EricJ

I remember when it came out in '79, those of us who'd seen it said "No, really! A Ron Miller-era 70's Disney comedy, and it's funny!" ...Nobody believed us. 😓 (But then, they didn't believe us that young Jodie Foster was funny in "Freaky Friday" or "Candleshoe", either. So, don't worry, Nick & Nora, it won't be too painful by the time you get to it in the upper 70's echelons of your Disney quest.) ...Despite the fact that Clark was married to Webster's-dad Alex Karras IRL for thirty years? Okay--after arguing with Shout Factory's "Pride Month sale" about what on heaven's green earth made the 70's Fantasy Island TV boxsets a "gay icon", with "Can't Stop the Music" as one of the also-like recommendations (and okay, that would explain "Webster", but "The Facts of Life"??)--I must ask: Has a culture in desperate need of tribalistic pop-culture identification actually descended to "It's 'gay' BECAUSE it's decade-kitschy"? I can understand how "Valley of the Dolls" and "Mommie Dearest" became misogynist-fantasy icons, and I've heard some flimsy explanations for why "Grease" attracts singalong-screening audiences, but have the "bullied" now become the sniggering bullies? (Sorry, had to vent, but...seriously, the heck??)

It wasn't even this bad when they were showing Man in the High Castle or Transparent, and that one had to make us look at Jeffrey Tambor. And it's hard to watch Horn without thinking of the many better Jack Benny jokes about it, but it's pretty clear that Benny just didn't work as a generic variety star out of his own element, even in a self-deprecating naive/dim role.

Y'know, I'd actually started to have forgotten about Korean cellphones...

Also, showing it twice a week, on Wed-Thurs ("Tune in tomorrow...") might have been a burnout, as ABC later found out with "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" And actually the first season was relatively balanced for "straight" comic-book action and humor--In the second season, it's played almost completely for humor, and the third season jumped the shark when producer William Dozier pushed B&R aside and tried to turn it into the "Batgirl" spinoff the network wouldn't let him do. And yes, Cesar Romero's all-in performance as the Joker--straight-on even within the "tongue-in-cheek" context--is the best reason for watching the first two seasons, even if Julie Newmar's Catwoman became too consciously comic in the second. And even Gorshin's fun to watch if you go in knowing he's doing his nightclub Richard Widmark impression. (Always wondered why everyone always makes the big goofy pop-culture yoks over having "three different" Catwomen in the series and movie, when--thanks to production schedules and actor difficulties--we also had three Mr. Freezes and two Riddlers.)

Er, rather than curse the darkness, could we just light a candle and maybe grasp the concept that Space Jam was insufferably unfunny, whether or not you'd ever seen any of the real cartoons before it? 😄

Never mind that it's from the director of the Jim Carrey "Grinch", it's from the screenwriter of Sony's "Peter Rabbit". Speaking of those who consider animation a "Genre" that was invented by Jeffrey Katzenberg...

I'll warn you ahead of time not to let the thread derail into a "What Everyone Always Gets Wrong About Snagglepuss" defense of Butler's perfect Lahr imitation--Which was much less subtle when Snag used to be the villain-foil on Quick-Draw McGraw's cartoons (oh, and he wasn't pink back then, if you're going to do those jokes). And I'd DO it, too. 😈 But since Lahr was still around doing potato-chip commercials in the 50's and 60's, it was easy for Butler not only to get the cowardly-lion voice, but also nail Lahr's obnoxious rapid-fire burlesque-bully rhythms for piling joke upon joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5WKJZLGgHk The one quickest way to spot a new-generation Poseur is what fans call "Cameo-mania"--If new cartoons have to show a group of core Looney characters, they always HAVE to, for no apparent earthly reason, include the one-shots from the memorable cult-fan Jones classics: Michigan J. Frog, The Crusher, Nasty Canasta, the bull from "Bully for Bugs", the opera singer Giovanni Jones from "Long Haired Hare", the hillbillies from "Hillbilly Hare", etc. Characters that even the cartoonists themselves never intended to be "classic" characters, but they're classic to the people who remember them! Orrrr, just want to show off that they do. And just count off the 80 Days-like cameo-mania we get in Space Jam, in their over-displayed attempt to convince us they're fellow fans....Yyyeah. Takes more than quoting a Pete Puma line to get in the club.

