Mathilda May does her impression of me halfway through a Blu-ray of an '80s Cannon Films action movie in a scene from the big-budget 1985 Cannon flick Lifeforce.
This is the sixth of 12 or 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017. It has taken me since January 2016 to finish writing this post about Cannon Films. I don't know why. Writer's block can really fuck you up sometimes. This is why I can't wait to leave this blog behind so that Accidental Star Trek Cosplay will become my only ongoing blog. After December, the only writer's block I'll have to worry about will be the block that keeps trying to prevent me from finishing my novel manuscript.
You've seen MacGruber, right? Now imagine if MacGruber wasn't a comedy. That's basically what an '80s Cannon Films action movie is like.
MacGruber is a Cannon movie played completely straight, except for a couple of big things: the profane update of MacGruber's old theme song (a tune from his days as an SNL character) and the intentionally offbeat dialogue that comes out of the mouths of Val Kilmer, Kristen Wiig and Will Forte, who weepingly delivers the least dignified and most sob-filled monologue in action movie history ("Just join my team. I'll suck your dick!"). Everyone else in MacGruber, whether the actor is Ryan Phillippe or the late Powers Boothe, is interestingly directed by Lonely Island troupe member Jorma Taccone to take the proceedings completely seriously, including even Maya Rudolph, aside from her silly sex noises while her dead character's ghost bangs MacGruber in a cemetary.
Phillippe and Boothe react to MacGruber's pantsless moment of desperation in the military office as if this were Michael Clayton or Spotlight instead of an Inspector Clouseau flick (or any other farce where everyone, including the straight man, gives a big and broad performance). Their underplayed seriousness actually increases the hilarity quotient of MacGruber's abnormal behavior.
Taccone's movie is a terrific parody of the schlocky Cannon house style, from the strange one-liners that sound like they were written by a 57-year-old Israeli movie producer ("Shut your butt!") to the ultraviolent heroes who, in real life, would be locked up in an insane asylum for their psychotic behavior (see MacGruber's "KFBR392" scene). If you took the dour and unintentionally funny 1986 Cannon movie Cobra, which I never watched until I rented it on YouTube a week ago, and you turned it into a comedy about how the behavior of matchstick-chewing supercop Marion Cobretti, the only person in the world who cuts pieces off his slices of pizza with a pair of scissors, actually looks to the world outside the narcissistic-at-the-time brain of Cobra star/screenwriter Sylvester Stallone, it would probably resemble MacGruber.
The first Deadpool flick makes a Cobra reference I wasn't aware of until Outlaw Vern pointed it out (it's the scene when Ryan Reynolds quips about the matchstick between Gina Carano's lips and wonders aloud if she's a Stallone fan). Taccone and Deadpool screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick all clearly watched Cannon movies like Cobra when they were kids, just like how I was subjected to a few Cannon cheapies as an '80s kid.
One of those movies was 1987's Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, which was one of Cannon's two attempts to update the then-100-year-old Quatermain novels in the wake of Indiana Jones, and I still remember how dreadful the production values in Lost City of Gold were (it should have been called Lost City of Plastic). Currently streamable on Netflix, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, an Australian-made 2014 documentary directed by Aussie filmmaker Mark Hartley, is the highly entertaining story of why during the '80s and early '90s, a name like Cannon meant it had to be not-so-good. It's hard to dislike any documentary that devotes five minutes to the lambada movie war of 1990.
Cannon was, of course, embroiled in that vicious war over who could first rush into release a movie about a dirty dancing craze from Brazil that was barely sweeping the nation. Nobody won the war between Warner Bros./Cannon's Lambada and Columbia Pictures/21st Century Film Corporation's The Forbidden Dance. The only winners were quippy film critics who got a kick out of tearing apart terrible movies. For five silly minutes, Electric Boogaloo recounts how obsessed Menahem Golan (pronounced "muh-nawk-um go-lawn"), the aforementioned 50-something Israeli movie producer, was with trying to get The Forbidden Dance completed in time for its spring 1990 release date, while Yoram Globus, one of the producers of Lambada, and his collaborators toiled over their rival project. Golan and Globus were not just former business partners who ran Cannon (into the ground). They also happened to be cousins.
