LoC #132 Top 112 Road Movies / Journey Films

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MILE 14

Logan ( 2017 )

Studio: 20th Century Fox
Director: James Mangold

2 Lists, 29 Points, #11 Pac-Man

TRAILER

Wolverine and an elderly Professor X who's dementia has caused his powers to kill a lot of people, ( including all the other X-Men aparently, ) are hiding out in an abandoned industrial site in Mexico. A woman pays Wolverine to take a girl to a refuge in Canada, and is immediately killed by agents trying to retrieve the girl. Realizing the girl is a mutant with identical powers to Wolverine, the professor insists they all go on a road trip to Canada to deliver the girl to the refuge.

James Howlett, code named Wolverine, debuted October 1974 in issue #180 of The Incredible Hulk where he appeared on the final panel as a brand new foe for the Hulk to fight, the main battle happening in issue # 181. Initially a weapon for the armed forces, Wolverine soon moved on to join the X-Men, becoming their most popular member.  Little surprise that when Fox decided the X-Men movie franchise would have spin offs, the first character they thought of was Wolverine. Of course, Wolverine was pretty much the only member of the X-Men who could have an origin film, as every member was a mutant who always had their powers, while Wolverine had the addition of an Adamantium skeleton which was added later in life. While various adaptions of X-Men in other media usually do not have every team member, they have always included Wolverine. This would include every animated version of the X-Men, including the series Wolverine and the X-Men for Nickelodeon. Every attempt at a film adaption of the X-Men included Wolverine, and actors asked to play him since the 80s included Bob Hoskins, Glen Danzing, Viggo Mortensen, Russell Crowe, Edward Norton and Keanu Reeves. The role finally went to Dougray Scott who was signed a multi-picture deal to play Wolverine in all the X-Men movies and spin-offs. However, while shooting a motorcycle stunt for the John Woo directed Mission Impossible 2, Scott sustained an injury, not only meaning he would not be available to shoot X-Men on their scheduled start, but once out of the hospital, would need to return to the Mission Impossible 2 set to complete his scenes. Production on Mission Impossible 2 had already run over, forcing director Bryan Singer to shoot every scene without Wolverine in the three weeks Scott had been delayed. Now he would be unavailable for another month at least. Worst of all, Wolverine was the main character of the first X-Men movie, as the story revolved around how he and Rogue are enlisted into the X-Men. So Singer needed to recast Wolverine that day, and begin shooting scenes with the new actor the next day. And aside from Scott, every actor Singer had asked had turned down the role. But he did remember something Cameron Crowe had told him when Crowe turned down the role. Crowe suggested a friend of his named Huge Jackman, an Australian actor who primarily worked in stage musicals, but had done a little film acting. With not much of a choice, Singer met with Jackman, and he was a foot and a  half too tall to play Wolverine, who in the comics was about 5 and a half feet tall. But as there was no time left, and casting came up empty, Jackson was on the set the very next day. His performance as Wolverine turned out to be brilliant. Even fans of the X-Men who complained about a tall actor playing Wolverine prior to the film opening wound up praising him.

Like most superhero franchises, 20th Century Fox had planed for The X-Men to be just a trilogy. A combination of the effects making these films expensive, the history of most franchises seeing diminishing ticket sales after the third film, and realizing that they probably could not get the entire cast to agree to do a fourth film, was good enough reason to end at three. Subsequently X-Men: The Last Stand ( 2006 ) was written to be the final film with characters being killed off or having their powers removed. But even with the film not doing well with critics, and getting even worse reviews from comic book fans, it ended up earning more money than the previous X-Men film. With second thoughts of killing off a franchise that was earning the studio hundreds of millions of dollars, it was decided to continue the X-Men films with a series of prequels to be called X-Men Origins ( 2009 ) which would feature the origin of all the individual characters. Of course they would choose the most popular character Wolverine for the first origin movie.  Despite a script by David Benioff who would later write the series  Game of Thrones, X Men Origins: Wolverine did worse with critics and comic book fans. While earning another $200 million for the studio, they decided there was enough bad will among moviegoers n the X-Men franchise that the only way to go forward was with a complete reboot. So the Origins series was abandoned. There had been an idea kicking around of doing an X-Men film that took place in the early days of the school, which would allow the recasting of characters as younger versions of themselves. Originally intended as a way of recasting characters like Storm and Jean Grey for the later Origins films instead of having to pay Halle Berry or Famke Janssen to return, it was now seen as a complete reboot where from that point forward all of the X-Men movies would feature the new cast in a different continuity. Critics and fans praised X-Men: First Class ( 2011 ), yet it earned the same amount of money as the previous films. There had been a sequel to X-Men Origins: Wolverine announced the week it was released. And then quietly shelved when critics pounced on the Origin film. But then after the X-Men reboot, and the insistence by Jackman for a second Wolverine film to be based on one of the comic book miniseries he liked, the sequel to X-Men Origins: Wolverine went back into production. The Wolverine ( 2013 ) earned more money than any other movie in the franchise, so a third stand-alone Wolverine movie was assured. Meanwhile X-Men: Days of Future Past ( 2014 ) brought Jackman as Wolverine back, along with the rest of the original cast, in a time traveling film where Wolverine meets the reboot cast, tying both the first three films and the reboot films together as the same continuity. Sort of. future continuity would be pissed on with Dark Phoenix ( 2019 ), 20th Century Fox's ill advised attempt to remake the story that fans hated from the original trilogy. But before that franchise killing film was released, we got Logan as the preferred last chapter of the X-Men saga. from a story by director James Mangold who had also directed The Wolverine, this was to show the final days of Wolverine and Professor Xavier. Critics and fans loved it, and it was cited as one of the greatest superhero films ever made. Both Jackman and Patrick Stewart announced they would be retiring from playing their respective X-Men characters after this film, as it was a fitting end for their characters. However, Stewart appeared as Xavier in at least one MCU film, and Jackman has agreed to reprise Wolverine in Deadpool 3.

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MILE 13

Sulivan's Travels  ( 1941 )

Studio: Paramount Pictures
Director: Preston Sturges

31 Points, 2 Lists, #3 Edward J Grug III

TRAILER

Director   wants to make a serious film about the poor,. So in order to get a better understanding of how the poor live, decides to travel around dressed as a hobo.