All I remember from the soundtrack are Elmer and Tweety singing the jingles from the many, many tie-in Sprint cellphone-service commercials: "I bewieve I can call..." 😓 I could say paragraphs, but think this says it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJKnnThTfNY 👍 Remember those aforementioned fans who like to show off how many references they THINK they know from childhood cartoons--always having Bugs say "Ain't I a stinker?", and have signs pop up saying "Silly, isn't it?"--and treat famous one-shot characters as if they were A-list Looneys, but don't really seem to understand anything about the classic WB style? This movie was not only written for them, it was written BY them. 😡 (Back when Warner first put the classic Looneys on Blu-ray, they thought, as usual, that there weren't enough core fans to buy them, and tried appealing to the mainstream poseur by including entire "Complete" collections of the characters they thought fans would remember: Marvin the Martian, Taz, Witch Hazel, Marc Anthony & Pussyfoot, etc. Yes, forget dignity, if Warner can't sell to the people who care, they'll darn well sell to the people who DON'T.) Even with the whole new animator style that literally doesn't know whether it's homaging or backhandedly mocking the "legacy" that they work for at their respective studios, there's a lot of open CONTEMPT being shown for Mickey in these new shorts: Yes, "Donald was funnier", and yes, nobody got to watch Mickey shorts growing up because Disney kept hiding them away, but when you have the marketing practically ignoring Mickey making any shorts since the Steamboat Willie days, somebody's got issues. And for TCM fans, it's particularly galling that the Disney Parks are replacing WDW's Great Movie Ride with a ride based on these new ugly shorts. We gotta talk.

Just wait till you get to the color (and, sadly, last Diana Rigg) Season 5, in '67--Which, among other things, involves trying to get the racing theme from "Dead Man's Treasure" out of your head: Although have to admit, the B/W Steed & Peel episodes have more of a "spy-show" feel to them, with more complex plots. And although Tara King in S6 wasn't bad, even Patrick Macnee admitted the '68 season jumped the shark bringing in the Ministry HQ and "Mother". BION, I also made the mistake of starting first-time Who-curiosity with the disjointed piecemeal episodes of "Lost in Time", just because it was the most available disk on Netflix at the time--All I knew of the Doctor was the strange low-budget channel-click pieces of Tom Baker I'd seen on PBS stations (with the Howard daSilva recaps, since I somehow never managed to tune into a Part 1 from the beginning), and it wasn't until DVD that I could start with the Tom Bakers and Patrick Troughtons. But I liked what bits of William Hartnell I saw, and dug deeper. (In fact, I'd started with David McCallum and Joanna Lumley in baldfaced Who-knockoff "Sapphire & Steel" on disk first, halfway realized, "Oh, this is what Doctor Who looks like!", and decided to look up the real episodes.) For those with streaming, PlutoTV has now added a streaming-broadcast channel of 24/7 Doctor Who:Classic episodes in their arc entirety, assuming you have any luck tuning into a Part 1 there, either. Otherwise, it was the Tom Baker one-two punch of "Robots of Death" and "Talons of Weng-Chiang" on DVD that made me a fan for life.

Instead of the "Terrible Joe Moran" (1984) TV-movie he got afterwards, after TV-movie producers found out he was still alive: (Although probably not having to walk as much, and sit out his "Ragtime" role might have had something to do with it. Also, Rich Little was reportedly needed to fill in a little of the post-dubbing, as he did when Gene Kelly's voice was starting to give out on a few TV specials.)

...Y'know, some days, you just wake up and ask "Qgar gappened?? 😖 " The book was considered "unfilmable", with Doctorow's non-linear story, and Milos Forman, after Cuckoo's Nest, was seen as the only go-to director who could translate "impossible" story projects like "Hair" and "Amadeus". Unfortunately getting Forman also meant getting Elizabeth McGovern as the female lead, so there's always that trade-off. (And yes, most of the publicity was over Cagney's five-minute return from retirement, and if, like Marlon Brando in "Superman", there was more of him in the movie that was cut out, I welcome any deleted scenes.) Nowadays, it's just remembered as part of 1981's Most Depressing Christmas Ever, with "Reds", "Ghost Story", "Whose Life Is It, Anyway?" and "Pennies From Heaven".

It's the same reason characters from late 50's-early 60's cartoon characters were drawn with big, black outer lines: So they'd contrast more easily on B/W film.