The following is a repost of my October 29, 2015 discussion of The Guest. After I published this post, Dan Stevens, the film's star, was cast as the title character on Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley's much-hypedLegion, an X-Men spinoff that will premiere next year on FX, while Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, the duo behind The Guest, made a much-maligned Blair Witch Project sequel that was simply titled Blair Witch. The Guest is now streamable on Netflix.
"Mumblegore" filmmaker Adam Wingard has said the concept for his offbeat 2014 action thriller The Guest arose from watching a double feature of The Terminator and John Carpenter's original Halloween. So what would happen if you got your Terminator in my Halloween and you got your Halloween on my Terminator?
Marrying those two classic thrillers (and borrowing Carpenter's favorite typeface for the opening and closing titles, although Wingard would later regret choosing Albertus due to its sudden ubiquity) then led to the You're Next director and his regular collaborator, screenwriter Simon Barrett, taking additional inspiration from the 1987 cult classic The Stepfather for their story of a small-town waitress (Maika Monroe) who notices something's not quite right about her parents' houseguest, a well-mannered stranger (Dan Stevens) claiming to have served in Afghanistan with her dead soldier brother Caleb. Wingard and Barrett also took some inspiration from the various "seemingly nice stranger insinuates himself or herself into a benign household and gradually turns out to be a psycho" thrillers that followed in The Stepfather's wake, like 1992's The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which turned into the box-office behemoth some Stepfather fans wish the 1987 film had gotten to be.
A heavily-updated-in-2020 version of the following blog post can be found in If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later. The 2020 book was written and self-published by yours truly. Get the paperback edition of If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You now!
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"I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!" is a series of posts that appear sporadically here on the AFOS blog rather than weekly. In each post, I reveal that I never watched a certain popular movie until very recently, and that's largely because I'm Filipino, we're always late to the party and that's how we do.
The 1982 version of Conan the Barbarian--made by John Milius, the director of the TCM staple The Wind and the Lion--is one of several popular '80s movies I just kept missing out on for the oddest reasons. I avoided watching it even when I had the chance to catch it back when my older brother--who was obsessed with D&D and the sword-and-sorcery genre during the years when Arnold Schwarzenegger portrayed the Robert E. Howard character--taped both Conan the Barbarian and its way more family-friendly 1984 sequel off the TV and owned a copy of the first issue of artist John Buscema's two-part 1982 Marvel Comics adaptation of the first movie. His copy of that issue was where I first glimpsed the Milius movie's Wheel of Pain montage and then wondered to myself, "So Conan doesn't get to take any bathroom breaks at all during this shit?"
(Photo source: Marvel Masterworks Resource Page)
Conan the Barbarian, the tale of a former gladiator on a mission to kill the sorcerer who slaughtered his tribe and sent him into child slavery, was R-rated, and my parents rarely allowed me to watch R movies for the first few years of grade school. (Yes, I know Conan the Destroyer was a PG movie, so I could have been able to watch it, but I always skipped it. I still haven't watched it.) So I had to settle for the G-rated Conan, a.k.a. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, that 30-minute commercial for the '80s Mattel toy line that was rumored to have originally been a Conan toy line before Mattel changed it to Masters of the Universe because the company didn't want to be associated with an ultraviolent and brazenly sexual R movie.
Although He-Man gave acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series writer Paul Dini his start in writing for animation, it has not aged well at all as an animated show. But when I was in first grade, He-Man was a decent weekday-afternoon time-waster--it was never a Saturday morning show, by the way, so get your facts straight, HitFix--even though I noticed it would always recycle the same nine or 10 bits of animation like all other cartoons from the Filmation factory used to clumsily do in order to save money.
I lost interest in He-Man after its first two seasons in afternoon syndication and never again formed another attachment to a sword-and-sorcery franchise--until Legend of the Seeker (the hotness of both Bridget Regan and Tabrett Bethell was the main reason why I became interested in that show) and, of course, Game of Thrones came along. So my lack of interest in the sword-and-sorcery genre in the years between He-Man and Legend of the Seeker is mainly to blame for never watching Conan the Barbarian all these years, even though I got myself a copy of the movie's excellent Basil Poledouris score so that I could use "Anvil of Crom" and "Riddle of Steel/Riders of Doom" for radio airplay.
