"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Bob's Burgers, "Midday Run"

On some Fridays, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

"Midday Run" is the second episode during Bob's Burgers' fifth season to riff on a classic movie that was released in 1988. "Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl," the show's fifth-season premiere, transformed both Die Hard and Working Girl into school musicals, with memorable and intentionally awful-sounding results ("I'm Grubin'/I'm Hans Gruber and I'm Grubin'/And sometimes that could mean shootin'/Mr. Takagi in the head!"), and now "Midday Run" pays tribute to another movie from 1988, and it's one I adore even more than Die Hard: the extremely foul-mouthed and eminently quotable Midnight Run.

The Robert De Niro/Charles Grodin buddy flick wasn't a big box-office hit like Die Hard and Working Girl, but it has a cult following that includes the likes of Dan Harmon and Paul Thomas Anderson, whose first feature film, 1996's Sydney (a.k.a. Hard Eight), is basically a spinoff movie all about Philip Baker Hall's Midnight Run mob lawyer character Sidney (spelled differently in PTA's movie due to what I presume are legal issues that PTA was clever enough to skirt around, unlike Larry the Cable Guy). Midnight Run is special to me because it's where I first learned the terms "chorizo and eggs" and "white-collar criminal," as well as 132 different ways to say "fuck." Like I once said to another Midnight Run fan on Facebook, Midnight Run was my Sesame Street when I was in junior high.

Episode writer Scott Jacobson must have felt the same way about Midnight Run when he was younger because he bases Tina's zeal for her duties as a Wagstaff hall monitor on Jack Walsh's intensely driven mission to deliver the Duke to L.A. (so that means in addition to her male butt-obsessed erotic fanfic author side, Tina's also got a stern lawwoman side). In Tina's case, her Duke is Zeke (Bobby Tisdale). He's in trouble for stealing the costume of the school mascot, the Wagstaff Whaler, so Mr. Frond (David Herman), the guidance counselor and hall monitor supervisor, assigns his toughest hall monitor to deliver Zeke to the principal's office. Of course, Zeke constantly attempts to escape, and like Jack, Tina finds out her prisoner is a much more noble soul than she originally thought: he stole the costume to entertain his grandma (also voiced by Tisdale) at her retirement home before she goes into surgery.

What I like most about "Midday Run" is that instead of referencing the not-so-prime-time-friendly dialogue from Midnight Run (the one bit of movie dialogue that's reenacted in "Midday Run" comes from a different movie, The Fugitive), the episode opts to reference Midnight Run's ambience, particularly on the musical side. Bob's Burgers creator/composer Loren Bouchard and his fellow composers Chris Maxwell and Phil Hernandez, the duo known as the Elegant Too, are the MVPs of "Midday Run." They amusingly channel themes from Danny Elfman's bluesy and lively score to Midnight Run, which is currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.

You can make out bits and pieces of "Walsh Gets the Duke" and "J.W. Gets a Plan" throughout the "Midday Run" score. After that score he wrote for Midnight Run early on in his film music career, Elfman went on to pen scores that are far more profound or popular--whether for Tim Burton or various tentpole franchises--and yet, the Midnight Run score remains my favorite Elfman score (for a brief time in the late '80s, the Midnight Run score was particularly popular with trailer houses). While Elfman's work for Burton frequently brings to mind the weirdest moments of his Oingo Boingo days, the Midnight Run score channels Boingo at its most tuneful and dance floor-friendly (it's no surprise that Elfman's Boingo bandmates took part in the recording of the Midnight Run score). The "Midday Run" score is the best tribute to a rather underappreciated Elfman score that doesn't often receive such tributes.

As a story that's primarily about the Belcher kids and their Wagstaff classmates (speaking of which, another appearance by Brian Huskey's likable hypochondriac Regular Sized Rudy, who looks up to Tina as a hall monitor role model, is always welcome), "Midday Run" is more pleasant than laugh-out-loud funny, but Regular Sized Rudy and Zeke nicely receive substantial character development here (while Mr. Frond remains an inflexible and clueless bureaucrat, and why does he seem to be in charge of everything at Wagstaff, as if he's a mini-Mr. Belding who, as many comedians would say about Belding on April Richardson's Saved by the Bell podcast Go Bayside!, just can't seem to go away?). The episode's amiableness also brings to mind a second work in addition to Midnight Run. This particular work is an animated show the Bob's Burgers writing staff might not have been aware of while working on "Midday Run": the forgotten early '00s Disney show Fillmore!, which was created by a pre-Walking Dead Scott M. Gimple.

