This is the seventh 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.
I love the work of Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho. Based on a real-life serial-killer case that remains unsolved, 2003's Memories of Murder, the second feature film from "Director Bong," intriguingly takes the standard "grisly serial-killer case psychologically damages the detectives on the case" thriller and expands its scope so that it morphs into a dark comedy about the ineptitude of institutions like the police, and it's so critical of institutions you'd expect David Simon to have had a hand in writing it. The Host, Bong's 2006 follow-up to Memories of Murder, became South Korea's biggest box-office hit ever by effectively mashing up the monster movie genre with dysfunctional family comedy and trenchant satire about both Korean and American institutions. Mother, Bong's 2009 whodunit about a mentally challenged prime suspect in a small-town murder case, is a worthy addition to the pantheon of twisted movies to watch on Mother's Day like Psycho and Serial Mom. Snowpiercer, a rare dystopian sci-fi flick that takes place in perpetual snowfall rather than being drenched in acid rain or set against orange desert landscapes, is both an inventive take on class warfare and 2014's most mesmerizing blockbuster starring a white guy named Chris.
These are all darkly comic films with a recurring disdain for either broken institutions or corporate malfeasance. So I was prepared to dislike the made-for-Netflix Okja, a globetrotting fantasy film that finds Bong venturing into Free Willy territory for a story about a Korean farm kid's bond with a genetically modified female "superpig"--an empathetic creature that behaves less like a pig and more like a dog/hippo hybrid--she wants to save from the slaughterhouse. Has Bong the sharp satirist gone all soft and cuddly on us?
Nah, not really. For his first family-friendly film since The Host (its R rating in America is, by the way, overblown--the original Gremlins is grislier than The Host--and I think its bittersweet ending had a lot to do with it being slapped with an R), Bong takes on the GMO industry and two-faced corporate culture, and his satirical vision of a feud between animal rights activists and Mirando, a Monsanto-style corporation with a deceptively sunny disposition, is slightly darker than I expected from a film that spends much of the first half-hour in idyllic, nearly dialogue-less rural splendor that's visually inspired by My Neighbor Totoro.
My Neighbor Totoro
Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the amount of F-bombs freely tossed around by Steven Yeun and Daniel Henshall--who play members of a Paul Dano-led "Animal Liberation Front"--as well as by Jake Gyllenhaal and Snowpiercer star (and Okja co-producer) Tilda Swinton, who's given this time by Bong a dual role as a pair of twin sisters who run Mirando (and have differing approaches to handling the corporation's crusade against world hunger). Bong has an awesome interpretation of "family-friendly."
Since 2009, the AFOS blog's "Shows I Miss" series has looked back at highly entertaining TV shows that were gone too soon and were too clever to last on commercial TV, from 2003's Keen Eddie to last year's Selfie. Comedy Central's hilarious Key & Peele is the first "Shows I Miss" entry in which the show closed up shop not because of the network but because the stars (who, in Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele's case, also doubled as the lead writers) wanted to move on: over the weekend, Key confirmed that the show's current season, which wrapped up filming last November, is also its last in an exclusive interview with The Wrap, and Peele did the same thing on Twitter.
It's not surprising that Key and Peele are eager to move on and concentrate on film projects like Keanu, which will star the duo and will be directed by Peter Atencio (the same director who brought so much cinematic flair to Key & Peele's sketches in the first four seasons and helped change the perception that sketch comedy should be cheap-looking and visually uninteresting). Last year, Peele toldL.A. Weekly, "If our show is to have any kind of legacy, it should be that it didn't go on too long."
Last Friday's series finale announcement is the biggest thing that separates Key & Peele from the sketch comedy show it's often (and sometimes rather unfairly) compared to, the groundbreaking, no-holds-barred Chappelle's Show. Unlike Dave Chappelle, whose "I'm going out for a pack of cigarettes"-style departure from his own hit show was one of the most bizarre exits from a TV show ever, Key and Peele get to end their hit show on their own terms.
If you don't remember the whole controversy over the demise of Chappelle's Show, Chappelle became so upset over seeing white fans of the show laugh at his sketches for the wrong reasons that he didn't come back to finish work on what became known as "the lost episodes." I have a theory for Chappelle's meltdown and subsequent escape from Comedy Central to South Africa: they were actually a cover for himself to go off the grid and do secret agent work nobody--not even his former writing partner Neal Brennan or his family in Ohio--knows about. Chappelle's a secret agent when he's not doing stand-up, which explains why he now has the physique of a black Daniel Craig.