Also, the Milius movie just always came off to me as ponderous and self-important like Man of Steel and--if my skepticism due to the largely dour footage I've seen in its trailers ends up being right--Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Despite those misgivings I had about the Milius movie, I added Conan the Barbarian to my DVD rental queue when I first got a Netflix account because I wanted to see if the movie lived up to its beloved Poledouris score (a score that, by the way, This Is How You Lose Her author Junot Díaz interestingly played repeatedly to keep his creative juices flowing while he worked on his first book). However, the movie was always slipping into "Very long wait" status on Netflix and was always getting pushed aside by other rentals I was much more interested in until one day, it became available to stream. And then like a Cimmerian thief in the night, it was suddenly gone from Netflix streaming. Fortunately, I stopped dilly-dallying and finally made myself watch Conan the Barbarian right before it expired.
You know what? Conan the Barbarian isn't as ponderous as I thought, but it has a certain grandiose style that would be described by younger, fidgetier film critics today as "slow." That "slow" style--contemplative and "devoid of clunky-sounding exposition" would be much better words for it--is actually what elevates Conan the Barbarian and makes it stand out as a sword-and-sorcery flick. It takes its medieval world seriously, but it's never an overly dour slog like Man of Steel. If anybody in the Conan the Barbarian cast is on the dour side, it's often Schwarzenegger, who did Conan the Barbarian way before Hollywood discovered you can work around the limited range of the champion bodybuilder and future California governor by feeding him distinctive and weird-sounding one-liners in movies like the original Terminator, Commando, Predator and Kindergarten Cop.
Schwarzenegger doesn't utter a single wisecrack during Conan the Barbarian, and the only times we get a hint of his future light-comedy skills are a scene where a stoned-out-of-his-mind Conan punches out a camel, a hangover scene where he collapses face-first into a bowl of soup and a moment where he pretends to flirt with a gay priest before knocking him out and stealing his identity to infiltrate an evil cult. But he looks convincingly like the '70s and '80s Marvel version of Conan while he broods and appears as if he's going to skullfuck Crom if he doesn't holler back at his prayers. Like Jim Kelly would have said, man, he comes right out of a comic book. The role of Conan doesn't call for you to do much. You just have to look convincing waving around a heavy sword. Barbarians aren't exactly known for being complicated men.
Conan the Barbarian may have made Schwarzenegger a movie star, but he's overshadowed by his co-stars in that movie (whereas he steals The Terminator from Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn and Paul Winfield, and he does so with even less lines). In a villainous turn way before he became America's favorite granddad/narrator outside of Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones makes quite an impression chopping the head off Conan's mom and later transforming into a snake. As cult leader Thulsa Doom, the perpetually scowling murderer of Conan's parents, the rather underused Jones sports the same exact hairdo as Janeane Garofalo's in Reality Bites. He looks kind of like Terry Crews when he strapped on one of his co-star Maya Rudolph's weaves to play President Camacho in Idiocracy. But the goofy-looking Jones relishes his lines like wine made from the blood of his character's virginal sacrifices. I cosign Roderick Heath's observation over at Ferdy on Films about how everything Jones says in the movie sounds like an admonition welling up from the depths of Hades.
There are two fascinating '80s movies that star Sab Shimono (who most recently had a guest shot as a Japanese internment camp survivor on Netflix's Longmire) and the late Mako, two Japanese American actors who are just incapable of giving an abysmal performance, even as animation voice actors, like when they both had roles on the beloved Avatar: The Last Airbender. One of the two '80s movies is The Wash, a 1988 indie in which Shimono and Mako play a pair of old Japantown men who are both in love with Nobu McCarthy. Nobody outside of Asian American college professors remembers The Wash, which was based on a play by Bay Area playwright Philip Kan Gotanda, but it was unique for its time because of its all-Asian American cast, the bold decision to have these Asian American actors portray ordinary (and unlike the more affluent Joy Luck Club, lower-middle-class) Americans instead of the stereotypes that were popular at the time and, best of all, the focus on an Asian American man dating an Asian American woman instead of the cliché of yet another white man hooking up with an Asian woman. Fuck all those things out-of-touch film critics like former Washington Post critic Hal Hinson wrote at the time about The Wash being a bland indie. The Wash features a stronger Mako performance than even the standout (and Oscar-nominated) one Mako gave as a coolie-turned-boxer in 1966's The Sand Pebbles.
