EricJ

Yep. Otherwise, your comedy tends to be about First-World Problems, like your car, or your real-estate, other celebrities, or wacky trends. Or drugs. When you freeze your butt off during part of the year, it knocks you out of Self-Absorbed mode, and into everybody else's problems, that you can't really do anything about because Nature, Fate, and/or Karma are against you. (It's similar to the same political reason I can't retire to a sun-belt state, even though it's harder to get around New England winters--I'd like to move to Florida, California or Texas, but they're all nuts!)

And to be fair, Chicago IS funny. It had its own Second City company that gave us the Brothers Belushi. But then, of course, they've got those seasonal Mid-Northern winters, up by the great lakes.

Can I explain why NYC is funny and LA isn't?...No. Wiser men have tried. And I've been around since the 80's, when we got a lot more LA rubbed in our pop-cultural face than we do today, and I still can't explain why we got Fridays along with SNL. All I noticed is that Brooks used to make tributes to old movies, and then when he went back to parodies, he parodied new recent low-hanging-fruit movies (Prince of Thieves, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Star Wars) that are hysterically funny to....West coast movie producers. And then he did his LA movie, about homeless people and wacky Latin/Middle-Eastern immigrants. (Having spent a semester in NYC during college, think it's that NYC'ers are more used to grousing about problems, and enjoying it as a group participation sport, as opposed to a place with no winter, more drugs, beachfront property, more plastic surgeons and a few hundred miles of geographic buffer from the rest of the country, where you think you can get away from them. And as for Brooks, while there is a healthy Jewish population in LA, you...just sort of think "NY" when you hear the word, don't you?)

And second only to Dracula: Dead & Loving It as the most mournfully unfunny Mel Brooks movie ever made. We lost a lot when native-NY'er Mel moved to LA (where no one knows how to be funny), and if we can't say History of the World Pt. 1 was our first warning, Robin Hood: Men in Tights sure as heck was. 😥 (But neither of those movies were about L.A...)

A theater company trying to put on a wacky English drawing-room farce--Once in rehearsal, once six months into the tour, and once a year into the tour, after actor rivalries have boiled over. Imagine a slightly sillier non-musical version of "Kiss Me Kate". 😀

Was he deliberately trying to imitate that guy from the Flintstones?

Listen to some of Corman's commentaries on his own DVD's (the MGM ones are OOP, and you may have to search them up at the library)--Corman wasn't a "huckster", or "delusional" about his "artistic" ability, and he didn't "throw off movies over the weekend": If you're going to go the factually shaky route of using Tim Burton as a historical source of how B-movies were made in the 50's ("Bride of the Monster" was co-scripted with Wood's producer partner, btw), think back to the scene of the producer who already had the poster for "Glen or Glenda?" ready, and hired Ed to go out and make a movie to go with it, if he could bring it in on time and under budget. That was EXACTLY what Samuel J. Arkoff told Corman, when Corman would sell a poster for "Attack of the Crab Monsters" or "Viking Women vs. the Sea Serpent", and had to make a film with that title in the month or two it took to saturate theaters with the posters. Apart from that, Roger Corman was the artistic lord of his domain, and, as long as he was scripting AND directing, could do anything he liked, or allegorize any message he wanted, within those boundaries...As long as, unlike Wood, he still remembered to deliver crab monsters and Viking women at some point. Roger didn't pretend his American International movies were "classics", or that he didn't cut corners, but he wasn't lazy about them, either. He not only ground out an amazingly productive supply in several genres (including westerns, delinquents and 60's-hippie), but also tried to put some "message" into them--Yes, the goofy ending of "Teenage Caveman" for one, but have to admit, he tried, while other modern B-movie goofballs like The Asylum or Lloyd Kaufman at Troma thought they could create a "wacky" hipster persona of not trying at all. Like Larry Cohen, Corman was that rare smart director in a cheap business, even if he became a little more cynical in his New World and New Concorde days as a studio x-prod--Listen to him sit down with a few savvy recollections on "X" or "House of Usher" (we'll assume everyone already knows why he refers to Ray Milland in "X" as "Greek tragedy at the drive-in" 😉 ), and it's possible to go a little easier on him than the impatient anger-management MST3K gags. Our local theater group put this on, fresh off of Broadway, and you HAVE to see Act 2 performed live, to know why the play became a classic. 'Nuff said. 😂 The movie loses a little something in the translation, but it's enough of a transcript, with the ideal dream-team cast in the play roles (John Ritter, Michael Caine, Carol Burnett, Denholm Elliott) to serve for future posterity. This is why plays and musicals have to be filmed, for the ages. There's not much other good Bogdanovich in recent years, but The Cat's Meow (2001) is an effective counterpoint to Citizen Kane (even if factually questionable).

