EricJ

I remember seeing it at our local shopping-mall matinee as a kid, back when Conway and Knotts were trying to get away from 70's-Disney and do their own indie B-comedies, most of which fell out of major release and ended up on the ethereal wilds of 80's-afternoon-HBO..."The Prize Fighter" has its amusing moments, but never hit the pure percentage of hits that "The Private Eyes" did. Not sure if it's on the current disks, but saw it on DVD with Tim Conway commentary (yes, he claims he still gets kids asking about Wookelars), where he told the story of the low-budget production having to carpool out to the Biltmore estate--It was the hottest day in August, and Don Knotts was showing the strain of having to film scenes in his Sherlock trenchcoat. Finally, Knotts stormed off the set, claiming he was going to go back to the hotel room, and...Conway did a hilariously dead-on Barney Fife imitation as he described Knotts coming back to the set five minutes later saying, "Say, Tim, you, uh...(sniff!)...wouldn't happen to have the KEYS, wouldja?"

If you have to light up to get a fun showing out of Rocky Horror, you're just not in on the joke--As the guy said in "Fame", this (audience) IS the show, and if you don't like it, go see it in Jersey. (One could easily say that about the Stooges as well. But if you were seeing midnight Stooge-fests in the 70's, I'm guessing it was the same Public Domain Five, with four of them Shemp shorts...Would I be right in guessing a big General Cinemas theater?)

In other words, everything looks different and more entertaining when you're brain-damaged...Well, it would certainly be hard to argue that point. But, let's break down the basic classic Hyper-Defensive arguments here: 1) We've got the never-fail Stoner's Whataboutism ("What about all that drinking Ray Milland did in Lost Weekend, that was legal!"): 2) "It's POPULAR, isn't it? It's been around since the 20's!" 3) "It'll be okay, once everybody starts turning it into a billion-dollar business!" 4) And the classic High-school-virgin Abstract-Philosophical "What is 'right' and what is 'wrong'?...Isn't it all relative?" attempt to move the fault off of themselves. 5)...(wait, what, no kitschy 1936 piano-playing clip from Reefer Madness to straw-man all "unreasonable" arguments against it? C'mon, you're breaking tradition, here! ) Let's face brass-facts: You were giggling like an aging high-schooler, at a movie you chose not to understand, for reasons that an underachieving high-schooler wouldn't. That's not often a smart idea in our complex world, where most of us have graduated by now and been through college...Except, of course, for the ones who weren't. There's enough NATURAL stupidity and passive-uncuriosity causing problems in the world already, do we need to create more of it through artificial means? Do smart people need to be made stupid because they think too much? (Reportedly, that's why JK Rowling's five two Fantastic Beasts movies decided to refer to American non-wizards as "NoMags", rather than the more familiar British title. Although they claimed the M-word was also a racial slur in some parts of the States.)

I remember when we cringed a year later seeing the trailers to "The Sixth Sense", thinking "Bruce Willis and a creepy-silent kid, again?" One of the reasons for Sixth's box office smash in '99 was our collective astonishment that it wasn't the Mercury Rising II we were afraid it was going to be going in.

To paraphrase the MST3K-ism, as much as William Castle was the 50's, he just wasn't the 60's: Castle seemed to retire to comedies in the 60's after his horror-film days, with the Tom Poston The Old Dark House (1963) and the Sid Caesar The Spirit Is Willing (1967), which both played themselves to cutesy "macabre" 60's-sitcom gags. But Zotz still had one of Castle's more amusing cameos: And yes, it is nice to see Margaret Dumont was still around doing comedy in her 80's (yes, she did "get" the Marx Bros. jokes, and you can see her crack up numerous times in "Animal Crackers"). After being curious for years, I finally tracked down Castle's last film, Shanks (1974), with Marcel Marceau, on Amazon Video a few weeks ago, and discovered that, yes, even that was another one of his near-retirement comedies. And not even a decent theater gimmick.

Critically however...it's pretty awful. Apart from the "We bad, we bad" scene--and no, I don't know why that in particular became such a cultural phenomenon in 1980, unless it was mainstream audiences who were taking notice of Richard Pryor for the first time since "Silver Streak"--it's punishingly unfunny, and the main "prison rodeo" plot (the original title of the movie) seems to go on forever. However, to its credit, if it hadn't been for Stir's box-office, Columbia would never have made Pryor an A-list star and given '82's "Live on the Sunset Strip" its major-release due. Poitier eventually went back to acting in the 90's, with "Hunt to Kill" and "Sneakers", followed by more TV-movies, but those expecting a new voice in black directors after the 70's Bill Cosby comedies were in for a disappointment.