The other fascinating '80s showcase for the character acting skills of Shimono and Mako is Conan the Barbarian. Shimono never appears on screen, but he did uncredited work on redubbing the voice of Subotai, Conan's Mongolian archer pal, played by Hawaiian surfer Gerry Lopez. The actual voice of Lopez can be heard in a deleted scene where Conan's stoic demeanor briefly disappears.
The YouTube clip summary for Conan and Subotai's deleted scene says one of the movie's producers hated Lopez and demanded that he be redubbed, which makes little sense because out of all the performers in the movie, you'd expect Schwarzenegger to be the one who would have gotten completely redubbed (in fact, Universal studio execs were worried about Schwarzenegger's thick Austrian accent, and that's probably why Universal's teaser trailer and main trailer for the movie didn't contain a single line of dialogue from Schwarzenegger). I have no idea what Schwarzenegger's saying when he briefly grumbles over his 20 years in bondage, whereas I can completely understand Lopez.
But Shimono's dubbing work for Subotai is so terrific that I didn't know Lopez was redubbed until after watching the movie and reading a bunch of articles about the physically demanding shoot. And this movie just adores the weather-beaten voice of Mako--who plays a storyteller and Conan crony known as the Wizard--so much that his voice is all over Conan the Barbarian. The gravitas of the voices of Jones, Shimono and Mako, especially during his narration--which Milius wisely uses to establish the movie's setting instead of awkwardly wedging exposition into the dialogue of these laconic warrior characters--is a huge part of why Conan the Barbarian stands up to repeat viewings.
If Jones sounds like he's straight out of Hades, then Mako sounds like the Hyborian Age equivalent of the world's goriest and most batshit audiobook. Potentially cheesy-sounding passages like "Language and writing were made available--the poetry of Khitai, the philosophy of Sung--and he also came to know the pleasures of women, when he was bred to the finest stock. But always, there remained the discipline of steel" become music in Mako's hands (during the bit about "Language and writing," is that the Oliver Stone rough draft talking or is it the Milius rewrite talking?). I wouldn't be surprised if Genndy Tartakovsky cast Mako as the evil Aku on Samurai Jack specifically because of his distinctive narration during Conan the Barbarian.
Though her character of Valeria, a precursor to Xena, Michelle Yeoh's Yu Shu Lien from the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon movies and Lady Sif from the Thor movies, is yet another clichéd example of a leading lady/love interest in an action flick who winds up getting fridged before the climax, the amount of fighting Sandahl Bergman--a professional dancer Bob Fosse recommended to Milius after directing her in All That Jazz--gets to do in Conan the Barbarian is the most surprising part of the material. It's surprising because at around the time of Conan the Barbarian's release, women rarely got to be warriors like Valeria in sword-and-sorcery flicks. They were either damsels-in-distress like Judi Bowker in the original Clash of the Titans or the bedroom conquests and evil sorceresses of Excalibur. TV was way ahead of sword-and-sorcery movies when it came to warrior women, thanks to Lynda Carter on Wonder Woman.
I found myself more taken with Bergman in the action sequences than with Schwarzenegger in action, not just because she's attractive in Conan the Barbarian but because I love heist movies, probably way more than any other genre, and the physicality she brought to both Conan the Barbarian's jewel heist sequence and the swordplay due to her dancing background constantly made me think, "Damn, she missed the heist movie renaissance by 17 years." Just like Schwarzenegger and Lopez, Bergman remarkably did most of her own stunts in Conan the Barbarian. In fact, she ended up accidentally slicing open her forefinger when a weapon she used for the rehearsal of a sword fight came without a handle guard, a good example of how physically rough it was to make Conan the Barbarian.
Usually on Throwback Thursday, I pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I didn't throw away, and then I discuss the movie on the stub and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. This week, instead of drawing some random stub, I'm going to completely break protocol and focus on a movie I didn't see in the theater. I caught this movie instead on Netflix, and it's an especially timely one because it takes place during Halloween.
"Mumblegore" filmmaker Adam Wingard has said the concept for his offbeat 2014 action thriller The Guest arose from watching a double feature of The Terminator and John Carpenter's original Halloween. So what would happen if you got your Terminator in my Halloween and you got your Halloween on my Terminator?