Chappelle's Show became unwatchable without Chappelle's approval on the final cut (one of the lost episodes was a non-comedic, town hall meeting-style--and rather pointless--episode about whether or not Chappelle's opinion that the "Stereotype Pixies" sketch, which triggered his exit, was reinforcing racial stereotypes was right: re-fucking-ally?). Meanwhile, Key & Peele's final season is, fortunately, far from an abomination like that aborted third season of Chappelle's Show was. Some Key & Peele fans might not agree--particularly those who miss the segments where Key and Peele would interact with a studio audience and have also grown tired of the antics of some of the show's few recurring characters, like Peele's Meegan, the petulant millennial afflicted with both vocal fry and lousy movie theater behavior--but Key & Peele is still one of the most consistently funny sketch comedy shows on the air. Last week's ChildFund International commercial parody with Peele as a social worker loosely based on the bearded ChildFund guy, asking viewers to donate fake beards to Third World kids, and the latest Meegan and Andre sketch (is it me or did Peele model Meegan's voice after Mindy Kaling, the current boss of Key and Peele's old MADtv pal Ike Barinholtz?) were both absolute riots.
To the viewers who say they miss Key & Peele's studio audience segments, you do know those segments were sort of a compromise between the show's crew and Comedy Central, right? A behind-the-scenes battle that not many of those Key & Peele viewers seem to be aware of is the battle over the inclusion of studio audience laughter in every sketch: the network insisted on a laugh track, while Key, Peele and Atencio didn't want laughter. In 2013, Atencio discussed on Tumblr his past disagreements with the network over the laughter and said, "Our feeling was that because the sketches had a filmic quality to them, the laughter was distracting, and in a way cheapened the effort we had put into making the sketches work as individual short films." He added, "A lot of our sketches rely on setting up a believable world in often very serious genres and then subverting them, and so having that laughter cut in during an action movie or sci-fi style opening was like pouring ice-water on the viewer."
Key, Peele and Atencio had to continually persuade the network that a laugh track would get in the way of, as Atencio pointed out, "the dialogue, music, and sound-effects, all of which play a role in the comedy in most of our scenes." They ultimately won the battle and came up with a way to include audience laughter without having it intrude on the sketches: laughter would be present only during Key and Peele's hosting segments in front of a live studio audience. But the show actually got even better when it completely did away with the studio audience segments and replaced them with True Detective-style fake road trip scenes between Key and Peele as themselves (ad-libbing to each other just like in the studio audience segments), and it became clear that what Key, Peele and Atencio really wanted to do with the show this whole time was to channel the laugh track-less vibe of sketch comedy movies like Monty Python's The Meaning of Life and the John Landis flicks Kentucky Fried Movie and Amazon Women on the Moon.
To me, Key, Peele and Atencio's preference for the absence of often annoying audience laughter is as great a legacy as the show's smartly written satire about racially motivated police harassment of black men and other racial issues (like the "Negrotown" musical number, which bashes everything from racist bankers to cultural appropriation) or the unique--and unapologetically nerdy--comedic voice of two biracial comedians. Key & Peele's experiment of abolishing laugh tracks from filmed sketch comedy has caused other Comedy Central sketch shows like Kroll Show and Inside Amy Schumer to follow suit, which is a thing of beauty. I hate laugh tracks. Why do I need to be told when to laugh? They never made sense when Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Daphne and Velma were getting chased around by ghosts to the sound of canned laughter, and they never made sense now.
Another one of Key & Peele's charms was that it wasn't trying to be Chappelle's Show (speaking of which, here's why some of us former Chappelle's Show viewers are still a little frustrated with Chappelle's abrupt exit: his departure was responsible for the increased presence of the unfunny and racistMind of Mencia on Comedy Central's schedule, as well as the network's annoying attempts to market the neo-conservative Mind as the next Chappelle's Show). I like the film writing of Kartina Richardson, but her complaints during Key & Peele's first season that Key and Peele are "black folk who want to move past race" and that the show's writing is tepid in comparison to Chappelle's no-holds-barred material and it "makes fun of blacks in a way white liberals will allow themselves to enjoy, under the guise of 'talking about race'" were really weird complaints, especially when race is frequently on the minds of both Peele, who's been working on a script for a horror flick he wants to make about "the fears of being a black man today," and Key (Richardson's negative review of Key & Peele is over at Salon, but I don't want to link to Salon because that site is as slow and laggy as Wendell trudging through a brony convention). In those earlier seasons, Key & Peele was interesting precisely because it wasn't another Chappelle's Show: the obsessions of Key, Peele and Atencio ("Labyrinth. That's my world. NeverEnding Story. Willow," said Peele to White Teeth author Zadie Smith in the New Yorker) are mostly different from those of Chappelle and Neal Brennan's. But Key & Peele eventually did dive into the kind of edgier material about race that Richardson felt the show lacked--like "Negrotown" and the Trayvon Martin-related sketch that opened "Les Mis," the show's third-season premiere--and it ended up excelling at that kind of material.
