EricJ

Actually, Disney Broadway originally envisioned the Tarzan musical as a Cirque du Soleil-style aerial show for a round arena, much like the Vegas Cirque shows--It reportedly played in arena theaters overseas, and did better in its original conception. On Broadway, however, they were stuck with the conventions of square stages, which meant the focus had to be back on the book and musical...Which only brought it up against that Dumbo-remake and Little Mermaid-musical problem of "Why did they even MAKE this??"

Chicago on stage in the 70s' was Kander & Ebb trying to follow their own "symbolic musical-number" lead from Cabaret, and it was only the '02 movie that came up with the idea of putting the numbers in the character's imaginations. Cabaret's movie could get away with such abstract touches in the 70's, but in '02, we'd had sixteen years of an entire pre-Millennial generation saying "Musicals? But, like, why would anybody break into song, that's weird!" Dennis Potter is a snarky British deconstructionist--I slogged through "Dreamchild" in the theaters, but still haven't gotten around to the Robert Downey Jr. version of "The Singing Detective"--so, in the 70's, the idea that audiences would (gasp!) bury their heads in the sand and try to find escapism from the doom and fatalism of the Depression by going to see Fred Astaire was something "unforgivable" enough to Bitterly Satirize in the BBC series. It came with the territory, but since musical movies were starting to wind down by the 80's, and we were looking for anything new (we had just as high hopes for "Annie" and "Yentl" the next year), the studio promoted the big-budget musical numbers as if it was a glorious "At Long Last Love" tribute to the great Fred & Ginger days. Bait-and-switch?...Oh, a TAD. Some got on board with the "Song lyrics trying to hide 30's nastiness" idea--mostly thanks to Christopher Walken turning out to be a better hoofer than we expected--but for the majority of the audience, to say that their response to being called "idiots" for trying to escape the nasty-people-doing-horrible-things tragedy by enjoying the old-school Herbert Ross-homaged musical numbers was "**** you, we're trying to get some entertainment out of our ticket! 😡 " was putting it mildly.

Actually, the whole "Down with RottenTomatoes" and "Critics are out of touch!"--synchronizing suspiciously with the same Summer of '16 that gave us the Trump-supporter rallies--were from the angry, eternally disgruntled DC Comics fans setting out to "prove" that "their time" had finally come, against "those stuck-up Marvel fans!", and their "tongue-in-cheek feel-good superhero movies for lil' PG-13 babies who can't take it R-rated and dark!", if only Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice would become the runaway box-office blockbuster of the year. (It had to!--It must! Otherwise, they'd never get those Justice League and Wonder Woman movies! Bite the bullet and take one for the team!) And when it didn't...and kept on not becoming it...the more the fans tried to find unity in being "persecuted". And, taking a note from certain other "persecuted" fans with an over-personalized issue, how do you find unity? By saying that the world is Against You...You just can't trust that FAKE PRESS!! After there was a (ahem) general consensus among the rest of the public that BvS's problems were thoroughly their own, the diehard DC Comics fans--like moving from the Wall to the Supreme Court--tried to rally their new issue around whether, okay, maybe Suicide Squad, and its different tone, would be Warner/DC's big moment. And when it wasn't either...that PROVED RottenTomatoes was Out to Get Them!

The Jerk is too "early" Steve Martin, from his flailing Wild & Crazy 70's. After playing deadpan in "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid", he cemented more of his classic style in The Man With Two Brains (1983). Would've put that or "Plaid" on my list, but I was looking through my DVD's, and there was Benigni and Fields.

I found myself thinking of the Spiderman musical too (or at least why the book-based Lord of the Rings musical played overseas and Canada but will never play Broadway), in that they had a wild staging idea, but needed music to make it an actual musical. What little we hear of the music here doesn't sound too bad, I'm just thinking this still seems like a studio-pushed musical: Who's got the merchandising rights for the original 30's Kong at the moment, Warner or Universal?

I'm...not sure what this has to do at ALL with Classic Movie Taglines, but I'll turn it into one: Power-hungry producers are so determined to show that Their Mega-Deal finally hit the screen, they don't think of it as a movie, they think of it as a product. As a result, the marketing no longer has a tagline that cajoles you with what the movie is about (eg. "Bill's having a bad day--He's lost his girlfriend and his cellphone, he's being chased by spies, and he's expected to save the world. And he just ran out of coffee."), but instead sells a product/brandname-advertising tagline three or four words long, that they can "blast" at the audience in the trailer--And usually one that has no idea what the movie is about to begin with, but makes a clever word-play on the title, since that's what they're selling: "Gone With the Wind: IT'S. GONNA. BLOW." Or, if the appeal is a TV-series or remake property the audience already knows, sell the recognition as what the viewer is paying for: "Gone With the Wind: GIVE A DAMN." As for classic movie tagline, there are so many to choose from, but for me, for some reason, the one that instinctively springs to mind is The Sting (1973): "All it takes is a little confidence."