Another one of those films with no production history, Basically all I could find was that Sturges said he wrote the script in response to how comedies had become too preachy and less about making people laugh and more about teaching them a moral lesson. I guess that was the case, I know that if you were to watch the entire Our Gang series in chronological order, they tend to drop the slapstick and start teaching moral lessons by the M.G.M. years. And while it is tempting to say that this was a case of M.G.M. just being terrible at comedies, the trend began at Roach studios with shorts like Canned Fishing and The Awful Tooth where a grown up overhears the kids plotting a scheme and decides to teach them a lesson. Anyway, that is what inspired Preston Sturges to write the script for his most celebrated film. And the only other tidbit I could find is an unsubstantiated story that the opening four and a half minute scene of Sullivan arguing with his studio bosses in one continuous shot, was done on a bet with the cameraman that he couldn't do it. So with nothing else to write about this film, lets take a look at Preston Sturges. He got into show business after dating an unpleasant actress in 1928, who midway through the date claimed she was never into him, and  the only reason she agreed to date him was that she was writing a play and had dated him as part of her research for the play. Outraged, Preston told her he could write a play too, and it would be better than whatever she wrote, and have a longer Broadway run. Which turned out to be true, because while Sturges wrote his first play just to spite her, she had lied and was not actually writing any play. Discovering there was money in writing plays, and wrote a second one called Strictly Dishonorable which became a hit and got him offer to write scripts for Hollywood. The film industry had just converted from silent films to sound films, and was in need of script writers who could write scripts with dialog. He began writing freelance for M.G.M., 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures and Universal., eventually getting a long term contract from Paramount Pictures for $2,500 a week whether the studio used his scripts or not. He began getting fed up with how his scripts were being directed and decided to direct his scripts himself. Paramount gave him this opportunity with The Great McGinty ( 1940 ) which earned him an Academy Award for best screenplay. This lead to four straight years of hit films, of which Sullivan's Travels was one of. However, he began clashing with Paramount over creative control of his films. When his contract was up, he began working for Howard Hughes, who promised to finance his films give him creative control over all his pictures. The first he did for Hughes was The Sin of Harold Diddlebock ( 1947 ), a sequel to the silent comedy The Freshman ( 1925 )    for which he got Harrold Lloyd to come out of retirement to reprise his role. It bombed. Despite promises not to interfere with  his films, Hughes would regularly re-edit the films shot by Sturges., which brought their partnership to an end. By this time he was unable to get any Hollywood studio to hire him. His final film was made in Europe for a French studio.

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MILE 12

Dumb and Dumber ( 1994 )

Studio: New Line Cinema
Director: Peter Farrelly

34 Points, 3 Lists, #10 RVRII

TRAILER

Mistaking a briefcase of ransom money for luggage a girl he has a crush on left behind at an airport before boarding a plane, limbo driver Lloyd and his equally dumb friend Harry go on a cross country road trip to return it.


John Huges wrote a treatment for a film that was to be an R rated comedy about two morons, then had second thoughts about it. Although he thought it had a lot of comedy potential, it was also mean-spirited and could ruin his reputation, especially as he was branching off from teen films to family films like Home Alone. Not wanting to throw away a good idea, he offered the treatment to two other writers he knew in the business, the Farrelly Brothers.  Aspiring writer Peter Farrelly was encouraged to use his skills to write scripts, and hooked his brother Bobby into the profession.  Together they had a reputation of writing brilliantly funny scripts that were too politically incorrect for any director to agree to direct.  Thinking his idea for two mentally disabled men on a road trip was perfect for the Farrelly Brothers, he gave it to them on condition that they didn't put his name on the script when they wrote it. Peter Farrelly had grown frustrated with his scripts never being greenlit, and decided the only way he could get one of his scripts made into a movie would be for him to direct the movie himself.  He had worked for producer Charles Wessler before as a writer for an HBO special, and asked if he would be interested in producing a film he directed.  Deciding his best bet was to use the script based on the John Huges treatment, The part of Harry was offered to Nicolas Cage who was said he would do it, and soon after New Line Cinema greenlit the film. The producers wanted Steve Martin for Lloyd, but he turned the part down. Martin Short turned the part down as well. After a few more rejections they were able to get an up and coming comedian named Jim Carrey, who's breakthrough film Ace Ventura: Pet Detective had not yet been released.  Nicholas Cage demanded an extra $2 million for his role, and was either fired or quit. He was replaced with Jeff Daniels.

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MILE 11

The Wizard of Oz ( 1939 )

Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Director: Victor Fleming ( credited )

36 Points, 3 Lists, #3 Stethacantus

TRAILER

Sometimes a movie has very little history. Other times it has mountains worth of history. The Wizard of Oz is such a beloved film that it's history has been well documented in several books. It was derived from a very popular book series. And even it's side history, like that of Disney, is well documented. The following is just the condensed version of it's history. As for it's plot.. is there anyone here who doesn't know it by heart? A girl in Kansas named Dorothy is in a farmhouse when a tornado rips it from it's foundation and sends it flying through the air. It lands in the land of Oz where it crushes a nasty witch. Dorothy becomes a pawn of a witch power struggle between Glinda and The Wicked Witch of the West when Glinda uses a spell to  remove the Ruby Slippers of the crushed witch and put them on Dorothy's feet. Told the slippers weld great power, and the Wicked Witch will do anything to get them back, Glinda tells her she must make an epic journey to the Emerald City where it's wizard will help her to get back to the safety of Kansas. And then Glinda just floats away and abandons Dorothy to go on that journey alone. Fortunately she makes friends along her journey, promising each the Wizard will help them cure their physical disabilities when she has no idea if he is capable of doing it, or is willing to do it. The get to  the Emarald City and the wizard tells them he will grant their wishes, but only if they go to the Wicked Witcher's castle and kill her. ( Actually, this is a post code film, so there is no way they would be allowed to have the wizard specifically put a hit out on the Witch, and for Dorothy and her friends agree to do it, as what happened in the book it was based on. So instead, the wizard just asks them to steal that broom the Witch carries around with her all the time, and if the Witch dies in the process, well, sometimes accidents happen. ) So Dorothy melts the Wicked Witch by accident ( see production code ) gives the wizard the broom, finds out he's a fraud that doesn't actually have any powers, and Glinda shows up to tell Dorothy she could have gone home all along if she had just clicked the magical Ruby Slippers together. ( Looks like the wizard wasn't the only character manipulating Dorothy into killing the Witch. And thanks to  a loophole  in the production code, the film is released even though no one pays for this crime. )  Now that I have refreshed you on the plot, lets see how this fantastic film came to be.....


L Frank Baum had been many things in life. A newspaper columnist, magazine editor, window display designer, stage actor, playwright, poultry breeder, fireworks salesman, showman. But he never saw any real success until he began writing children's books. For years he had entertained children by improvising short fantasy stories, and after some encouragement from family members, used that talent to write books. He published his third book in May of 1900, a collaboration with graphic artist W. W. Denslow. It was inspired by Alice in Wonderland, a popular children's novel that Baum criticized for being incoherent. But he did like the idea of Alice traveling through fantasy world, and thought he could do a much better novel on the same subject. The girl in his book was named Dorothy, as a tribute to his wife's late niece Dorothy Louise Gage who had died as an infant. The fantasy world was to be called Oz, a name Baum came up with by looking at a card catalog in a library and seeing the draw for the books from O through Z. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz came very close to what we would consider today to be a graphic novel. No doubt there was some influence from the Sunday color sections of newspapers where at the time the first comic strips were being published, having been invented just five years earlier. Illustrations were on nearly every page, usually interacting creatively with the text. The only thing separating the book from the comics was that Baum never used word balloons or subtitles for dialog, Sadly, later editions removed most or all of the illustrations, with mostly just the text. The book was a success, but Baum never intended the story to have a sequel. Even after receiving thousands of fan letters from children begging him to write another Oz story, Baume insisted on writing children's books with other characters. It wasn't until 1904 where he went bankrupt promoting another one of his plays that he agreed to write The Marvelous Land of Oz to pay off his creditors. In 1907 he wrote a third Oz novel Ozma of Oz and would continue writing a new one every year. This ended with The Emarald City of Oz where in the last chapter the kingdom is sealed off from the rest of the world by a magic spell, and Baum apologizes to his readers, saying the spell will prevent him from getting any more stories from Oz. Despite complains from children across the world, Baum intended never to write an Oz novel again, feeling he had run out of ideas. However, in 1913 he wrote The Patchwork Girl of Oz, opening the book by saying that thanks to the new technology of radio, he can once again communicate with Oz and get new stories out. He would continue to write a new Oz novel every year until his death in 1919, with two more of his manuscripts published after his death. With the blessing of Baum's family, new Oz books were written by different authors and continued to be published every year up until 1942, after which the series continued sporadically until 1963 with five more novels.