There is one area where Key & Peele definitely surpassed Chappelle's Show (besides the five seasons Key & Peele will now have amassed), and that would be the fact that it got a few non-black comedians of color some extra screen time on largely vanilla Comedy Central. For instance, Filipino American improv comic Eugene Cordero appeared a few times on Key & Peele, which is better than Chappelle's Show's weird casting of either extremely wooden Asian non-actors or what I assume to be relatives of Chappelle's Asian wife as Asian characters and SNL's continuing practice of casting white actors as Asians. You bet your ass it's offensive and lame whenever the white comedians on SNL play Asians, even without yellowface or brownface makeup. Occasionally, Key has played South Asian characters on the show--like that Indian pediatrician in the unsettling "Make-a-Wish" Halloween sketch with Lauren Lapkus--even though he's neither South nor Asian, but he's actually convincing and non-offensive as an Indian guy (perhaps the reason why Key doesn't sound like Hari Kondabolu's priceless description of Apu as "a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father" is due to help from his wife, a dialect coach).
Key & Peele did a few other things better than SNL, like any of Key & Peele's sketches about Barack Obama, which wouldn't have existed had Lorne Michaels chosen Peele to bring his impression of the President to SNL (Peele once said, "I had some good friends over there, and a great meeting with Lorne and they asked me to do it, but I couldn't go for contractual reasons. I was on MADtv... It was a whole fiasco. It was such a shame, SNL is one of my favorite shows of all time"). The sketches with Peele as Obama and Key as his "anger translator" Luther may be viral sensations, but my favorite Key & Peele Obama sketch is "Obama: The College Years," mainly because of the way it makes fun of terrible, subtle-as-an-anvil dialogue in historical dramas like that cheesy line Joely Richardson had to say in The Patriot (Mel Gibson: "May I sit with you?" Richardson: "It's a free country. Or at least it will be").
The little visual touches Atencio came up with for the degraded early '80s videotape look of the fake footage of young Obama are a good example of Atencio's visual flair. That flair and Peele's nerdy love of horror movies were integral to another highlight of Key & Peele's run: the show's ability to pull off horror genre parody sketches that were genuinely unnerving in addition to being funny. The aforementioned "Make-a-Wish" sketch is especially unnerving. It features a creepy performance by Peele as an evil kid whose dying wishes are more elaborate than "I wish I could be Batman." Peele seems to be particularly obsessed with Thomas Harris adaptations like Manhunter, The Silence of the Lambs and the Hannibal TV show, which explains why the Harris Cannibalistic Universe inspired not one but two sketches: "Hall of Mirrors," featuring Peele as a serial killer who's got Francis Dolarhyde's cleft lip, Ted Levine's voice and Joe Isuzu's inability to lie effectively, and "Sex Detective," which has Peele playing a brooding, Will Graham-like criminal profiler in a dead-on spoof of the masturbatory overtones of loner detectives like the occasionally Graham-like Fox Mulder, whose love of beating the meat was hinted at on The X-Files (extra points for the casting of former Criminal Minds star Paget Brewster as another detective).
"Sex Detective" is so dead-on that it's forever ruined the HCU for me. Thanks to "Sex Detective," Hannibal's pilot episode remains the only Hannibal episode I've watched because I know I won't be able to watch the rest of Hannibal without thinking of Peele's MacGruber-ish moans from "Sex Detective" and chuckling. That's how terrific a Key & Peele genre spoof like "Sex Detective" is: it has the power to ruin whole genres, just like how Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story was so brutal in skewering musician biopic clichés that it caused me to be unable to take any musician biopic seriously anymore.
