murderer Jason Voorhees on his program. The waterlogged scourge of Camp Crystal Lake, who killed over 150 people across 10 official "Friday the 13th" movies — a franchise currently on pause due to legal wrangling — was quite the get for Hall. At the time, it confirmed that "The Arsenio Hall Show," which premiered at the outset of 1989, was becoming the hip alternative to the establishment which Carson alone represented ("The Pat Sajak Show" was the only other competitor, and no one wanted to chop it up with that ultra-conservative dullard). In all seriousness, this bit, which might've been forced on newcomer Hall by his corporate overlord Paramount Television, was the kind of stunt that could fall embarrassingly flat. The whole premise was to have non-verbal, axe-wielding Jason, promoting the release of "Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan," sit opposite Arsenio as the host lobbed a litany of questions and observations that would go unaddressed. Impressively, what could've been an absolute death wound up being a very funny five-minute segment.