You could add movie mogul to Baum's resume. It started with his stage production of The Wizard of Oz, followed by The Fairylogue and Radio Plays ( 1908 ).  Radio play not being what you think it sounds like. Radio-Play was a process of color dying a film to add colors to each individual frame of a motion picture. Similar to colorization, but instead of with computers, with artists hand coloring the frames with dye.  The Fairylogue and Radio Plays was a live stage show with actors dressed as characters from various Baum books, which periodically switched to colored motion picture films for part of the production. The show was expensive to produce and ended up bankrupting Baum again. To pay off his debt, the rights to the show were sold to the Selig Polyscope Company, who made The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ( 1910 ) and three other silent films based on the script for the stage show. Deciding the future was in motion pictures, not stage shows, Baum founded the Oz Film Manufacturing Company in 1914, which made a few feature films based on the Oz books before it too went bankrupt and was sold to Metro Pictures, who a decade later would combine with two other studios to become Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The last silent movie based on the Oz books was comedian Larry Semon's The Wizard of Oz ( 1925 ) for Chadwick Pictures, six years after Baum's death. Although supposedly based on the first book, it, like the previous film productions, was based on material from the later more popular novels. The story centered around Larry Semon's Scarecrow character instead of Dorothy, and the Tin Man, played by Oliver Hardy, was one of the film's villains.

A year after Baum's death, A young cartoonist living in Kansas named Walt Disney opened his first animation studio with his brother Roy and his best friend Ub Irwerks. After a year in business, the studio relocated to Hollywood, despite the major animation studios all being located in Manhattan. ( This out of necessity. Madison Avenue was where all of America's advertising agencies were, and the artists working for the animation studios supplemented their incomes by drawing advertisements. )  Disney was also inspired by Alice in Wonderland, and his studio got it's first notoriety with the Alice series. Loosely based on Alice in Wonderland, the shorts combined live action footage of a girl with animated backgrounds and characters. When the Alice series came to a close, Disney and Iwerks created a new character called Oswald the lucky Rabbit. The series was sold to Universal where it became a hit. Deciding he  deserved a raise, Disney took a train to New York City and asked the producer his studio was working for, Charles Mintz, for more money. Mintz instead told Disney he wanted a 20% pay cut. Mintz had secretly started his own studio in California called Screen Gems, and had hired Disney's animators behind his back. Telling Disney that Universal owned Oswald, his only option was to join Screen Gems and work for him at a reduced salary.  Disney refused, and officially cut ties with Minz, reducing his staff back again to just him, Iwerks and his brother. On the train ride home Disney developed a character to replace Oswald, and created Mickey Mouse. This time making sure he legally owned the films and characters his studio produced, Disney offered Micky Mouse to R.K.O. Radio Pictures. About the same time The Jazz Singer ( 1927 ) had been a blockbuster, and studios were beginning to convert from silent to sound films. Insisting to R.K.O. that Micky Mouse should be a sound film series, he produced the first sound cartoon Steamboat Willie ( 1928 ) which made Mickey Mouse a bigger star than Oswald. ( BTW, at this time Universal decided not to have Screen Gems produce the Oswald series any more because they found out Disney no longer worked there, and instead hired Walter Lantz to head an inhouse animation division for the studio, which would not only continue the Oswald series, but would also create the Chillie Willie and Woody Woodpecker series. )  The fortunes of Walt Disney studios grew with the creation of new animated stars like Goofy and Donald Duck. In 1933 Mary Pickford asked Disney to produce an Alice in Wonderland feature film, which like his earlier Alice series would have Mary shooting live action footage of herself as Alice, combined with an animated Wonderland. Disney was interested, but a short time later Pickford cancelled the project because Paramount announced they were filming their own live action adaption of Alice in Wonderland. Still interested in producing the first animated feature film, Disney attempted to acquire the rights to the Broadway musical Babes in Toyland. but discovered Hal Roach had just acquired the rights for a Laurel and Hardy film. The rights to other popular books were negotiated for, including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Wanting to be the first studio to produce an animated feature, and hearing rumors of other studios looking to do the same, Disney chose to start right away by adapting a story in the public domain, which would not require months of negotiations with publishers over film rights. While continuing to negotiate for the film rights to the other books, Disney began work on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs which took him from 1934 to 1937 to complete. When it was released, it broke all box office records and became the most successful film in motion picture history. In Hollywood, if anything is a major success, every other studio will copy it. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer immediately wanted their own version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but had no animators working for their studio. They hired Fred Quimby to create an Animation Department for  their studio. Meanwhile M.G.M. discovered that Walt Disney was in negotiations with the Baum estate for the rights to animate the Wizard of Oz novels. If Disney wanted to do the Oz novels, then he must know something, so M.G.M. did a run around and acquired the rights to the first novel. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz which was not owned by the Baum family due to L Frank Baum being forced to sell the rights to the publisher during one of his many bankruptcies, and was the only Oz book the family did not own. M.G.M. then asked Fred Quimby to produce a Wizard of Oz feature film as fast as possible. Bu just having hired animators who knew the business, Quimby gave the studio the bad news tat an animated feature film would take three years to produce something of the quality of Disney's film, and two years for an unsatisfactory film. Disney himself was working on his second feature, Pinocchio, which would not be completed until 1940.  M.G.M. decided they could wait until 1941, so decide to shoot the Oz Film as live action instead. The cartoon division wasn't a complete waste for M.G.M.  Quimby would go on to hire Tex Avery who made a lot of classic stand alone cartoon shorts and created Droopy Dog.  And two young animators named Hack Hannah and Joseph Barbera who created Tom and Jerry.  M.G.M. went from being the one major studio that didn't distribute cartoon shorts, to the studio that was surpassing Disney in quality.