The intensity of Key & Peele's horror sketches, whether that sketch is "Make-a-Wish," the explanation for Steve Urkel's dominance on Family Matters or either of the Thomas Harris spoofs, sheds light on one last standout thing about Key & Peele: the two stars are excellent actors in addition to being great comedic minds (Zadie Smith points out that "If the depth Key brings to comic moments is unexpected, the bigger surprise is that he's doing comedy at all: he intended to be a classical actor"). So many of last week's negative reviews about the Adam Sandler blockbuster Pixels have noted that Sandler sleepwalks through the movie. In other words, the energy level Sandler once had in his earliest comedic vehicles--and in more challenging and risky movies like Punch-Drunk Love, in which Sandler movie fan Paul Thomas Anderson got a career-best performance out of Sandler--is completely gone. On Key & Peele, neither Key nor Peele could ever be guilty of such a thing. They acted their asses off in every sketch, and that sort of commitment to whatever material comes their way is something studio comedy filmmaking could really use right now. Comedy Central's latest loss is now studio comedy filmmaking's gain.
Apple is quietly retiring the original iPod line after 13 years. Boo-fucking-hoo. I bought two iPods--I had my first one, a third-generation iPod Classic, engraved with a line from De La Soul Is Dead, "I got the bidox, let's do this like Brutus!," back when Apple allowed customers to have any kind of message engraved on the back of their iPods for a few extra bucks--and both those excellent rectangles died on me after only two or three years of use.
It's an excellent rectangle for those two or three years, and then afterwards, you're just bitter over how it's no longer excellent. I haven't bought another iPod since my second one, a black iPod Nano that replaced my dead third-generation iPod Classic, stopped working smoothly a few years ago. Even though I recharged its battery repeatedly, the Nano was starting to turn itself off in the middle of songs, just like how I chloroform myself whenever I hear an Iggy Azalea track coming on.
I spent so many hours filling each of those iPod hard drives with music and organizing the playlists that when those devices finally broke down, I felt like all those hours of curating were wasted. It made me wish walkmans didn't become obsolete because unlike iPods, an entire library of music wouldn't get wiped out along with the tape player when it would break down.
These days, I rely on just my MacBook to bump music. Apple needs to build portable music players that last longer than two or three years. The day when it does that is the day I cop another portable music player.
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.
It's a good week to be The Awesomes. Hulu announced that it's renewing Seth Meyers and Mike Shoemaker's animated superhero sitcom for a third season, and this week's Awesomes episode, "Tim Goes to School," solidly penned by Late Night with Seth Meyers head writer Alex Baze (who's been killing it on Twitter, whether he's ripping on Republicans or paying tribute to the late Don Pardo), isn't too shabby either. The episode deals with both the formation of the PRICKS (People Really Into Crime & Killing Sprees), a team of supervillains assembled by Malocchio Jr. to take down the Awesomes, and Awesomes leader Prock's realization that the raising of a child without his parents--in this case, Tim, whose ex-mercenary parents are currently under the protective custody of a hero protection program--is a responsibility he needs to be better at.
A new government act that requires both underage superheroes to receive an education and adult superheroes to finish theirs if they dropped out ends up forcing Tim--as well as school dropouts Muscleman and Frantic--to attend middle school, where Tim learns that handling bullies is easy, especially when you can transform into a 500-pound sumo wrestler with amazing strength. Instead of the bullies being the ones at school who are bothering Tim--they wind up becoming his friends after they see him transform into Sumo due to their surprisingly non-race-related verbal taunts pissing him off--it's Prock and the rest of the team who are bothering him with their overprotectiveness. Prock, Impresario, Gadget Gal and Concierge have disguised themselves as faculty to make sure Tim gets through school okay, and Tim's discomfort with having them around escalates into one of those Hulk-vs.-the-other-Avengers-type battles that have become such a staple of the Avengers comics that the Joss Whedon movie version staged such a confrontation aboard the Helicarrier.