Marrying those two classic thrillers (and borrowing Carpenter's favorite typeface for the opening and closing titles, although Wingard would later regret choosing Albertus due to its sudden ubiquity) then led to the You're Next director and his regular collaborator, screenwriter Simon Barrett, taking additional inspiration from the 1987 cult classic The Stepfather for their story of a small-town waitress (Maika Monroe) who notices something's not quite right about her parents' houseguest, a well-mannered stranger (Dan Stevens) claiming to have served in Afghanistan with her dead soldier brother Caleb. Wingard and Barrett also took some inspiration from the various "seemingly nice stranger insinuates himself or herself into a benign household and gradually turns out to be a psycho" thrillers that followed in The Stepfather's wake, like 1992's The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which turned into the box-office behemoth some Stepfather fans wish the 1987 film had gotten to be.
The duo ended up making a film that's more satisfying and engrossing than any of the gazillion Stepfather clones and Hand That Rocks the Cradle ripoffs that dominated movie houses--and the Lifetime schedule--in the '90s. Even though The Guest is a highly stylized action thriller (dig that pulsating synth score by musician Steve Moore and the well-chosen and hypnotic existing songs by Love and Rockets and Norwegian electro-pop singer Annie) and Stevens does that hyperrealistic action movie thing of nonchalantly unpinning a grenade in each hand at the same time as if he's in a John Woo joint, there's a nice tinge of believability to The Guest that's not found in those '90s killers-living-in-the-house thrillers.
The believability emerges in the form of Anna Peterson, Monroe's character, figuring out way earlier than you'd expect--especially from a thriller like The Guest--that the stranger who identifies himself as David Collins is an imposter. Wingard said, "One of the things that we liked about being able to work in a movie that has some '80s and '90s genre nostalgia to it was, you're able to do the kind of thing where the kids get what's going on but the parents are totally clueless. That was a key factor to those films. That's just a fun dynamic to play with." The intelligence of Anna and her younger brother Luke (Brendan Meyer)--who's somewhat aware that there's something off about David, but he doesn't really care as much as Anna does because he's enjoying how David has taken to helping him fight off bullies at school--sheds light on how distracting it was that the family in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was badly dumbed down in order for Rebecca De Mornay to get away with her reign of terror.
If you ever rewatch The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the movie turns into 100 minutes of you muttering, "No family in real life is that dumb!" The family in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was so clueless and so trusting of the evil nanny that the mentally challenged handyman played by Ernie Hudson ended up looking like a Mensa member compared to everyone in the family.
The tension of "When is someone in this family going to get the hint that this new guy fell out of crazytown?" is nicely done away with in The Guest so that greater--and more interesting--tension can be built from "Will Anna or David gain the upper hand?" and "Where did this psycho come from?" The Guest is at its most effective as a thriller when it conceals the mysterious David's backstory. In fact, Wingard's original cut of The Guest ran much longer because it delved so much into his backstory. Getting rid of all that backstory was a wise decision. The first and second acts of The Guest keep you guessing David's actual identity and why he has infiltrated on Halloween this family that's still grieving over Caleb. Is David a criminal trying to get his hands on a stash of money stored in the Petersons' house? Could he be a cyborg who escaped from the military to hide out among civilians? Or is he an alien who slaughtered all of Caleb's unit in Afghanistan and then took the form of one of Caleb's comrades as part of a plot to lull Earth into an invasion?
Stevens, who's playing against his Downton Abbey romantic lead persona, is great at embodying two sides of David and doing subtle things with his performance-within-a-performance to make the audience say, "What is the story with this guy?" There's the well-mannered and chivalrous side that wins over Anna and Luke's parents, Spencer (Leland Orser) and Laura (Sheila Kelley), and attracts women like Kristen (Tabatha Shaun), Anna's co-worker at the local diner. And then there's David's abnormal side, like when he stares too long and hard at Luke at the dinner table when he first meets Luke, as if he's an alien trying to figure out how to consume ice cream in a cone for the first time, or the way David unsettlingly stares into space when he's by himself. Stevens is reminiscent of a younger Jeff Fahey, and in an alternate-universe version of this story if it were made in 1989 or 1990 by Hemdale, the indie studio that produced the original Terminator, or Cannon Films, whose logo is amusingly channeled by the Snoot Films logo that kicks off The Guest, you could easily picture Fahey starring as David.