The Undead was another (albeit more serious) Charles B. Griffith script for Corman, with Griffith's humor showing up in the gravedigger character. Griffith reportedly wanted all the medieval scenes to be in Shakespearean pentameter--'cause, see, that was the way they all talked back then--but Roger wisely ruled against it. And Corman's overlooked, IMHO, for intentionally trying to create "art" on a B-budget. If you can still hate Corman after Red Death and X: the Man With the X-Ray Eyes, then...there's nothing else I can say here.

I remember when the news stories about antibody tests came out, I had to explain, "Okay, remember those things that wrapped around Raquel Welch's leg?" ("Then, what was the blobby thing that destroyed the submarine?" "That was a white blood cell!") Of course, though, I knew these things from watching, and occasionally binging, Netflix's Cells at Work anime. (From when it used to air on Crunchyroll)

Classic Doctor Who is considered to be an unapologetic sci-fi spin on frustrating, eccentric, know-it-all Sherlock and his loyal but long-suffering Watsons: Both Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker got made-for-BBC spins at the Hound of the Baskervilles, after their DW stints were over. My dad, who raised me on Holmes the way some dads raise their kids on the Cubs or Packers, used to have the recording--Problem with Broadway shows, though, if they don't go to movies, you never get to see them.

Try the movie again--JUST the 1977 original. See if it looks different, now that you're not 12. For better results, try watching Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress first--Not a requirement, but couldn't hoit.

Ironically, Will Ferrell wanted do his movie ten years ago, but had to give in when Robert Downey Jr.'s version got the bigger studio greenlight. (And, not coincidentally, we get Ferrell trying to do a parody of Downey's boxing-Holmes, eight years later.)

There's the old story that Fox was illegitimately "block-booking" ( = blackmailing) theaters into booking Star Wars if they wanted to book Fox's big surefire June bestseller-blockbuster upcoming hit The Other Side of Midnight. By June, after early reviews hit, it reportedly became the other way around. 😄

Oh, how I love to tell the kids: During the first two months, NOBODY "dressed up in line"--How could we, we hadn't seen the movie yet! With the movie playing on only one screen, we were in line at 3pm trying to get tickets for 9pm! (As opposed to the opening of Episode 3 in '05, when the usual fans were traditionally online at the Grauman's--despite the fact that it wasn't playing there--and all the other kids were staring at them with looks of "Dude...who stands in line for movie tickets anymore? Why did you not buy them online six weeks ahead like normal fans??" 😆 "

Mario Bava's Black Sabbath (1963) springs to mind...

I remember going to a sneak-screening of Flash, back literally no one knew what to expect from it-- It was being sold at the time on the strength of "Flash Gordon is an epic pop-culture hero, just like Star Wars!", so the audience wasn't quite prepared for Batman-style intentional tongue-in-cheek. By the time Ming chose the "Hot Hail" button in the opening theme, we had our suspicions, Queen rocked the credits, and then by the football game, all suspicions were confirmed. 😄 Ah, what a ride we had.

I can't tell how many times I've seen YouTubers say "Hey, they're singing a Beach Boys song! 😄 ", every time a character in an old TV series sings a public-domain old Caribbean sea folksong. (The villain also sings it in a "Wild Wild West" episode, also getting the "Hey, he's a Beach Boys fan!" Tubers.) Think you got it backwards: The Beach Boys COVERED an old public-domain Caribbean sea folksong, when they wanted to give a surf-beat to a folksong the Kingston Trio had already had a big hit with. (Gee, and all these years, I'd thought they'd covered the song to kid Brian Wilson about some disastrous attempt at a yacht trip...Could have happened.)