Yes, we've noticed a lot of MST3K episodes being published as just "regular" reviews, with a few fan jokes attached, and wondered whether that might be the case. The MST3K version had a better theme song, too:

I don't know how we do SPOILERS on this, so I'll use the old White-Out method (highlight to reveal): Saw it on DVD, and the "classic ending" was where Segal grabs some random home resident, plants him in front of Ruth Gordon, says "HERE'S Poppa!" and drives off into the sunset. In the "Deleted ending", Momma isn't fooled, calls her son, and now Segal is doomed to a life of having to live with Momma in the nursing home--Ehh, that's not funny. The original was too perfect. ...So, what was the "Berserk" ending?? (And yes, every comedy from the late 60's to the early 70's had to have a gorilla suit in it at some point. It was the What's New Pussycat? Rule.) ---- And now that I've been dragged into the thread, might as well go all in--In no particular order after #1: The Court Jester A Night at the Opera Love and Death Young Frankenstein Monty Python & the Holy Grail The Circus (Chaplin) Never Give a Sucker an Even Break One, Two, Three Hot Shots: Part Deux The Monster (Roberto Benigni, at his least pretentious before "Life is Beautiful")

You saw it on TCM? I saw it in a theater. With an audience. An all-night sci-fi festival. At 2am. 😫 It didn't take us long to figure out that, despite the Crichton name, there was no actual movie here. (Even "Looker" would have been a more entertaining Michael Crichton film to sit through.) There's nothing like a slightly punchy all-night 2am audience scorned to start a nice mutiny--Every time the scene faded out, we cheered "Yayy!", and then "Awww!" when the next scene faded in. When Jill Clayburg goes out on a balcony, we all shouted "Jump, jump! Save yourself!" I literally didn't know he was still around until someone made me watch an episode of "The Goldbergs". Segal's entire acting style just seemed to belong to the early 70's.

The Buddy Holly Story (1978) - 👍 This one had been floating all over the Columbia Orphans on streaming, so my sense of 70's completism had to take a look--There were two big "50's music!" sountrack-biopics coming out in 1978, with the Alan Freed "American Hot Wax" being the other, and they both seem as if they were literally seven or eight years ahead of their time. 50's nostalgia wouldn't catch on until the Reagan 80's, and then we got floods of 50's musician biopics like Lou Diamond Philips in "La Bamba" and Dennis Quaid in "Great Balls of Fire", but this one still had the gritty, low-budget feel of a classic 70's movie, and set most of the ground rules first. Seeing the older, dumpier current Gary Busey in those Amazon Alexa commercials ("Lookit whatcha can do, lookit whatcha can do!")--or playing the goofy comedy-relief Elvis fan in "DC Cab"--it's hard to remember when Busey was just an emerging new breakout Texas-Okie teen actor, but he's still remembered for the Oscar nomination he got for this one. I confess I never really knew much about founding rocker Holly, apart from his being the "nerdy Elvis" that inspired all the later musicians with a rockabilly beat, but Busey does his own singing in the movie, and not only inhabits the small-town-kid-made-good character, but also gives some impression of just why 50's teens went crazy over a skinny Texas kid with glasses. As 50's-music biopics go, there's nothing particularly standout, and it covers the default basics: Shocked conservatives, 50's racism toward "black music" and Latinos, ego and band tensions, big execs not understanding the new style, etc.--As this was first out of the gate, it was all new territory, and had to cover them all by number. The biggest standout Holly is culturally remembered for is the fatal '59 plane crash, but unlike the more 80's-honed "La Bamba" (in which Richie Valens was in the same plane), where the crash is sentimentalized as 'Boomer history, Holly's movie skips it over almost entirely. The movie climaxes on the big final Clearwater, IA concert with Valens and the Big Bopper, and just tacks on a historical footnote before the credits. Now I've got to look up "American Hot Wax", and see the other example of how the late 70's tried to parse classic 50's music in the days just after American Graffiti and Happy Days.

Actually (now that we're well off the original topic), that's because the 1973 version was one of the American Film Theater's production of early to mid-70's movie versions of classic plays: https://www.imdb.com/search/title?companies=co0130370&sort=year,asc Which, along the way, also gave us Maximilian Schell in "The Man in the Glass Booth", Topol in Bertold Brecht's "Galileo", and that weird version of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in "Rhinoceros", proving that Eugene Ionesco is pretty darn unfilmable. They're all interesting from an academic standpoint, but yes, plays need a little judicious editing for screen.