Neither white viewers of The Awesomes nor Asian Americans who don't watch The Awesomes because they've been alienated by the comedy shows from Awesomes co-producer Broadway Video (due to SNL's propensity for yellowface and brownface, its lack of Asian American cast members and the particularly rocky year of race-related humor SNL experienced last season) may pay much attention to how The Awesomes writes Bobby Lee's character, but I like the way the show handles Tim and gives him the same type of anger management issues that Arthur Chu discusses in his Daily Beast essay "Model Minority Rage: Why the Hulk Should Be an Asian Guy." It helps that Tim's Asianness (he's half-Korean, half-Japanese) isn't used as a punchline like on Drawn Together or Family Guy. Sure, Gadget Gal, who's basically filter-less Estelle Getty from The Golden Girls in a rejuvenated body, says frequently racist things to Tim, like when she delivers a one-liner about walloping an uncontrollable Sumo right in the "won tons" during "Tim Goes to School" (won tons are Chinese, you old bitch), but The Awesomes frowns upon her racist views instead of adopting them like Drawn Together or Family Guy would.
It also helps that, Gadget Gal's xenophobia aside, the Awesomes team members are likable and the kinds of characters I don't mind spending an animated half-hour with. In his Dissolve piece on why Star Trek V didn't work at all, whether as a sci-fi actioner, as a Star Trek story or as a movie about the letter V, Noel Murray said that the '60s Star Trek has great replay value partly because its cast of characters is pleasant to be around. "The crew of the Enterprise has a believable camaraderie, cut with just enough friction to bring some dimensionality to their relationships," Murray wrote. Even though the Awesomes are animated characters--and even though the voice actors don't appear to have recorded their dialogue at the same time in the same studio, an approach that hasn't hurt Archer, a show where the actors are scattered in different parts of the country and are recorded separately--that same kind of camaraderie shines through in Awesomes episodes like "Tim Goes to School." Plus I like seeing SNL and MADtv alums together on the same show and getting along well: Lee, Ike Barinholtz and Josh Meyers, Seth Meyers' brother--and Barinholtz's one-time makeout scene partner--came from MADtv, as did current SNL regular Taran Killam, who voices Frantic. There used to be an intense rivalry between the East Coast SNL and the West Coast MADtv, but the two camps appear to have buried the hatchet--or maybe amongst the Meyers brothers, Lee and Barinholtz, there wasn't even a hatchet to begin with.
Like Jason Ritter on Gravity Falls, Lee is a couple of octaves too low to be voicing an 11-year-old, but he's good at bringing out the vulnerability of Tim, just like Ritter does with 12-year-old Dipper. Casting them to voice boys is better than getting women to voice them. As good as Regina King was as Huey and Riley on The Boondocks, I still couldn't shake the awareness that a lady was doing their voices. I don't think I'd be as invested in Tim's anger management issues in "Tim Goes to School" if Tim sounded like June Foray as Rocky the Flying Squirrel.
Stray observations:
* The biggest payoff of the formation of the PRICKS is not fisticuffs, but another appearance by Maya Rudolph as Malocchio Jr.'s doting mom Lady Malocchio, who shows up at inopportune times to make Malocchio Jr. look far from imposing. I've been wondering why Rudolph's amusing voice as Lady Malocchio sounds so familiar. It turns out that Lady Malocchio's voice is basically the voice Rudolph came up with for her obscure SNL character Glenda Goodwin, an attorney obsessed with Bigfoot. "Aired one or two times, I think, but was [co-creator] Mike Shoemaker and my favorite voice of all her voices. When we asked Maya to play the part, the first thing she said was 'Lemme guess, Glenda Goodwin?' She was right," said Meyers to Entertainment Weekly.
* Now that Prock has a girlfriend (Amy Poehler's lawyer character Jaclyn Stone), everyone's been throwing themselves at Prock, from a hot teacher at Tim's middle school (Cecily Strong, who replaced Meyers on Weekend Update) to Muscleman's sister Abby. The Bento Box animators did a good job with Muscleman's expression as he realizes that the shirtless pic of a bodybuilder that he glimpses on Prock's phone is not a pic of himself.
* "Tim Goes to School" doesn't contain any Zack Morris Time-Outs from Prock. I don't miss them.
Most people visit YouTube for cat videos, while I go there for either hip-hop music videos, instrumental versions of hip-hop tracks, music I can't find on Spotify (or don't want to go to Spotify for because it always crashes), blooper footage or old TV show opening title sequences. The other night, I was zipping through some YouTuber's compilation of network TV opening titles from my childhood (peep Bryan Cranston in an uproarious mullet at 4:25!), and one particular title sequence--from a show I've never seen before--stood out amongst the rancid-sounding, sub-smooth-jazz pack.