But the real find during The Guest is Monroe, the lead from last week's Throwback Thursday entry, director David Robert Mitchell's similarly striking horror flick It Follows. She looks like Gwen Stefani without all the weird and off-putting racial baggage. The Guest and It Follows are a fascinating pair of thrillers where Monroe stars as the kind of horror movie character author Carol J. Clover dubbed as "the Final Girl"--the last female standing in a horror flick with a massive body count--and is now the basis for director Todd Strauss-Schulson's meta slasher flick The Final Girls.
In It Follows, Mitchell subverts the Final Girl formula by making the girl who has the most sex in the movie the one who faces off against the killer at the end--instead of pitting a virginal heroine against the killer--and as that atypical Final Girl, Monroe makes for a solid lead who's more frazzled and vulnerable than action-thriller tough because of the incomprehensible nightmare her character is unable to overcome or make sense of for most of the movie. Meanwhile, in this thriller that preceded It Follows, Monroe plays a more traditional--and more strong-willed--Final Girl. But I actually prefer her performance in The Guest because she gets to show a little more range and cut loose for a couple of moments and be genuinely funny, like when Anna, before she takes David along with her to a Halloween party where she temporarily lets go of her suspicions about him, accidentally stumbles into a towel-clad David and becomes flustered by his chiseled bod, but in a believable way rather than an inane and cheesy rom-com kind of way.
There's humor in The Guest, but Wingard and Barrett handle it with subtlety (rather than playing it broadly) and a couple of odd references nobody in Stevens' native country of England or outside America will understand. I'm amused by the weird way the film emphasizes how much of an ordinary American family the Petersons are by naming Caleb's siblings and parents after characters from General Hospital. Anna's name is clearly a nod to heroic secret agent Anna Devane, while Luke gets his name from Luke Spencer and the names of the Peterson parents come from Luke's longtime love Laura. Either Wingard or Barrett is a secret fan of all the drama over in Port Charles.
It's great that the suitably named Anna gets to be smarter than everyone else in the film, but I wish she were smarter in one particular area: being able to notice that Stevens' otherwise perfect Southern accent, like almost all other American accents attempted by British actors who portray Americans, gets all weird when he says the word "anything" and pronounces it as "ennathin." I've always wanted to write that one thriller where someone realizes he or she is being held captive in a fake, the Village from The Prisoner-esque version of America by a British person who's pretending to be American and is actually working for the enemy (or maybe evil aliens) because the way the captor pronounces "anything" gives away that something isn't right about their surroundings.
Then our protagonist shoots his or her captor in the head and says, "That's not how to pronounce 'anything,' bitch."
None of Steve Moore's original score cues from The Guest are currently in rotation on AFOS, but they ought to be.
Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.
Kimiko Ueno is a writer to watch. She's responsible for two of Space Dandy's funniest episodes, "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby," a frenetic half-hour that's grown on me since its airing in July, and last season's "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby," a riff on the zombie genre that features the show's most sublime use of its Douglas Adams-style narrator (his matter-of-fact narration is an element of Space Dandy that plays better in subtitled Japanese than in English because matter-of-fact foreign narration, whether it's delivered by a Japanese announcer or a British documentarian, is just funnier, and not for xenophobic reasons).
In "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby," the pulling of "cosmic pubes" caused Dandy, Meow and QT to ping-pong back and forth between other dimensions. In those other realities, they had awkward and often argumentative encounters with their parallel counterparts, who were completely different from all the other much more identical parallel counterparts we saw in previous and subsequent episodes, that is if Space Dandy viewers' theory that each episode takes place in a different reality is a correct one (the counterparts Dandy, Meow and QT met in "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby" more closely resembled the stars of animated shows that are way more popular in Japan than Space Dandy, which has failed to catch on with the Japanese public and is a more popular show over here in America). For instance, in one reality, Meow was a sexy woman in a dance leotard instead of a male cat, while in a much more emo reality, he was a terrifying-looking cyborg with a frozen smile who spoke only in creepy-sounding electronic meows that would constantly drive his morose shipmate Emo Dandy to want to kill himself. And like "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby," "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby" made sublime use of the narrator at one point and had him bickering with his parallel counterparts as well.