Work began immediately on the script, with the decision to delete much of the second half of the book. Originally Glinda's castle was the final destination of Dorothy and her companions after the Wizard floats away in his balloon. For the script, the character of the Good Witch of the North and Glinda are combined into one character, and the journey from the Emerald City to Glinda's castle was eliminated. Because the film was to be shot using Technicolor, it was decided the silver slippers from the book would be Ruby Slippers in the film, which would look much better on screen. The next step was to cast the film. M.G.M. wanted Shirley Temple to play Dorothy. She was ten years old ate the time, which was age appropriate to the Dorothy in the book, and was the biggest child star in the world at the time. But she was also under contract at 20th Century Fox, which meant M.G.M. would need to negotiate with the rival studio.  They would also need to negotiate with Paramount for W,C, Fields, who they wanted as the Wizard. For the Wicked Witch of the West, they wanted Academy Award winning actress Gale Sondergaard. Since The Wizard of Oz was more-or-less a rip-off of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, M.G.M. wanted the Wicked Witch to be as glamorous as the Evil Queen.  And comedian Bert Lahr as the Cowedly Lion. For the rest of the cast they looked no further than the actors under contract to their studio. Billie Burke as Glinda. Buddy Ebsen as the Scarecrow, and Ray Bolger as the Tin Man. The biggest casting challenge was the Munchkins, which required them to put out a national casting call to gather enough dwarf actors to populate Munchkin City. As filming drew near, M.G.M. were unable to get 20th Century Fox to lend them Shirley Temple. So they chose 16 year old Francess Gumm, who had been under contract to their studio as Judy Garland. In the past few years she had quickly risen in the ranks as one of their most popular stare and had recently been cast as the love interest to their other teenage star Mickey Rooney, in the Andy Hardy film series. She was at least seven years too old to play Dorothy, which the studio felt fans of the book series would forgive. When the producer of the film decided he wanted the Wicked Witch to be an old hag rather than  glamorous, Sondergaard, who was not under contract to the studio, dropped out. She was replaced by character actress Margaret Hamilton. Apparently the negotiations with Paramount were successful and W,C. Fields was going to be lent out to M.G.M. The addition of the character Professor Marvel was written specifically for Fields. However, filming on You Can't Cheat An Honest Man ( 1939 ) went behind schedule, so Fields was replaced at the last minute by M.G.M. contract player Frank Morgan. The final cast change happened when Ray Bolger insisted that he play the Scarecrow instead of the Tin Man, and Budy Ebsen agreed to switch parts. Unfortunately the makeup they were using for the Tin Man had aluminum dust which slowly poisoned Ebsen to the point that he had to be hospitalized ten days into shooting his scenes. Both Ebsen and the makeup needed to be replaced. Jack Haley was currently on loan from 20th Century Fox, so was immediately assigned the role.

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( Continued )




Of course, there was also the revolving door of directors on this film. Richard Thorpe began directing, but was fired by producer Mervyn LeRoy. His replacement was George Cukor who's main contribution was to decide to scrap every bit of footage shot so far, and for Judy Garland to remove the blonde wig and babydoll makeup Thorpe had given her character. However, before Cukor was able to shoot a single frame of footage, he was reassigned to direct M.G.M.s other messy production Gone with the Wind ( 1939 ).  He was replaced by Victor Fleming who shot most of the film, but hen had to leave before it was completed so that he could direct Gone With the Wind which apparently Cukor had completely screwed up. King Vidor was brought in to complete the film, and his scenes were mostly the back and white footage that bookended the movie. During the editing process, M.G.M. decided they wanted the movie cut down to 100 minutes. LeRoy had to choose between cutting one of two songs. The Jitterbug or Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The studio wanted to keep The Jitterbug which had been an expensive and complicated dance number to shoot. Also, Jitterbugging was a dance craze at the time, and they felt audiences would like that sequence better. What eventually saved Somewhere Over the Rainbow and doomed The Jitterbug was that Somewhere Over the Rainbow took place during the black and white scenes, so would cost less to distribute than the three film strip Technicolor scenes.

The Wizard of Oz was released in August of 1939, and bombed at the box office. It would not recoup its budget until the later re-releases. Disney went ahead and acquired the rights to all the rest of the Oz novels, but never got around to making any Oz animation. In 1957 he decided to make a live action Oz feature starring the cast of The Mickey Mouse Club to be called The Rainbow Road to Oz. A script was written, songs were composed, costumed were fabricated and the sets were built. Wanting to promote the upcoming film, Walt asked the Mouseketeers to perform some of the musical numbers in their costumes on the Oz sets for a special episode of The Mickey Mouse Club. But after watching them film the episode, decided to cancel the film. It wasn't just the lackluster performance by the Mouseketeers that had him rethinking the film. On November 3, 1956, CBS broadcasted The Wizard of Oz on television for the first time. It did so surprisingly well in the ratings that a year later it aired again. A brand new generation of kids were seeing the film for the first time, and falling in love with it. Disney must have realized there was no way his Oz Film could compete. CBS began broadcasting The Wizard of Oz every year as an annual event, which only ended when NBC nabbed the broadcast rights and began airing it annually on their network. It would continue airing annually on either NBC or CBS until 1991. It was such an anticipated television event that in 1974 Dunkin Donuts began rebranding their donut holes as Munchkins to be eaten as the official snack while watching The Wizard of Oz while Marvel and D.C. teamed up for the official comic book adaption, released as a giant sized treasury edition. The annual airing began to lose its luster when video tape recorders became available.  If you had a VCR, you could tape it and watch it any time you wanted. It was released for sale on home video, on VHS, Betamax, Laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray.  Ted Turner bought the film along with Gone With the Wind and began airing it on TBS as many times a year as he wanted.  The last network to air it annually was the WB, which ended when it became the CW. Now it is on cable all the time.

One final thing to mention.  Not only does The Wizard of Oz qualify as a road movie, but so does any of the other Oz films as they all insist on having a journey along the yellow brick road as a major part of the plot.  This not only includes previously mentioned Oz films, but The Wonderful Land of Oz ( 1969 ),  the animated sequel to the M.G.M. film Journey Back to Oz ( 1972 ), the Australian Rock opera Oz ( 1976 ), the Disney sequel to the M.G.M. film Return to Oz ( 1985 ), Tom and Jerry and The Wizard of Oz ( 2011 ), the prequel to the M.G.M. film  Oz the Great and Powerful ( 2013 ), and a film that surprisingly wasn't on anyone's list, The Muppet Wizard of Oz ( 2005 )

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MILE 10

Wild Strawberries ( 1957 )

Studio: AB Svensk Filmindustri
Director: Ingmar Bergman

37 Points, 2 Lists, #6 Charles Castle

TRAILER

An elderly academic goes on a 400 mile road trip to  receive an honorary degree, and on the way has flashbacks of his past life.

We have reached another milestone. We are now in the top ten. Unfortunately the write-up may be a little thin. While a dumb but beloved fantasy film like The Wizard of Oz had tons of back story, this important and critically acclaimed film has  almost nothing. From an idea Bergman had on a road trip which he wrote into an original script, got it green lit immediately, and went to his company of actors who he used in most of his films and stage productions. So not much to tell about the making of this film. Originally a writer and director for the stage, Ingmar Bergman began working in the Swedish film industry in 1941 as a script writer, eventually working his way up to director in 1946. After a decade and about a dozen films, he had his first international hit with the comedy Smiles of a Summer Night ( 1955 ). This was followed by one of his most prolific years. In 1956 he was the director of three stage productions while taking time to turn one of his plays into the film The Seventh Seal ( 1957). The stress lead to an ulcer which put him in the hospital for two months in the spring of 1957. It was in his hospital bed that he wrote the script for Wild Strawberries. It had come from an idea he had during a car trip from Stockholm to Dalama, where he took a detour through his childhood town. Driving past the house where his Grandmother once lived, he imagined opening the door and finding it unchanged from the way he last saw it as a child. He then thought what a good idea for a film. Someone visiting their old home town, walking through doors and seeing the insides of buildings as they were in the past. It was this idea he developed into a script while stuck in a hospital bed. The script was completed on May 31st, and he began shooting on July 2,, completing principal photography on August 27th, and having it completed and released by Christmas. While he used his stock company as the cast, he insisted on casting the lead of the elderly academic to celebrated silent era director Victor Sjöström, who's filmography included Bergman's favorite film The Phantom Carriage ( 1921 ) which had a very similar plot to Wild Strawberries. Shortly after directing The Phantom Carriage, Sjöström moved to Las Angeles and began working as a director for M.G.M. There he directed one of my favorite silent films The Wind ( 1928 ). Sjöström had begun in the film industry as an actor, and when his directorial career ended with the arrival of sound films, he returned to Sweeden to take up acting again. He was in his late 70s, sickly and recently retired when Bergman begged him to star in Wild Strawberries. Sjöström eventually agreed, but was too frail to film on the road. So a back projector  and a stationary car interior were used to simulate most of the car trip. It would be Sjöström's final film. He would die three years later at the age of 80.