Unfortunately, the superhero movies re-created TOO much of the print-comic experience that most modern grownups hadn't grown up with as a kid. (Y'know, back when we weren't reading comics in the 70's, and didn't pay attention to them again until the late 80's when Batman started getting one headline after another.) When you were a kid, you bought comic books because they were serials; the last issue said "Hang on till next issue, true believers!", and so you waited a month and bought the next issue--Or the crossover issue of some other hero's title, where a little more of the story was being told from some other character's angle. And if it turned out to be some lame "filler" issue, where the big battle doesn't happen until next, and this story was all about the heroes arguing over what's at stake, the villain hinting at his plan, and some minor skirmish with one of the villain subordinates, that was one of the issues you were probably going to sell back to the comic-book store the next time your mom told you to clean out that closet. Disney/Marvel Studios has done a good job of creating the "crossover-universe" that the print comics created, and the same serialized storytelling style of putting Chapter 1 in one hero's movie, Chapter 2 in another's, and stringing you out for Chapter 3, but all that's done is create disposable movies. You don't mind disposing twenty cheap pages of a $1 magazine (or $0.25 when you were a kid), it's a slightly different issue when you have to sit through all 2-1/2 hours of "Avengers 2: Age of Ultron", and realize that nothing actually HAPPENED in it except Important Plot Points were set up for "Captain America: Civil War" in the next issue. Y'know, that big cool issue where we had the big hero-battle showdown, and that was the one you kept. Old studios could grind out Ma & Pa Kettle and Andy Hardy because TV didn't exist yet, and movies stayed at 30's-40's theaters for one week only, so audiences didn't mind getting "disposable" movies, if it was a better experience with the characters than radio. But in this age when every movie now has immortal posterity on disk, it's just an act of pointlessness for a studio like Universal or Paramount to make "The Mummy" or "Transformers 5" for literally no other reason than to tell us to go see the next movie. That's one thing a lot of folks get wrong when they don't grow up reading comic books.

Every celebrity who finds themselves suddenly over-50 and dropped out of the mainstream into personal projects has been going around with the George-Bernard-Shaw beards lately-- Jim Carrey got rid of his, though:

Here, the post was getting long, let me sum it up for you: From the 30's to the 80's, theaters were independently owned and operated (chains were regional at best), theater managers bid for the best movies they thought would bring in the local crowd, and if it didn't, something ELSE would be playing next week--From the silents to Terminator 2, the movie business was about the theater, and what you put in it...You didn't go to a movie, you went to the theater, and looked up to see if anything interesting happened to be conveniently playing there that week. And then we started building 15-20 screen super-plexes, because the very idea that a big awaited movie wouldn't be playing in our own town (or that we might, ack, have to go out of town to see it) galled our very privileged senses, so we created theaters in which EVERY SINGLE movie opened in your local area the week it opened. It wasn't about what was the "best" movie to play at your theater, every single one of them was, and they'd all be there next week unless they flopped. (And then maybe a month after that, because the plex still had to fill space.) It was now no longer about waiting for a traveling show to come to town and make your evening different, it was now about going down to the shopping mall--most plexes were now in shopping malls, or right across the highway from them--in the same trip that you made to pick up a gallon of laundry detergent at Wal-Mart. Even if you did want to be first in line for "Avengers: Endgame", you weren't actually in line anymore, since you could order your tickets over the web, and with five screens at the plex running a total of fifteen shows per day, it probably wouldn't be sold out. Movies became a product, and like every product sold on the shelves, they had logos and commercial jingles. In the 80's, Ghostbusters opened "wide" on 1500 screens, the '16 remake opened wide on 3500-4000. That almost tripled the likelihood that every single person in the country was going to see it in one weekend (yeah, I know, the remake, but just for the sake of argument), and a movie that would thirty years ago last two months in theaters would now burn itself out in two weeks. Translate that to EVERY big-studio blockbuster, and you now have an industry that pitches their movies for one big "event" weekend only--we're not even persuaded to go on Monday or Wednesday anymore--and only seven or eight "big" weekends out of the year, thus requiring only seven or eight big movies, all competing for the weekends in three in-demand months. Compare that to Toys R Us folding because analysts complained the chain "only made money one month out of the year".

Wow, we sure got a lot of mileage out of THIS David Guercio "Wouldn't it be neat if Ben Mankewicz was made of candy and interviewed Mr. Moose and Bunny-Rabbit?--That's be so cool! 😀 " thread... Me, I prefer 80's NBC Dave from before his "Late Shift" feud with Jay, when they both crafted their humor around Found Objects:

Or that Boris Karloff's "Mummy" was better than Tom Cruise's one. (Well....okay, we'll give them that.) And when Eli Roth tries to remake it, Bruce Willis flops on his big fat face.