Ueno also wrote "Rock 'n' Roll Dandy, Baby," a Behind the Music-like rockumentary parody where would-be rocker Dandy spent more time bickering with his bandmate over what to name their band and how their merch should look than actually creating music. "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby"--in which Scarlet (Houko Kuwashima), the prim Alien Registration Center clerk who always rejects the unregisterable creatures that Dandy brings to her, pays the pompadoured alien hunter to pose as her boyfriend in order to ward off her stalker ex-boyfriend Dolph (Kazuya Nakai)--isn't quite as funny as those three previous Ueno episodes, but it reteams Ueno with director Masahiro Mukai, who helmed the chaos of "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby."
Mukai brings much of his visual panache from the cosmic pubes episode to this one as well, especially in any scene involving the machine gun-wielding silver and red mecha from the show's opening titles, which finally makes an appearance here and turns out to be piloted by Dolph. Because this is a sci-fi comedy show full of spaceships and giant mechs, instead of stalking Scarlet in a tourist disguise or in a Spider-Man costume, Dolph spies on her from the cockpit of his floating mecha, the winner of the least conspicuous stalker vehicle of the year.
You keep expecting Mukai to stage a battle between Dolph's mecha and Dandy's Hawaii Yankee, a Hawaiian shirt-wearing mecha that's been absent this season, but they never get to the fireworks factory, and "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby" is the lesser for it. However, "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby" scores points for getting a man and a woman who's constantly repulsed by him to bond over the film and TV work of Chuck Norris, action genre veteran, famously wooden actor, ubiquitous Internet meme and right-wing nutjob.
For most of the episode, Dandy and Scarlet have nothing in common, and Dandy is constantly at his worst behavior during their pretend dates on the romantic getaway planet known as Trendy. He spits game at some other hottie in the middle of his beach date with Scarlet, which sends her unleashing her fury at him, while my favorite running gag has Scarlet frequently apologizing to little kids for Dandy snatching their belongings from them and making them cry.
But then Dandy unearths Scarlet's DVD copy of Missing in Action from the mess he's made of her house after he tries to protect her from a man-faced spider straight out of John Carpenter's The Thing (if that house is a vacation rental, I can't wait to see the discussion she'll have with the constantly broke Dandy over how to cover the damages), and their adoration of the Missing in Action star begins to bring them closer together and raises the possibility that this fake couple could turn into a real one. Dandy and Scarlet also out themselves as fans of the short-lived Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos, an actual kids' cartoon and one of many inspirations for Adult Swim's upcoming '80s cartoon spoof Mike Tyson Mysteries, which will star the voices of Mike Tyson and Norm Macdonald.
For some reason, I'm having flashbacks to Chris Rock's old "Terry Armstrong" bit about athletes who always refer to themselves in the third person. Chuck Norris' intro for Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos makes Chuck Norris' show look like a fake Chuck Norris cartoon from Robert Smigel, but it's not a Smigel TV Funhouse segment about the Chuck Norris-ness of Chuck Norris. Karate Kommandos was an actual half-hour piece of shit from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! creators Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, whose Ruby-Spears studio also produced the inexplicableRambo cartoon, which was a 30-minute commercial for a Rambo action figure line, and the occasional TV Funhouse targetMister T, which starred the A-Team scene-stealer as the coach of a multiracial team of mystery-solving gymnast kids (Mister T makes the Brady Kids Saturday morning cartoon look like Shakespeare).