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STOPPED AT MILE 10!

My plan to finish this LoC by Labor Day was nearly thwarted by hackers, supposedly. All I know is that for the past week, every time I tried to go onto this website, I was stopped by my internet provider warning me that the site was taken over by evil hackers who would them steal my Rifftrax password. Ooooooooh! After a couple of days of avoiding this site, thinking those hackers would be easily thwarted and driven off, and still getting the warning, I thought, "Wait a second. Who gives a shit if the hackers get my Rifftrax password? So I proceeded past the warning page, then two more warning pages, and got onto this site, then tried to go onto the General Discussion page and was once again warned by my internet provider. Then past those two warning pages, clicked this thread and had to go past two more warning pages...... Okay I get it Spectrum! This site has hackers! While you are too busy bothering with this, you are not bothering to renegotiate a deal with Disney.

Anyway, tried to post something, got a couple of more warning pages, which in turn deleted the body of the text I had written, which basically meant I could not post anything here. Did a full smartscan search, no malware. Which means the hacker suck at what they are doing... or maybe there are no hackers and everyone at Spectrum are just a bunch of morons! Tried to use my phone to post something over a completely different data network and the site was absolutely blocked with no option to go onto it at my own risk.

So it seems that today the hackers are gone, perhaps dead, and I can start posting  here again. Fortunately I wrote the write-ups elsewhere and all but #1 is completed, which fortunately has tons of behind the scenes stuff and production history for the write-up and will probably take until Monday to fully write and edit. So....back to the LoC. And lets hope those hackers do not come back.

[stethacantus]

MILE 9

The Blues Brothers ( 1980 )

Studio: Universal Pictures
Director: John Landis

38 Points, 2 Lists, #2 Stethacantus

TRAILER

Jake and Elwood Blues go on a mission from God to go on a road trip with their band to raise money to keep the orphanage they grew up in from closing. On the way they make dangerous enemies and become public enemy with law enforcement, leading to constant auto chases.

Second City alumni Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi joined the cast of Saturday Night Live  on its inaugural season, and soon became the series most popular players. Aykroyd had opened a bar shortly after joining the cast, where the shows after parties would be held. A fan of blues music, Aykroyd kept the jukebox stocked with Blues singles. Belushi soon became indoctrinated into the Blues himself.  The bar had a small stage with an amplifier and a few instruments if any of the shows house band members wanted to jam. Often a drunken cast member would get on stage and sing a song. Independent of each other, Belushi and Aykroyd would often get on the stage to belt out a Blues song. One week on SNL the show ran short in the dress rehearsal. At the time SNL was more of a late night variety show, where much of the 90 minutes was filed by musical guests, stand up comedians like Andy Kaufman where you had no idea how long his routine would last, short films submitted by independent directors that may or may not be completed by Saturday, and  a puppet show from Jim Henson who may or may not show up that week. The writers and cast members were inspired by Monty Python's Flying Circus which had just begun airing in the United States, and so were often submitting short sketches of no more than a minute. Exactly how long a show ran was not known until the dress rehearsal an hour prior to the live broadcast. If it ran long, some sketches were cut. Often it ran short. Usually when this happened, the house band would be asked to perform a number while wearing costumes.  The previous week there had been a sketch about killer bees, where cast members wore bee costumes and carried guns. The band was asked to wear the bee costumes and perform a song about bees.  Belushi suggested a Blues standard called I'm the King Bee, and asked if he could don a bee costume as well and sing the song.  Dan Aykroyd got into the act by playing a harmonica. This eventually lead to Belushi and Aykroyd performing together at the bar. On April 22 1978,  Steve Martin was the shows host. A comedian who had frequently hosted SNL, his career had exploded and was beginning to sell out arenas on his comedy tours. That night the show hadn't been able to book a musical guest. Aykroyd asked if he and Belushi could perform as a fictional band called The Blues Brothers, which had both he and Belushi wearing what would become their signature Blues Brothers outfits.  Martin was impressed with their performance, and asked if they wanted to be the opening act for one of his shows. On September 9,  1978  the Blues Brothers opened for Martin with the SNL house band as their musicians at the Universal Amphitheater. The performance was recorded and two months later released as a live album called  The Blues Brothers: Briefcase Full of Blues. The album went to #1 on the billboard albums chart, and produced two top 40 singles.

1978 had been a good year for Belushi.  Both he and other SNL cast members had been in low budget films and so far on ex-cast member Chevy Chase had any success. That changed with Animal House which was a huge hit. Universal wanted Animal House's director Lohn Landis to do another screwball comedy for them, and wanted John Belushi to star in it. Meanwhile, Aykroyd had co concocted an extensive back story for the Jake and Elwood Blues characters he and Belushi portrayed in the Blues Brothers act. It involved the pair growing up together in an orphanage and being taught the Blues by a janitor.  A condensed version of the story was printed in the liner notes of the first Blues Brothers album. When Landis approached Belushi about doing another comedy, he brought up the Blues Brothers back story, and suggested that he and Aykroyd make a Blues Brothers movie. With the combo of a Landis directed Belushi comedy, and it featuring the Blues Brothers, both Paramount and Universal wanted to make the movie, and soon both studios were in a bidding war. Universal won out, but had agreed to make a film with no budget and no script. It was up to Aykroyd to write a script.  Having never seen a movie script before, let alone writing one, Aykroyd wrote an outline for [i5]The Return of The Blues Brothers[/i] which was 342 pages, which was three timed longer than a standard screenplay.  Landis had the task of rewriting the entire thing into a comprehensible script.

It should be pointed out that at the time Landis was good friends with Steven Spielberg.  The plot for The Return of The Blues Brothers had a few car chases, which would make it an action film. Spielberg brought up that he would be directing his own action film, 1941. Legend has it that both directors decide to compete to see which one could direct the greatest over the top action film ever.  Another version of this story has the two betting each other as to who could make the most expensive comedy ever. Never the less, both were bad influences on each other, driving each to outdo each other with explosions and destruction in their respective films. They also had cameo roles in each other's films. Landis even went as far as lending Spielberg Belushi and Aykroyd for small roles in 1941. Their characters, an insane fighter pilot looking to shoot down Japanese planes and a tank commander respectively, only meet once in the film, and neither was on set at the same time. The scene where Aykroyd salutes Belushi from a distance being shot on different sets on different days. With their movie careers taking off, and a second live Blues Brothers album coming out, Belushi and Aykroyd left Saturday Night Live so they had the time to make both movies.