Fillmore! was a '70s cop show spoof where the buddy cops were a pair of middle school hall monitors, black skater kid Cornelius Fillmore and his goth partner Ingrid Third, and all the characters on the show were named after San Francisco streets, an odd touch I especially enjoyed because the Bay Area's my home turf (the San Francisco street thing was actually both Gimple's way of paying tribute to the '70s cop show The Streets of San Francisco and a shout-out to Bay Area friends whose couches he previously crashed on). Like "Midday Run," Fillmore! wasn't laugh-out-loud funny, but there was much to like about it, whether it was the '70s-isms, the diverse cast or the Latino kid who acted as the show's version of the obligatory irritable police captain (he was voiced by then-SNLer Horatio Sanz). There's this Fillmore!-esque vibe to "Midday Run," particularly in the scenes between kiddie cops Tina and Regular Sized Rudy, that makes the episode appealing, in addition to all the Midnight Run score references.

And now that Bob's Burgers has just been renewed for a sixth season, I wonder what other movies from 1988 will get the Bob's Burgers treatment (as this ode to the movie year of 1988 reminds me, the summer of '88 also included Big, which I could envision being turned into a Gene story where he thinks he's been magically transformed into a grown-up but he actually wasn't, or maybe it should be a Louise story), as well as what other facets there are to Tina's unique and unusually confident personality. We've seen the erotic fanfic author with a crazy imagination, the investigative journalist, the avid Equestranauts toy collector, the "bat-zilla" who craves attention and now in both "Tina Tailor Soldier Spy" and "Midday Run," the lawwoman. It's not a bad life for an oddly heroic kid who doesn't consider herself a hero because she puts her bra on one boob at a time like everyone else.

Memorable quotes:

AFOS finally adds to rotation the expanded score from a great Chicago movie, The Fugitive, while it's time to look back at Chicagoan and Fugitive admirer Roger Ebert's tastes in film music

(Photo source: DVD Beaver)

Jurassic Park, which stomped back into theaters a couple of days ago in a 3D-converted 20th anniversary edition, conquered the box office in the summer of 1993. But that summer, because I was at that time a fan of A&E's reruns of The Fugitive, David Janssen's noirish, anti-authoritarian show from the '60s, I was more excited about--and ended up more enthralled by--a different blockbuster, director Andrew Davis' film version of The Fugitive. Sure, dinosaurs are cool, but white-knuckle, non-CGI-assisted action sequences involving narrow escapes from bus-train collisions and spur-of-the-moment swan dives from dams into waterfalls are cooler.

So are both Harrison Ford in the role of Janssen's memorably laconic and twitchy Dr. Richard Kimble (perfect recasting) and Tommy Lee Jones' entertaining reinterpretation of Gerard, who was a much more unlikable and humorless cop on the original series (Jones won an Oscar for his work, and let's pretend U.S. Marshals never happened). Blink and you'll miss Neil Flynn as a transit cop in a scene that Scrubs later used as a clever gag about the murky past of Flynn's nameless janitor character on the show. A not-as-tiny element of The Fugitive is James Newton Howard's original score.

The first score that Howard composed for a blockbuster is a pretty decent score with a couple of terrific cues. "Helicopter Chase" is the same theme that Debbie Allen's dancers performed a bizarre interpretive dance to at the 1994 Oscars (a moment that elicited snickers from many TV critics, including then-New York Times film critic Janet Maslin, who cracked, "Who ever said the score from The Fugitive had a good beat? Who said you could dance to it?"). The other standout cue is "It's Over/End Credits" (the theme for Kimble during this cue was later recycled by composer Louis Febre in CBS' 2000 Fugitive reboot with Tim Daly as Kimble and William T. Michaelson, er, Mykelti Williamson as Gerard).

In 2009, La-La Land Records released an expanded edition of the Fugitive score and corrected a huge audio mistake on the previous release of Howard's score, which nobody outside of Howard and his fellow musicians would have noticed (someone accidentally reversed the left and right channels on all the tracks). The booklet art on this two-CD La-La Land set is strange because it doesn't contain a single photo of Jones' craggy face and is filled with pics of the One-Armed Man, for the two people out there who are fans of the One-Armed Man. DVD producers can't clear pop songs on box sets of TV shows without ponying up an arm and a leg, and now movie stars' faces inside soundtrack album booklets can't be cleared either?

Though I enjoyed the 1993 film, I never got around to copping the 2009 release until a few weeks ago, when La-La Land posted that the album will go out of print in April. Selections from the now-out-of-print album are now part of the "AFOS Prime" playlist, so you don't have to search every warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse to hear some of this album.