Unfortunately, Poitier's later directorial efforts after the 70's--"Stir Crazy" (1980), "Hanky Panky" (1982), "Fast Forward" (1985) and "Ghost Dad" (1990)--never quite lived up to the promise of Poitier as a groundbreaking social image-shattering director.

Now, if you try watching it sober, you can appreciate Orson Welles's dreamlike David Lynch imitation, trying to recreate a nighttime REM style in the idea that Kafka's allegories could only take place "in a dream". And then the B/W opening with the agent bursting into Tony Perkins' bedroom, and never quite answering his questions, can freak you out. Marijuana encourages passivity, and the idea of giggling at something without having to think too hard about it...And thinking about it is EXACTLY what classic film challenges you to do. Come to think about it, that's exactly what adulthood asks you to do. Without it, there's the passive-bystander aspect of "Huhuh, sucks to be Josef K, dood..."--the same way a child lets the dumb grownups take care of all the "boring stuff" that he doesn't have to--and the general approach to interaction with our complex world that that encourages. Under the right altered circumstances, the Weather Channel could be a giggling hoot, but that's no fault or credit to the show itself.

At its best, In Living Color, Homey included (Homey basically being a "clown" of ghetto-thug self-loathing), was a biting satire on black self-images--One sketch had a prisoner behind bars spouting four and five-syllable verbal-mast*rbations of Lewis Farrakhan prison-converted black-Muslim paranoia ("The delineation of the perpetuation of the subjugation of the black man...") and we see it's a PSA: "Because a mind is a terrible thing to waste." The show could have been in the spirit of the old observation about Jewish humor--that a minority can make jokes at its own expense, even if the outside can't for fear of "racism"--but in the end, it's Booty humor that gets the louder and "easier" laughs. Sort of why SNL was funnier before Kenan Thompson became the lead performer, or why the Daily Show was funnier with Jon Stewart than Trevor Noah.

An early 80's generation can't recall a single line from either of the Apple Dumpling Gang movies, but can discuss the habits of Wookelars at length. Don't say Conway never found immortality in feature films. (Er, yes, we did wonder what took you so long...) 😓 And I already jumped the gun and posted his German-interrogator sketch with Lyle Waggoner over on the TCM Memorials thread...Didn't realize there'd be a GD thread. (The whole sketch ran about ten minutes, but it's the three minutes of Tim with his Hitler hand-puppet that became TV history.) In all the YouTube clips of Tim Conway's Emmy speeches, I'm trying to find the one where he shows how much support he had for the award by reading a letter from his hometown to the Emmy audience: "Best of luck on your award, Tim, from your friends at Gary's Miniature Golf....Hey! Fun for the whole family! Bring the kids to Gary's Miniature Golf! Family night every Tuesday, kids under 12 admitted half price! Coming soon, look for our Mark Twain hole, with a rotating paddlewheel, and music of the old South!" And so on, for three minutes.

It was pretty much that way in the early 60's, when the 50's-TV "Amos & Andy" had to be expunged from broadcast, because nobody who was too young to remember the radio show knew why the characters were talking that way, and just assumed they were stereotypically "forced to" by evil white producers. Anyone who still uses the term today as a symbol for all imagined "outdated black depictions" has likely never seen the show in the last fifty years either. And let's not even get STARTED on the facepalming social-soapbox attempt to use the TV Jack Benny's Rochester calling Mr. Benny "Boss" as a coverall symbol of every attempt to ever cast a black actor in the role of a subordinate domestic. Anyone accusing Jack Benny of a "racist" depiction of Eddie Anderson has never seen or heard very much of Jack Benny's material, or of Benny's experiences during his WWII tours. I remember one comedy talk show during the 90's having a round-table discussion with the producers and stars of UPN Network (remember that? ), by the time the network had become almost entirely dopey urban-black sitcoms, asking "Why 'Homeboys from Outer Space'?...Is this forwarding the cause of diverse television??" In their defense, the comics and producers naturally leapt to old-fashioned Whatabout-ism, responding "Well, what about those Jim Carrey comedies?...You're saying white people don't make dopey comedy too?" (Ignoring the rather obvious fact of on whose show Jim Carrey had first risen to stardom as Token Dorky White Comic.)

I am. It happens to be my childhood favorite movie of all time, thank you. 😡

And not just Harvey, either-- Some say the funniest moment on the Carol Burnett Show was Carol coming out in her Gone with the Wind "curtain" dress...But they're wrong. The funniest moment on the Carol Burnett Show was German interrogator Conway ruthlessly (and improvisationally) breaking up Lyle Waggoner:

Er, technically, Birth's biggest crime is that it's not an overstatement to say that it was literally Griffith's recruitment film for the K-K-K. The local Kl*n at the time even treated it as such, and sponsored a big opening expecting membership to soar. (When Woodrow Wilson made his famous endorsement of it, he wasn't exactly disagreeing, something we historically recognize about Wilson today.) When we get our hero and his White Riders charging to the rescue to "Ride of the Valkyries" to save our virtuous white heroine from nasty race-mixed congressmen, I've seen Trump ads that were more subtle.