Much like what was going on at 1941, the budget for what was now being called The Blues Brothers was out of control.  Landis would later claim that most of the budget overrun was not due to the over the top stunts and explosions, or the record breaking 103 vehicles destroyed to make this film, or the actual mall destroyed to film an indoor car chase scene, or the thousands of extras when the police and army finally corner Jake and Elwood, but production delays due to Belushi's addiction to cocaine, which worsened throughout the film. If Belushi wasn't showing up to the set late, he was passing out in his trailer shortly after arriving, and on occasions being missing for days. On December 13, 1979 Steven Spielberg's 1941 was released to theaters in the United States. Although an ensemble film, Dan Aykroyd was billed as the star, John Belushi got third billing. The trailers featured mostly clips of Aykroyd and Belushi, while the original release poster featured caricatures of Warren Oats, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the general release one sheet poster caricatures of the cast members rioting on Hollywood Boulevard while much larger caricatures of Belushi and Aykroyd are in the foreground, and the international poster showing a Japanese submarine with inset photos of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Neither Belushi nor Aykroyd were the main characters in the film, and both had far less screen time than the teenagers who were the main characters. Yet Universal chose to promote the film as an Aykroyd and Belushi film as a selling point, and also mention it was directed by the guy who directed Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Blues Brothers had wrapped up shooting and was in post-production when 1941 bombed at the box office. It was a nightmare for the studio. Bad enough that 1941 being a film directed by Spielberg did nothing for the box office, but they were counting on Aykroyd and Belushi to sell tickets. When they didn't sell tickets, Universal began to panic because they had another expensive Aykroyd and Belushi movie being released  that summer. furthermore, many theaters refused to book the film because they thought white Americans didn't want to see a film with so many black singers like James Brown, Aretha Franklyn and Cab Calloway in the cast. Released in only 594 theaters, it ended up coming in second place at the box office, earning nearly $5 million dollars. It ended up earning $115 million at the end of it's original run. The Belushi/Aykroyd comedy team seemed viable. Columbia hired them to star together in the comedy Neighbors. Belushi and Aykroyd had some other films as a team in the works. National Lampoon wanted a sequel to Animal House, but Universal put it on hold after the sequel More American Graffiti did poorly a the box office. Lampoon was to ask Belushi to come back, and create a character for Aykroyd. Steve Marrtin wrote The Three Amigos with plans for Belushi and Aykroyd to be his co-stars. Ron Howard had asked Aykroyd and Belushi to star in Night Shift. And Aykroyd had written treatments for both Ghostbusters and Spies Like Us intending Belushi to be his co-star. And Landis was hoping for a Blues Brothers sequel. Belushi would never get the chance to star in any of them.

[stethacantus]

MILE 8

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ( 2005 )

Studio: Touchstone Pictures
Director: Garth Jennings

40 Points, 3 Lists, #9 RVRII & Pastor of Muppets

TRAILER

Earth is destroyed by aliens, and the only survivors are human Arthur Dent, and his friend Ford Prefect who turns out to be an alien himself who was secretly on Earth as a researcher  for the intergalactic book The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. They are rescued by a spaceship piloted by Ford's semi-cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox and his crew aboard his spaceship The Heart of Gold, who are searching the galaxy for the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.

I have to confess here that my only connection to this famous Douglas Adams story is the 1981 television series back when it was first broadcasted on PBS in the early 80s. I know it has been adapted into every form of media known to man, and for the longest time I had been meaning to listen to the radio shows or at the least read the novels, but have still not gotten around to it. If the movie is anything like the plot of the television series then I would think it was a long stretch for anyone to think of this as an equivalent to a road film. And yet, it was on three lists and is ranked at #8 in this LoC. It isn't just the highest ranking Science Fiction Fantasy on this LoC, it is the only Science Fiction Fantasy on this LoC ( unless you count the Beavis and Butt-Head movie. )  No one thought of adding any of the Star Wars films or Star Trek films, but thought of this.


Douglas Adams  got his first break as a writer when he was discovered by Graham Chapman shortly after his writing partner John Cleese had decided not to make any more episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The remaining five members were still going ahead with a six episode fourth season, so Chapman asked Adams if he wanted to be his new writing partner. One of the skits Adams worked on, where a doctor refuses to help a patient who is bleeding out until he fills out the proper paperwork, made it onto the show. And he even got to have a small role in one of their filmed skits.  But what seemed like the dream of a comedy writers lifetime, being invited to be an unofficial member of Monty Python, wasn't the case. The group decided to discontinue writing for television after the six episodes. Chapman used Adams to co-write a couple of other television scripts for other shows, and nothing more. As a solo writer, the BBC wasn't interested in hiring him. He would often submit unsolicited scripts for his favorite series, only to have them rejected for not being in the style the BBC preferred.  For several years his writing career was dead, with the BBC occasionally assigning him to write a random Doctor Who episode. That is until the head of BBC radio asked him to write for their division.  BBC radio still produced audio series and needed talented writers, which they were no longer getting as those writers preferred television.  After a year of writing radio scripts, Adams was asked to develop a radio sitcom. He proposed a generic sitcom about buddies living in an apartment when his boss said he was hoping Adams would do a science fiction comedy instead. Adams was thrilled.  He loved the genre. He immediately pitched an anthology series called The Ends of The Earth which each week would be a parody of a different doomsday story. He was given a six episode order and began writing the series. While writing the first episode he came up with an alien character who would be the weekly host, acting as the Rod Sterling for the series. As an explanation for the alien character, Adams decided he would be a field writer for an intergalactic guide book called The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. Realizing the premise of the book was far more interesting than having to come up with six different ways to have the Earth destroyed, Adams explained the new premise to his boss and got the go ahead.

The first episode was broadcasted on March 8 1978 and it quickly became very popular. It was the first radio series to be broadcast in stereo, so Adams used this to design the sound effects. It would be repeated several more times that and the next year. The entire show was re-recorded for an LP which was a best seller.  Soon after there would be a stage production of The first season, a novel written by Adams based on the first season, and finally, a second season. It was during production of the second season that Hollywood came calling. At least one producer who Adams never named, and an executive working for ABC both wanted to buy the film rights to the novel. He refused to sell because he was convinced all they wanted to do was turn his story into a rip-off of Star Wars. In 1978 producer Glenn A. Larson created the television series Battlestar Galactica, which resulted in 20th Century Fox in behalf of Lucas Films suing Universal Pictures, the studio that produced the series, for copyright infringement, claiming that Battlestar Galactica was derivative of Star Wars Not wanting to step into any legal trouble, studios wanting their own Star Wars would need to source it from existing media. Paramount soured their own property Star Trek. United Artist sourced Moonraker from a James Bond novel of the same name. Universal sourced Buck Rogers for the Glenn A. Larson series [/i]Buck Rogers in the 25th Century[/i] and Flash Gordon for the film of the same name. This after counter suing 20th Century Fox and Lucas Films for copyright infringement of their Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon movie serials. Adams was well aware that if he sold the rights to the book, the plot would be mostly jettisoned and replaced with battling space ships and laser sword fights. He did agree to sell an option to producer  Ivan Reitman who had produced Animal House and who he felt was interested in turning The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy into a movie because of it's humor, not because of it's potential to be a special effects space opera.  Reitman told him he wanted to cast Dan Aykroyd as Ford Prefect. Adams once again rewrote the first season of the radio show, this time as a film script. And then... the film just never happened, and the option ran out. Adams later learned that when Reitman had a meeting with Aykroyd to offer him the role. Akroyd told him instead that he had another film in mind, called Ghostbusters, and he wanted Reitman to direct it. He agreed, and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was dumped on the backburner, then completely forgotten. Meanwhile, the second season of the radio show was also turned into a novel, while the BBC asked for a television series.