The Doctor also came out within a short space of Regarding Henry (1991), with Harrison Ford as a high-powered executive who recovers from a brain injury with a new post-amnesiac innocence and thinks, "Gee, I was that?", and Doc Hollywood (1991), where rich-obnoxious Lightning McQueen Michael J. Fox strands his car in Radiator Springs a small town, and has to settle in for a few weeks of quirky, charming small-town community service, that'll show 'im. At that point, audiences and critics lumped all three movies together into an annoying "trend" of wishful fantasies of Punishing the Bad People--near the end of the Reagan/GHWBush era and with 90's Clinton populism on the rise--and were seen as modern-day early-40's "You Can't Take It With You" Capra-corn, only with more preaching and less Jimmy Stewart/Bing Crosby. (And whew, I kept reading these two pages of William Hurt/Jane Eyre thread-drift--including the entire B.O. chart for 1991--and thinking "Zefirelli directed 'The Doctor'?? I knew he did 'The Champ' and 'Endless Love', but I didn't know he was THAT corny away from Shakespeare and opera!" 😄 )

Think you're referring to "the Chuck Jones take": We still get that from the new cartoon-lore-showoff fourth-grade-retentive cable animators, except that even that's now pumped up to staccato "whip" movements with funny sound FX, because Fast is Funny. (Especially if you're ADHD, got into the cartoon business straight out of high school, and want to show off to the world everything you thought was funny at ten.) Yes, we've got a lot of 'Boomer animators showing off how much of classic Chuck Jones they remember, but what they don't have is a sense of how Chuck could wring out sympathy for both Bugs or the villain, by drawing the gag out and leaving long enough time for expression, apprehension, embarrassment, chagrin, or even Daffy's frustration at seeing Elmer fall for one of Bugs' disguises. (We see almost every animator fanboy-homage Wile E. Coyote pulling out his "Stop, in the name of humanity!" sign before being mowed down by a bus, but it doesn't have what Chuck put into it--They seem to think the bus is funnier.) One of my all-time favorite Jones gags, that had me laughing in tears as a kid, was from Knight-Mare Hare (1955)--Where Connecticut-yankee Bugs, back in King Arthur time, puts out a dragon's fire with a seltzer bottle, and the dragon, after an understandably worried beat pause and Chuck-take, tests to see whether his pilot-light's gone out. Even without dialogue, the poor dragon's expression says it all: We had sympathy for Bugs because one bit of smart revenge is worth a thousand dynamite-sticks.

Darn, you had to go ahead and post that, while I was checking for a YT clip from the Bugs Bunny Superstar (1976) doc. ☹️ Short subjects were considered necessary "throwaway" filler, enough to get one building on the lot, but not lavished a great deal of money on by the studio. And that hints at THE big problem, at why the new Bugs and the new Mickey, etc., and even Warner's any-minute-now attempt to bring back Tom & Jerry, aren't in the style of the old ones: The entire industry for creating Selected Short Subjects to be shown in a theater to any audience (I remember seeing early-70's Pink Panther shorts before a UA movie, as a kid!) isn't there anymore, and now replaced by the entire "pop-culture gentrification" of Boomer-fan Classic Cartoon Worship by experienced experts--Cartoons are no longer made for unsuspecting mass fans or mass-market Saturday-morning TV, they're made for insular cable cults, by animators who want to nudge other animators about what great cartoon Boomer lore they can homage, while relishing a lifestyle where they can "do what they dreamed of doing when they were ten"...And craft the gags accordingly. The audience has been written out of the equation, so they go back and watch what WAS intended for an audience: The old classics.

Thing is, ever since Robert Zemeckis's shrieking, hyperactive, Tex Avery-centric idea of cartoons in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?", that started the whole 'Boomer "Cartoon renaissance" of the late 80's and early 90's, there's been this backhanded idea that even the Chuck Jones cartoons were frenetic, hyperkinetic, and just blindingly plotless collections of Bugs dropping anvils on Elmer and handing him dynamite sticks in popcorn boxes. ("Get it while it's hot, get it while it's buttered!") There's no appreciation for the way Jones would time a cartoon, with just the right pauses and "help!" takes from the characters, that gave us the comically sympathetic smart-people-win sense that Jones' Bugs was a good rabbit pushed too far...And then, of course you know, that meant war. Just like Disney's recent Mickey Mouse cartoons have turned into an ugly backhanded kitsch of what animators imagine the Steamboat Willie-era toons to have been, now Warner's animators seem to be jumping on some "retro" Wild Hare-era 1940 image of yellow-gloved Bugs and tomato-nosed Elmer. The recent generation of animators literally don't seem to know whether they're paying tribute to the characters, or their childhood, or backhandedly snubbing either one, because the legacy embarrasses "their" profession.

With every other S1-2 character in S3 now either crazy, catatonic, AARP or dead, there seems to be MORE attention devoted to lovable snark-meister Albert (as he has to run out of his car in the rain shouting "F*** Gene Kelly!")--And you start to wonder how much of that snark throughout the S3 series is Albert's, and how much of that is Lynch's, now that fatigue may be setting in.