Okay, maybe that original Todd Rundgren theme for TV 101 isn't so rancid (Stacey Dash drinks the blood of young Republican virgins to keep looking like she does in the TV 101 opening credits [6:41]). But from 2:01 to 3:01, Almost Grown, a drama that starred Tim Daly (at a point in his career between his breakout role in Diner and the era of Wings, the Timmverse Superman and my personal favorite animated Daly character, Bizarro), blows away all the other '80s shows with a Pablo Ferro-esque font and a swaggering James Brown banger that fortunately isn't the overplayed "I Feel Good," a Brown tune I grew to despise (thanks a lot, movie trailers, wedding DJs and Republicans!).
I know this groove best as Das EFX's "Mic Checka" ("I miggity-make the Wonder Twins deactivate!"), but heads who didn't grow up in the '90s might know it as "Think '73."
It's funny how "Think" was used to open the whitest show on network TV. Almost Grown was part of an annoying late '80s network TV trend of white and affluent baby-boomer showrunners subjecting viewers to their nostalgia for '60s music (even though a lot of that music was top-notch Motown). However, this really white show is an interesting-sounding one I'm dying to watch for the first time on disc (I don't think it'll ever make it to disc because I doubt Universal Studios Home Entertainment would want to go through the trouble of clearing all those existing songs on Almost Grown's soundtrack), mainly because Almost Grown was made by a pre-Sopranos David Chase. Judging from the descriptions of how Chase ambitiously structured the time frame of Almost Grown's episodes, this was a show ahead of its time. Chase made a precursor to the flashback-heavy structure of Lost, Person of Interest and Arrow.
Almost Grown was chock-full of subjects Chase would later revisit in both the equally existing-song-heavy Sopranos ("The family and the annoying mother. Almost Grown was the lab for The Sopranos," said Chase in a 2007 WGA chat where another TV writing genius, Tom Fontana, complimented him on his work on Almost Grown) and Chase's final collabo with the late James Gandolfini, the unsurprisingly existing-song-heavy Not Fade Away. Chase's 2012 movie revolves around a struggling '60s rock band, while Almost Grown's late '60s flashbacks involved the Daly character's phase as a college radio DJ caught up in the counterculture of the period.
"Music has always been part of my creative process. I put on headphones, listen to music and try to get ideas or moods for stories," said Chase to the Chicago Tribune during the brief run of Almost Grown, which had Chase taking a vintage pop tune that a character would hear ($5,000 per tune!--according to Chase in the 1988 ChiTrib piece) and using it as "a mnemonic device to send you back to that period in their life and you'd play out a story back there and then come back to the present."
Oh, so it's like Cold Case without the heavy-handedness.
Comedian Rudy Ray Moore, a.k.a. trash-talking '70s action hero Dolemite, a.k.a. the Human Tornado, has died of complications from diabetes. He was 81.
Famous for its stiff martial arts choreography and production values that were so low that the boom mike gets enough screen time to qualify as a supporting character, Moore's 1975 cult classic Dolemite is a pretty bad movie (bad not meaning good in this case). Not a lot of bad movies are fun to watch (exhibit A: Nicolas Cage's last few action films). But Dolemite is fun to watch--and endlessly quotable ("Man, move over and let me pass 'fore they have to be pullin' these Hush Puppies out yo' muthafuckin' ass!").
Moore's B-movies have had such a huge influence on the hip-hop generation. Robin Harris is seen watching Dolemite and quoting from it during House Party, Ol' Dirty Bastard's "Got Your Money" video consists of nothing but footage from Dolemite and the Beastie Boys constantly reference Moore in their music (the classic "Hey Ladies" video recreates a sex scene from one of Moore's movies):
One of my favorite MADtv sketches spoofed Dolemite and its wooden actors and lousy production values. As the "Son of Dolemite," a half-naked Aries Spears ran around fuckin' up muthafuckas in "Pas-uh-DEE-NUH!" with his beergut hilariously hanging out of his bikini briefs.
It's been kind of a tough past three days for the hip-hop generation. First, we have to endure the sight of Sarah Palin attempting to relate to us by "raising the roof" on SNL*, and now a favorite blaction hero dies.
* I'm not a fan of SNL's "really white white people trying to rap" shtick, but Amy Poehler's got skills. When 8 Mile co-star Brittany Murphy guest-hosted SNL a few seasons ago, the show did an 8 Mile-inspired sketch about a fake feud between the cast members from the East Coast and the cast members from the West Coast, and Poehler was killin' it.