In 1976 Douglas Adams wrote a Doctor Who serial called The Krikkitmen which the BBC rejected. Six years later the BBC wanted a second season of the television series The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.  Deciding not to readapt the second season of the radio show, which was already adapted into the second novel, he decided to adapt the plot for The Krikkitmen into the second season of the television show. And then Adams and the BBC had a falling out. The end result was the cancellation of both the radio and television series. Adams went ahead with the third novel Life, The Universe, And Everything which was adapted from the unused Krikkitmen script. The novels were called a trilogy, and Adams had no plans to continue writing any more stories with the characters. That is until 1984 when the fourth book in the trilogy So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish was published. Then the fifth book in the trilogy Mostly Harmless in 1992.  In 2000  Jay Roach, the director of the Austin Powers and Meet The Parents franchises,  convinced Douglas Adams to let him make a film adaption of  The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Once again Adams wrote a script, and Roach had Spike Jonze as the director, Jim Carrey cast as Zaphod Beeblebrox, and Hugh Laurie as Arthur Dent. And then Douglas Adams suddenly died, and the project fell apart. One of the producers, The first draft script and film rights to the novel passed around from producer to producer before work finally begun on the film in 2004 with a different cast and director.

[stethacantus]

MILE 7

Pee-wee's Big Adventure ( 1985 )

Studio: Warner Bros.
Director: Tim Burton

46 Points, 4 Lists, #2 Pac-Man

TRAILER

This past summer we said a sad farewell to comedian Paul Reubens, better known to the world as Pee-wee Herman, who died on July 30th of cancer. Before his death, he had written a note to be, released posthumously.

Please accept my apology for not going public with what I've been facing the last six years. I have always felt a huge amount of love and respect from my friends, fans and supporters. I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.

A classy and touching goodbye from a man we never thought would get old. He was 70 years old at the time of his death.  Pee-wee was still in his pre-teens. Pee-wee's Big Adventure will always remain his most celebrated film. It has a very simple plot. Pee-wee's beloved bicycle is stolen, and mistakenly believing it is in the basement of the Alamo, goes on a cross country journey to get it back. 

Paul Reubens had been a failed stand-up comedian due to constantly forgetting punchlines to his jokes, and leaving details out of the set-ups. Deciding he was better suited for improve where he would not need to remember lines, he joined the Groundlings in the early 70s.  It was there that he met future collaborator Phil Hartman. During a1977 show the Groundlings were asked by an audience member to portray people you would find in comedy clubs. As members of the improve troupe improvised MCs, hecklers and drunks, Reubens drew on his past experiences to do a stand-up comedian who is flopping, during which he did what would become the signature Pee-wee Herman laugh at his own jokes, and replied to insults from the Groundling member pretending to be a heckler "I know you are, but what am I?" Hartman thought the character had a lot of potential, so he and Reubens developed it for further use. The character became more immature with each comedy club performance. Looking to give the character a name, Paul chose Pee-wee from the Pee-wee Harmonica he once had as a kid. The last name Herman from a kid in his home town.

In 1980 Saturday Night Live did the unthinkable and fired the original cast members. ( Or what was left of the original cast members who hadn't left, or were planning to leave, to work in movies. )  The word was out that NBC was casting talented comedians for the new cast, and both Hartman and Reubens auditioned. Both were rejected. Having developed the Pee-wee Herman character, Reubens and Hartman decided to turn it into a lounge act featuring Groundlings members. The Pee-wee Herman Show was performed as a raunchy 1950s kids show with Reubens as Pee-wee, and fellow  Groundling members ,John Paragon as Jabmi the Genie, Lynne Marie Stewart as the beautiful Miss Yvonne,  Edie McClurg as Hermit Hattie and Hartman as Captain Carl. The show was a success. Tommy Chong, who was friends with some of the Groundling members, asked many of the cast members from the Pee-wee Herman Show, including Reubens, to be in Cheech and Chong's Next Movie in various small roles. While Reubens played a hotel desk clerk, that character later in the film goes onto a club stage as Pee-wee Herman. While the movie didn't give Reubens the opportunity to perform his Pee-wee act, it did give the character national exposure. In 1981 HBO taped the show to air as one of their comedy specials. David Letterman began inviting Reubens onto Late Night as Pee-wee. In 1982 he was invited to participate in the NBC comedy special Twilight Theater, a sketch comedy show that aired during the Saturday Night Live time slot on a week it was in hiatus. He wrote a condensed version of The Pee-wee Herman Show with new material where he finds a lost chimpanzee and adopts it as a pet, only for an organ grinder ( played by Steve Martin ) to turn up and say the monkey was his. With the television exposure, what began as a lounge act became a major traveling show that was selling out theaters. Pee-wee Herman continued to be a guest on Late Night with David Letterman as well as guest appearances on other comedy specials shot for cable. This culminated in The Pee-wee Herman Show selling out at Carnegie Hall in 1984.

This caught the attention of Warner Bros. who contacted Reubens and asked him if he wanted to do a theatrical version of his Pee-wee show. Reubens responded to them that he would love to do a Pee-wee film, but as long as it was an original script with Pee-wee in a brand new adventure. Reubens favorite film was Pollyanna ( 1960 ), a live action Disney movie starring Haley Mills as an orphan sent to live with her uptight rich relatives. Basically The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air 30 years earlier, only with a white girl. Reubens wanted to write a remake, but with his Pee-wee character replacing Pollyanna. He and Hartman were given offices at the Warner Bros. lot to write  the script. It was thee that Reubens noticed many of the crew members working at the studio used bicycles to get around the massive facility, and eventually asked if the studio could give him a bicycle of his own. Having writers block on the Pollyanna adaption, Reubens began riding around the famous backlots and through many recognizable Warner Bros. sets hoping to get inspiration. He decided the film should end with Pee-wee riding around a backlot and through sets of films being shot. As he and Hartman expanded on that idea, they eventually decided to drop the Pollyanna premise and make the entire film about Pee-we and his bicycle, eventually settling on the idea of Pee-wee's bicycle being stollen, and him going on a country wide search to get it back. Reubens had seen and enjoyed a stop motion animated short from Disney film called Frankenweenie ( 1984 ), and then found out that Disney had just fired the director who made it, because it was scaring the shit out of the children who saw it in theaters and had to be pulled from release. Reubens tracked down the director who made it, Tim Burton, and asked him how he would like to direct a live action Pee-wee Herman movie. As director, one of Burton's first duties was to hire a composer. He suggested the lead singer of Oingo Boingo Danny Elfman. Reubens was a huge Oingo Boingo fan and agreed with the choice. Elfman had never scored a major studio movie before, and had to be talked into doing it.