With the exception of Neil Diamond, Elton John, Michael Jackson, and Billy Joel in that Disney movie:

Unlike Spacey's Bobby Darin, however, I doubt Zelwegger is about to go on a one-woman live Judy stage tour, so that's still in favor of Spacey keeping the crown.

Don't give up hope! "Neck" was basically the clean radio/movie term you could substitute for other humorous colloquial body parts you couldn't mention....Eg. "A horse's neck", "If this goes wrong, it's gonna be my neck!"

At this point, the only thing STOPPING SotS on DVD--apart from Disney still in Warner "Digital-vs-Physical" mode from the 10's, vainly trying to pretend "disks are dying" to get their DRM service started--is Bob Iger. Who still thinks Remus was a "slave", and now dismisses the "fanboys" nagging him about it at every stockholder meeting. (The last time it was "buried", in '96, Sidney Poitier was still on the Disney board, and Maya Angelou was palling around with the Clintons.) Cutting the Crows out of Dumbo (just the remake for now, BUT...) and the Siamese cats out of the upcoming direct-to-streaming Lady/Tramp remake (yes 😓) isn't a helpful current sign--But up to now, back during the big "Disney Archive" push in the 00's for classic rarities on disk, there was widespread studio support for just getting it out there like a passed kidney stone, and Iger's announced retirement became a fan "deathwatch" to get over the one main obstacle, before he kept pushing the dates back. At this point, the fan mentality seems to be "Sure, give him a $100M, give him a hundred billion, just get rid of him!!"

Since it wasn't Viva Las Vegas (1964), with red-hot firecracker Ann-Margret, and arguably Elvis's best movie song, no. And Elvis was reportedly originally up for Kris Kristofferson's role in the '77 "A Star is Born", but both management and the studio thought Elvis & Barbara Streisand would be a battlefield--There is only ONE star in an Elvis pic, they argued, and you don't put him in supporting roles.

Clint Eastwood's immortal auteur tribute to Hal Needham.

Like the scene from Alien Nation (1988), where cop James Caan discovers that crotch-kicks don't work on aliens, and alien partner Mandy Patinkin advises him, "I believe the effect you were trying to achieve would be here, under the armpit."

Although Hailey's book was more about "Behind the scenes crisis-expose'!" at an airport--like he did for "Hotel"--with a plane disaster attached. What we think of as "the 70's Disaster Movie" didn't really start until "The Poseidon Adventure" two years later, which also had a good Paul Gallico book behind it. Ah, the days when bestsellers could Soon Become Major Motion Pictures.

Speaking as one who watched it on Saturday morning (during Filmation's Shazam/Isis spate of live-action Saturday-morning series, in the days before He-Man)...yes. From here, you can go on to Jonathan Harris hamming it up in "Space Academy", but I don't promise any improvement.

Fear Strikes Out (1957) - 👎 With the weather turning warmer, May is the usual season for me to try and get motivated by digging out good sports movies (still have "The Natural" and "Eight Men Out" that have spent the entire winter on my New Unwatched Blu-ray pile). Hadn't recognized this baseball title at the library, so took a look--More in the then new "Athlete hospitalization-comeback" genre, with Anthony Perkins in the role of Red Sox outfielder Jimmy Piersall's autobiography, whose dad had obsessively groomed him for the big leagues since childhood, leaving him with crippling anxiety issues, leading to a breakdown on the field, and a long recovery. Unfortunately, as psychology was still a "shocking" topic for 50's films, it's all played at a melodramatic level, on top of the "it wasn't my fault!" self-defense of survivor autobiographies: Karl Malden, as the domineering dad, basically gives a one-note performance for ninety minutes, as he's called upon to do nothing but play a sort of male version of Mama Rose, all but singing "Have a goldstone, Mr. Eggroll" to the big-league baseball scouts. Perkins, of course, plays his usual traumatized, stammering screen character, three years before Norman Bates (not that there's anything, y'know...s-strange about that, I mean, lots of people have nervous moments now and then, it's sort of...natural, don't you think?), but through the miracle of creative editing, we don't see much of his skill on the baseball field--He's usually just finishing up practice or coming back off the field, so we don't get to see whether Perkins could make the turn on the double play. As a result, we don't really get the sense of what made Piersall a big prospect with 50's sports fans, and until the end of the movie, where he finally fits the uniform, poor twitchy, vulnerable Tony looks like he'd be freaked out by a pop fly.

...Can you be more specific?