If Dandy and Scarlet bonded over the much more revered Bruce Lee, whom Spike Spiegel idolized and emulated during Space Dandy general director Shinichiro Watanabe's more serious Cowboy Bebop (and is far less problematic to Asian Americans as a martial arts hero than his white Way of the Dragon nemesis), it wouldn't be as amusing. Because Dandy the bumbling lout and Scarlet the lonely office drone are kitschy Watanabe characters, as opposed to badass Watanabe characters like Spike and his femme fatale love interest Julia (although Scarlet has a badass side that she expresses in her Jeet Kune Do skills), it makes more comedic sense for Scarlet and Dandy, who's delusional about his prowess with the ladies, to idolize the similarly delusional Norris than to idolize Bruce. The star of both Karate Kommandos and the frequently ridiculedWalker, Texas Ranger was under the delusion that America would take seriously his warning that re-electing President Obama would bring about "1,000 years of darkness." (Dandy's also delusional about being an intergalactic celebrity, just like how Peter Quill thinks "Star-Lord" is a name everyone in space is familiar with during Guardians of the Galaxy. Junichi Suwabe, the Chris Parnell-esque voice of Dandy in Japan, is great at portraying this delusional and self-absorbed side of Dandy, so it's fitting that Suwabe was chosen to dub for Chris Pratt in the Japanese release of Guardians that's opening over there tomorrow.)
The references to a real-life obscure cartoon instead of a made-up one with a dumb-sounding and unconvincing fake title are a nice touch in Ueno's script, as are Scarlet's evident fetish for '80s action stars (it's not surprising that one of her exes is a blond jerk named after Dolph Lundgren) and the episode's open ending, which was clearly influenced by Watanabe's love of ambiguity. For anybody in the audience who might be a shipper of Dandy and Scarlet (and I keep coming back to this, but God, the word--and very concept of--"shippers" make me wish they never existed), the ending is pure torture, but for the rest of us, it's one of many reasons why Watanabe, whose work has proven that he's as far from the dark ages of Ruby-Spears as one can get, makes several of the best animated shows to come out of Japan.
According to Space Dandy's alien alphabet, the logo on Scarlet's bikini says "Elle."
Because of the success of Transformers, movie studios have moved on from filming mediocre features based on sitcoms (Bewitched, The Honeymooners) to making equally mediocre projects based on cartoons from the '80s, a rather lousy era for animation (except for Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, I can't think of an '80s cartoon that ever approached the caliber of later shows like The Simpsons or Batman: The Animated Series). New Regency wants to launch its own Transformers-like franchise with Voltron, while Italian Job remake co-stars Mark Wahlberg and Jason Statham are rumored to be reuniting for a G.I. Joe film. Tobey Maguire's production company just bought the film rights to Robotech, the Roots of mecha cartoons (trying to squeeze Robotech into a two-and-a-half-hour live-action feature would be like trying to make a two-and-a-half-hour film out of, well, Roots). News items about long-delayed Thundercats and He-Man adaptations continue to haunt viewers like me who grew up watching those cartoons but don't think they've aged well--or would make for great live-action films either.
The He-Man franchise already blew it once with Cannon Films' 1987 Dolph Lundgren vehicle Masters of the Universe. The Mattel higher-ups expressed their shame about releasing toys that contain dangerous amounts of lead. If only they were equally apologetic about the Masters of the Universe movie, which isn't as poisonous but can induce seizures in viewers who are unable to sit through a Cannon Film, especially one that features so many flashy and annoying laser ray effects.
Hollywood needs to stop turning to the RetroJunk site for movie ideas. If there's one animated series that I'd like to see adapted to film--hell, I'd just be glad to see it return in any form other than comics--it'd be the lesser-known Megas XLR (2004-05), a too-short-lived Cartoon Network giant robot spoof that was sharper and more entertaining than the '80s cartoons it parodied. (Titmouse, the studio that created Megas, is currently busy producing Adult Swim's delightfully gory Metalocalypse.)
Megas is the story of Coop Cooplowski, a Jersey schlub who stumbles upon the future's most coveted superweapon--a giant robot that its time-traveling female pilot, Kiva, hid in Earth's past from extraterrestrial baddies. A live-action Megas movie would be the perfect vehicle for Tyler Labine, a scene-stealing veteran of good but short-lived shows like Dead Last, Kevin Hill and Invasion (hopefully, Labine's much-buzzed-about Reaper won't join that list). Labine was born to play Coop, and he even sounds like David DeLuise (Dom's son), who voiced the lazy but bright gearhead on the cartoon. Megas' Kevin Smith-meets-Robotech premise has tons of potential as a live-action feature (unless any one of the filmmaking geniuses listed in the A.V. Club's "10 Directors You Didn't Know You Hated" article gets his mitts on Megas--then the movie's really in trouble), and unlike the overlong, overstuffed Transformers, it wouldn't take over an hour for the lead robot to finally appear.