That's probably because Warner LITERALLY believes an entire generation "doesn't remember the Looneys" except for the presumed 90's-nostalgia of Space Jam. (Of which any true Bugs/Chuck Jones fan believes should have every print thrown into a wood-chipper, and the pieces fed to rabid wolves. 😡 ) Warner, you see, doesn't get back on the horse easily after a bad retail-disk experience--They tried releasing the Looney Golden Collections on Blu-ray, but when audiences didn't buy the Complete Sniffles/Hubie & Bert Collection on Blu (yes), Warner's non-Archive retail-video department curled up into a fetal position in the corner, rocked back and forth, and wailed incoherently something about audiences "not liking Bugs Bunny anymore". After a while, they did what Warner usually does in the wake of handling rejection, and tried to pitch the brand to the Target-Mart mainstream, with "Best-of" kiddy disks, streaming collections, and obnoxious new cartoons on Cartoon Network. But Warner's feeling the Crunch now--where they have to find the New Warner Brand, with no more Harry Potter or Batman--and they're slowly, grudgingly, starting to make peace with all those Looney and Hanna-Barbera cartoons they were so mean to back in the 00's. ...Oh, and they want to do one more Space Jam.

Orson Welles similarly shot most of "F for Fake" as a "prank-umentary" to Artistically illustrate his point, and all it left me thinking was, "Oh, thank you...So WTH did I just WATCH for two hours?? 😡 " Not a prank, but Hitchcock took hell from the critics for doing something similar in "Stage Fright", when [I'll repost it when someone reminds me how to do Spoilers on the new format] thus pretty much meaning the entire story was on an entirely MUC basis from the very beginning. Like Joaquin Phoenix's "I'm Not Here" prank-umentary, you don't do that intentionally unless you're Trolling, and...Trolling is SO 90's. Now we have Moderators to plonk them off the face of the earth.

Again, while I prefer library rental to Digital except in emergencies, Vudu VOD is probably one of the greatest cultural treasure-troves of obscure 60's-90's Disney movies, from back when they tried to put the entire collection on disk-- https://www.vudu.com/content/movies/details/Bon-Voyage-/37014 https://www.vudu.com/content/movies/details/The-Ugly-Dachshund/40008 (I'm assuming most folks by now have some form of set-top streaming?)

And I pity any recent high school student whose Lit teacher thought showing them the more recent Leo DiCaprio R&J would be more "current". Zefirelli aced almost every single Shakespeare he touched, even when Kenneth Branagh later stumbled--Taming of the Shrew "gets" the play so perfectly, it'll shut up any feminist who complains about Kate's ending speech, and his Hamlet (1990) had the wild but brilliant idea of getting Mel Gibson for the role: Yes, Mel's not Laurence Olivier, but he is barking-mad and violently impetuous, and that's who the character is when he's not gazing at skulls. (Always held it against Zefirelli for giving up more Shakespeare in the 80's to do his opera-production films, but--now that his La Traviata (1982) and Otello (1986) are floating around the Streaming Orphans--they're worth an opulent look too.)

Lynch definitely came back for the S2 opener, and the Black Lodge cliffhanger, now that his new fetish was for the hysterical Screaming Meemies, that he was playing with in Wild At Heart--The S2 finale (not counting the bit stuck on from the end of the "Beauty contest" arc) is much more in keeping with the Lynch-approved cable S3 series than anything preceding it for the entire season. And, of course, the "wacky" FBI Chief Cole (WHAT? I LOVE NAT KING COLE, ESPECIALLY THE WAY HE SANG "CHANCES ARE"!), where he could let off his fatigue with the series as the Lynch's-version-of-comedy got goofier. (Anyone keep seeing Our Beloved President whenever Lynch keeps playing Cole on the S3 series?: "What? 'Fake booze'?...No, we've got Jack Daniels, the real stuff!") 😁 Getting off of Twin Peaks, I'll always associate Lynch with one bit of improvisation from the old UK version of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?":

The Miniseries wasn't bad--This was when Sci-Fi Channel was Sci-Fi, not SyFy, and more in the spirit of one of those big-budget Robert Halmi classics miniseries, and not one of the goofy ones, either. While it's '00-era CGI, the budget concentrates on sticking to Herbert's book, doesn't surrealistically indulge itself as much as Lynch on the Harkonnen's designs, and plays more to what would be a Game of Thrones audience today, with more time to explore the story without all of Lynch's danged expository internal whispering. (i wonder if he knows they followed up with a TV version of "Children/God Emperor of Dune"...)

"Infamy, infamy!...They've all got it in-for-me!"

That explains a lot of the post-Laura S2, with or without the new directors. You can usually tell (ahemgroeningsimpsons) when the original creator has lost interest and left his creation, and it's now in the hands of a lot of new talent showing off their own guesses based on its Famous Pop-Cultural Image marketing.