***

The Fugitive made great use of Chicago locations--that St. Patrick's Day parade where Kimble hid from Gerard wasn't in the script and was an event Davis, a Chicago native, received permission to shoot in at the last minute--but that's not the only reason why the late Roger Ebert, who was also a Chicago native, loved the film and considered it "the best of all the summer thrillers" that dropped in 1993.

(Photo source: DVD Beaver)

The louder parts of Jones' Oscar-winning performance are what everyone from Scott Glenn in a 2008 Monk guest shot to more recently, Tim on Justified imitates or quotes from (and by the way, Tim was referencing a movie Justified cast member Nick Searcy appeared in), but the quieter parts of Jones' performance were also fascinating to Ebert. "As the chase continues, [Gerard] gradually becomes convinced of the innocence of his prey," wrote Ebert, "but this conviction is wisely never spelled out in dialogue, and remains ambivalent, expressed in the look in his eyes, or his pauses between words."

The original series was notable for delivering exposition through opening voiceovers by narrator William Conrad, which 2000 Fugitive series showrunner John McNamara said were a holdover from radio in an Entertainment Weekly article about the 2000 reboot. The film ditches the narration and avoids having characters deliver infodumpy dialogue, except in believable situations where minor infodumps are called for, like in Gerard's famous "Our fugitive has been on the run for 90 minutes!" speech to his team. As Ebert observed, the characters instead gradually reveal the way they are thinking, mostly through their facial expressions.

"The Fugitive has the standards of an earlier, more classic time, when acting, character and dialogue were meant to stand on their own, and where characters continued to change and develop right up until the last frame," wrote Ebert at the end of his four-star review of the film.

Ebert himself was a writer from an earlier, more classic time, when the newspaper industry that he and Gene Siskel emerged from wasn't in shambles and film criticism was everywhere on TV. Both lovers of all things Chicago and haters of deep-dish "Chicago-style" pizza (I agree with their opinion of "thumbs down" regarding that kind of pizza), Siskel and Ebert pioneered the movie review show format of two critics debating each other. It's a format that, frankly, sucked when Siskel and Ebert weren't the critics debating each other because "the original frenemies," as one of Ebert's Chicago Sun-Times colleagues referred to the duo in an oral history about their friendship, were the only ones who were great at it on-screen.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Neil Richardson, "The Riviera Affair"

Song: "The Riviera Affair" by Neil Richardson
Released: 1970
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: When I first saw Ocean's Thirteen, I dug the old-sounding Warner Bros./Village Roadshow logo music.



I wasn't aware that the logo graphics and music were a reference to '70s and '80s TV, in keeping with the film's nostalgia for things like '60s and '70s caper flicks and the camaraderie of the Rat Packers who starred in the original version of Ocean's Eleven (as heard in "You shook Sinatra's hand," the film's frequently repeated line to Al Pacino's villainous character about how much of a backstabbing asshole he's become). I didn't grow up in New York, so I learned on YouTube that the swanky Ocean's Thirteen logo music--"The Riviera Affair," a library music cue written by British composer Neil Richardson, who died in October at the age of 80--was the same instrumental that used to open and close the "4 O'Clock Movie" broadcasts on New York's WOR.



Steven Soderbergh's shout-out to the WOR movie broadcast graphics is the director's way of saying, "Ocean's Thirteen is just like those old, breezy caper flicks that used to turn up at 4:00 on WOR."

Richardson's instrumental was left off the Ocean's Thirteen soundtrack album, but it's part of 1996's Sound Gallery '60s and '70s library music instrumental compilation. An Amazon.com user review of The Sound Gallery sums up "The Riviera Affair" well. "Picture David Janssen and Diana Rigg cruising in a turquoise convertible along the open highway with the wind in their hair and the glorious possibilities of the future before them," says the reviewer. "This will give you just a small idea of how glorious and transcendent this tune is!!"

True, although when I hear "The Riviera Affair" and picture nearly the same thing--a relaxed playa cruising in a turquoise convertible along the open highway with his woman by his side--the twitchy star of the original Fugitive TV series doesn't exactly come to mind.

In 2009, another one of Richardson's loungy library music instrumentals was used to great effect when director Michel Hazanavicius gave ample screen time to Richardson's "Rio Magic" in the French spy spoof sequel OSS 117: Lost In Rio.

All the other "Rock Box" Tracks of the Day from this week:
Iggy and the Stooges, "Search and Destroy"
Raekwon feat. Inspectah Deck, Ghostface Killah and GZA, "Guillotine (Swordz)"
Dinah Washington, "This Bitter Earth"
Earth, Wind & Fire, "Reasons"