Er...who-whaa?? 😮 Only "fiasco" I remembered from Hugo was bad marketing that convinced everyone that Martin Scorsese had somehow turned "traitor" to the Mob and was making, quote, "Kiddy" films just like Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis were (so much Zemeckis-hate, combined with Spielberg's "Tintin", had adults literally thinking Scorsese's movie was a "CGI kiddy film"), Oscar voters stayed away, and everyone praised The Artist as "the only [sic] film to pay tribute to the days of silent Hollywood movie-magic". Other than that....NO clue what you're talking about. Unless you're suggesting Scorsese made the movie up himself, and not from an award-winning book.

Prompting Roger Ebert to point out that "the only new thing director Van Sant added to his version was, appropriately enough, a m**********n scene".

That's one reason we've gotten so many remakes of 80's and other classic MGM films lately (Magnificent Seven, Robocop, Total Recall, Overboard, Clash of the Titans, Ben-Hur, and now Child's Play with Mark Hamill as Chucky): The studio is still trying to dig its way back out of bankruptcy(ies), and all they have to work with are titles that either belong to the former studio, or have fallen into a semi-public-domain status after MGM, United Artists, Hemdale and/or Orion folded. New scripts cost money, you know. Except for the Steve Martin "Pink Panther"'s, that was Sony trying to build themselves a house franchise out of the free UA titles they already owned.

Now, y'see, THAT'S a better April Fool's headline--Clint doing another grizzled-senior-citizen western is too believable a scenario, and "Oopsie, he isn't!" tends to get just an "Oh....Okay. 😑 " Internet April Fool's is a very tricky art-form, since it has to be im-plausible enough to get the joke without going dopey-viral as a "real" rumor for the next seven years, while being pointed and plausibly deadpan enough to be satirical--"Disney to do live-action/CGI remake of 'Chicken Little'", for example.

It was Gus Van Sant. He "thought it might be fun" to do a remake. 'Nuff said. 😓 (That, and Universal was getting itchy again to find something to market their "Universal Horror"(tm) brandname again, with the Brendan Fraser "Mummy" coming the next year.) For years, I used to confuse it with the time Universal discovered an alternate storyboard for the Shower scene after Hitchcock's death, and, because DVD deleted-scenes didn't exist yet, didn't know how to turn it into a project...But no, that was eventually used as the flashback/prologue to Psycho II (1983), and that was a better movie.

Fox's "Something's Gotta Give" restoration from the Marilyn DVD set/AMC should still be floating around YouTube if you can find it. (And John McGiver's perfect as the judge at the beginning.) And yes, "Move Over" needed someone as sharp on romantic comedy as Doris Day was, which sweet, ethereal Marilyn simply wasn't by that point.

Sadly, it's more than that: Studios in the 10's have now been persuaded (ahemwarner) into believing that the business is now all about creating Franchises out of past existing identifiable audience hits, as "Brand names". It hasn't worked out, of course--did anyone even see Fox's last Aliens and Predator movies??--but until studios and screenwriters start talking again, that's their story and they're sticking to it. Now, you'd think Disney would be slopping over with recognizable franchises, what with their owning Lucasfilm, Marvel and Pixar (despite the fact that Star Wars and the Avengers' days are already numbered). And yes, but problem is, castle-Disney doesn't have its OWN franchise that they can exploit--All they have are the animated classics, but after all those cheesy direct-video sequels in the 90's, John Lasseter put a ban on the studio doing any animated sequel to a non-current movie (they can do Frozen, Ralph and Zootopia, but not Dumbo II). So what loophole do they use to get around this, and franchise-market their past movies anyway? There's nothing in the fine print that says they can't make LIVE ACTION movies...Except for "Christopher Robin" or "Saving Mr. Banks", which are not so much sequels to the stories, so much as about adults who grew up with the classic Disney characters, and unpreparedly meet them again as grownups who have to get in touch with their inner children again if they want to reconnect with their families. Hint, freakin' hint. Disney's still got more live-action adaptations, but they're starting to realize its losing its box-office draw, and they're saving "Sword in the Stone" and "Lady & the Tramp" for their streaming service. It's only the movies with big bills to pay, like Will Smith in "Aladdin" or all that expensive Jon Favreau CGI in "Lion King", that has to subsidize itself at the theater with $10 tickets. Yes, and Favreau was cast to direct Lion King for pretty much the same reason Disney hoped Tim Burton could do another LAD and hope "Alice" would happen again after nine years...Oo, let's give Tim the circus-y one, you know how he likes clowns!

Gee, "Gordon", since you asked, that would be Theater of Blood (1973), in which Phibes Price gets Shakespearean revenge by way of "Titus Andronicus". Anthony Hopkins was less subtle in Julie Taymor's version of Titus (1999):

Old joke: (Parents in the kitchen on Friday teen-night) "What's with the arguments going on in the TV room? Sounds like a den of iniquity in there!" "Eh, that's just my kid and his friends trying to divide up a couple of pizzas--You're hearing the din of inequity."