That could, in fact, apply to ANY thread on this board. And often does. 🙄 I remember being on an Anime-related board right around 9/11/01, and for three solid days, nobody on the entire board could talk about anything but How Many Would Die in the New WWIII, and When Terrorists Were Going to Get Us, Maybe With Cool Biological Weapons This Time. The mind finally rebelled (ie. mine, since I considered terrorists as immature trolling idiots and wasn't that traumatized about it to begin with), and after stories about Red Cross blood-donation drives started becoming the new "good" charity--sort of the equivalent of our "Free meals for frontline workers" charities--I remembered one well-known anime-series joke about blood donations, and made an anime-related joke about "How Anime characters are reacting to 9/11". That opened the floodgates: A whole thread of in-jokes about how favorite characters were reacting to the tragedy--in tasteful, optimistic, supportive ways, of course--got us back on our favorite board subject and posting like normal Internet human beings again. For us, it's a lockdown and movies, but it still works.

You have to appreciate it knowing what you're getting--Charles B. Griffith was Roger Corman's "funny" writer, and audiences expecting B-movie thrills might go to Death Race 2000 or Creature From the Haunted Sea not knowing they were going to get an intentional tongue-in-cheek spoof. Whatever Little Shop '60 was trying to do, though, worked more effectively in A Bucket of Blood, an almost direct retread of the script, with Dick Miller adding a touch of loner-creepiness to the Seymour-equivalent character, and a more biting satire of beatnik culture taking the place of Shop's sitcom humor.

Yeah, Frank Oz was obviously hired for his directorial expertise with big puppets, but on his own, he is NO director. The whole movie seems to be filmed with sort of a quick first-read on-paper appreciation of the original stage version--a sort of isolated scene-by-scene "Okay, how can we make this number wacky?"--and "Don't Feed the Plants" just seems to be dumped on the end of the movie because it happened to be on the end of the musical, so there...But not because Oz particularly figured out anything creative to do with it in the spirit of the final cut of the movie. Not every director's cut is an unjust "martyr" of the studios, and some managed to be salvaged in the recuts.

Are they showing the National Theatre for-kids production of "The Cat in the Hat"? That's a cute one (showed on Netflix a while ago, back in its more elegant days), and does right a good example of what Mike Myers did wrong.

And Roger C. Carmel, of course, has HIS immortal niche in weaseldom, albeit for TV:

That, and horses grazing by the water's edge... 💩 When the automobile arrived, not everyone was saying "Get a horse!"--Some activists praised that the lack of horses (and street sweepers) on our city streets would be a significant improvement in public health.

Err, no: The Winnie the Pooh Guy was the decidedly un-weaselly Sterling Holloway. (Okay, maybe except for Kaa in The Jungle Book, or the TV repairman in that Twilight Zone episode.) And yes, Holloway played Roquefort the mouse in The Aristocats (1970).

The original Euro version wasn't really TRYING to be a "horror" film in the sense of the Corman/Price Poes, it was trying to be a "socially disturbing" first entry inventing the new late-60's/early-70's AI/Hammer genre of what I would refer to as "Inquisition Porn": Period horror films, still in 18th-cty. bodices, about covens of witches, druids or vampires who just wanna do their own writhing happening in the woods, man, but are being hunted down by ruthless, corrupt, hypocritical, fetishistically sadistic and clearly puritanical/sexually-repressed self-authoritarian witch-hunter authorities of the church (aka the Establishment) as the real villain of the picture...Since, eventually, they turn to framing innocent Young People, like our young heroine who spurned the authority figure, just to cling to that authority. Just that AI didn't know what to do with an artsy UK "shock" picture, and put a Poe title on it to look like their other drive-in staples. It was horror B-movies' way of trying to edge their way into the Hippie mentality, which was hard to do with Vincent Price or Christopher Lee, and usually resulted in things like Hammer's Twins of Evil, where Peter Cushing turned up as Evil Puritan Inquisitor, or Dracula AD 1972, where we could get nice long scenes of groovy psychedelic love-ins, work in a little bit of the Satanic pentagrams and daggers, and still have Lee show up as the franchise vampire.