The movie was a huge success. Paramount signed Reubens to a three picture deal to make more Pee-wee Herman movies for their studio. CBS asked him to adapt his stage show into a real Saturday Morning kids show, but with just G rated material, and some segments each episode that could pass for educational ( as demanded by the FCC ). Pee-wee's Playhouse began airing in the fall of 1986. Most of the first season episodes had been filmed before Phil Hartman finally joined the cast of Saturday Night Live They both had a falling out over the direction of the Pee-wee Herman character, and Hartman decided to no longer be associated with Reubens, and instead concentrate his talents on SNL. The first of the Pee-wee films for Paramount, Big Top Pee-wee, ( 1988 ) bombed at the box office. The filming of that movie interrupted production of the  third season of Pee-wee's Playhouse resulting in only two episodes being made. Rubens completed a fourth and fifth season. In 1991 Reubens made the mistake of going to a porn theater in Florida, not realizing the police there regularly staked out the theaters to arrest anyone they saw pleasuring themselves. Reubens was one of four men in the theater arrested for spanking the monkey. But when the police realized who they had arrested, they alerted the press, forced Reubens to do a perp walk, and released the mug shot. CBS immediately cancelled Pee-wee's Playhouse, although later in a joint statement from CBS and Reubens, they claimed that thee had been an agreement that the show would end after season five. The deal with Paramount went away. The theme park Disney-M.G.M. Studios had shot a short film with Pee-wee explaining how films were dubbed as part of the tour. It was immediately removed. There was also a line of Pee-wee toys based on the television series which Toys-r-Us immediately removed form their shelves. MTV, who usually distanced themselves from controversy by pulling any video that got complaints, asked Reubens to appear as Pee-wee on their 1991 Video Music Awards. After that, Reubens decided to retire the Pee-wee character. He would go on to play other characters, such as The Spleen in Mystery Men ( 1999 ).  In 2007 he appeared as Pee-wee for the first time in fifteen years for the Spike TV Guy's Choice Awards , and occasionally revived the character for the odd television guest appearance Finally, there was a revival of The Pee-wee Herman Stage Show combining elements from the original production with elements from Playhouse. In 2016 he made his first Pee-wee film in 28 years, Pee-wee's Big Holiday.  It was most likely shortly after completing that film he was diagnosed with cancer. Pee-wee's Big Holiday was the last time he ever portrayed the character.

[stethacantus]

MILE 6

O Brother, Where Art Thou? ( 2000 )

Studio: Touchstone Pictures
Director: Joel Coen

49 Points, 3 Lists, #6 Edward J Grug III & Pac-Man

TRAILER

During the great depression, three convicts on a chain gang escape and head to a town that is about to be purposely flooded  to create a lake, which  one of the convicts says has a hidden treasure.

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? was a pretty big film when it came out in 2000. It was perhaps the most money spent on the promotion of a Coen Brothers film, and that includes No Country For Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Rasing Arizona or Fargo. I do recall the video for Man of Constant Sorrow was on very heavy rotation on VH-1 in 2000, which was entirely plot spoiling clips from the film, so by the time the movie came out i was already sick and tired of it.  The history of this film? The Coen Brothers decided to adapt The Odyssey into a tale taking place in the Great Depression. Changing the era and location  of classic stories was the rage in the 1990s and early 2000s. Although mostly with the Shakespeare plays.  Pretty much most of the plot from The Odyssey was eliminated from this adaption, keeping just variations of some of the monsters Odysseus and his men faced on their journey.  The original poem, which is perhaps the oldest surviving journey tale, dates back to Ancient Greece.  One of two surviving epic poems composed by Homer, it tells the tale of King Odysseus of Ithaca, who had participated in the ten year long Trojan War. ( Homer's other surviving poem, The Iliad, is the only surviving account of that Ancient Greek war, and is best remembered for the trick that finally ended the war, the Trojan Horse. That an Achilles poor choice in footwear.  ) While all the other surviving Greek combatants have returned to their homes, Odysseus is prevented from doing so by the god Poseidon, who Odysseus unwisely pissed off. Sent off course by a storm summoned by Poseidon, Odysseus and his men end up far from home, and spend the next decade getting back, having to face all sorts of supernatural  perils on the trip.  Finally returning to Ithaca he discovers his palace overrun by suitors looking to marry his wife Queen Penelope so they can become the next king. Odysseus slays the suitors and retakes his throne.

The Odyssey was written prior to the existence of books, where literature had to be memorized word for word by the bard who wrote it, who would then recite it at parties and other gatherings. They were written in verse to make memorization by the bard easier. The bard would usually adopt an apprentice who he would teach all his literature word for word, and who would continue telling his stories one the original bard died. Only existing as a memorized poem, the literature would be passed down from bard to bard until a bard was killed before finding an apprentice, and the literature lost forever. Invention of writing introduced a new way of preserving old bards tales, but it also had it's drawbacks.  The printing press would not be invented for another two thousand years, which meant that one scroll the literature was written on could be the only existing copy of that literature.  Sometimes scribes would make a copy of a scroll. But it could take months to complete and was not done often.  This made it easy for books to be lost forever when all known copies were destroyed, either accidentally or deliberately.  The Odyssey survived long enough to be translated into Latin and written on a few scrolls for the amusement of Roman aristocrats. There Odysseus name was changed to Ulysses.  Although the poem's name, The Odyssey which roughly translated to Odysseus' Tale, remained the same. It became just a nonsense word, but eventually came to mean an epic peril filled journey. The Iliad and The Odyssey were printed as books by the late 1400s and therefore preserved for later generations.  Which included the Coen Brothers. Aside from The Odyssey, the  brothers had one other inspiration. The movie Sullivan's Travels where the lead character wants to direct a movie called O Brother, Where  Art Thou?.

[stethacantus]

MILE 5

Planes, Trains and Automobiles ( 1987 )

Studio: Paramount Pictures
Director: John Hughes

51 Points, 3 Lists, #4 Pastor of Muppets

TRAILER

Despite his airplane being cancelled due inclement weather, businessman Neil Page is determined to get home in time for Thanksgiving, ending up taking various modes of transportation accompanied by an obnoxious curtain ring salesman.

I can't do a write up. I am sorry. I know this is one of the most popular comedies ever made. But there is nothing.  John Huges casually mentioned in an interview that he got the idea for the film when he was on a flight from New York City to Chicago hat was diverted to Kansas due to a snowstorm. And that's it. I could mention that a mythical three hour edit exists. But most films had a longer edit before being trimmed down for the theatrical release, so not really worth mentioning. It is not based on material I can do a history of. I can't write about John Huges because he was already talked about in several write-ups already, and the one thing I have left on him is being saved for the John Huges film that ranks the highest on this LoC. And he was the writer, producer and director. Normally if I have nothing to write about in a write-up, I go to a list of films that were on no one's lists. But I already did Plane movies. I already did a list of train movies. I already did a list of Steve Martin movies. That leaves just John Candy. But aside from Wagons East ( 1994 ) and Speed Zone ( 1989 ), every John Candy film within the road movie genre is in this LoC. How about a list of Thanksgiving themed road movies? Well, I know of only two others, Red Blooded American Girl and Dutch, and both are on this LoC. So basically, there is nothing to write about for this write-up. I have been completely defeated!

[stethacantus]

MILE 4

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America ( 1996 )

Studio: Paramount Pictures
Director: Mike Judge

53 Points, 3 Lists, #3 RVRII

TRAILER

Beavis and Butt-Head go on a cross-country journey for what they mistakenly believe is someone paying them to have sex with his wife, when he had actually wanted them to kill her.

Mike Judge was in college studying for a masters degree in math with plans to become a teacher when he saw animation cells on display at a movie theater. Fascinated by the animation process, he began studying it and soon realized he could easily make his own animation.  He bought himself a Bolex 16mm film camera and began making his own crude animation shorts. One of those shorts, Milton ( 1991 ), featuring a timid office worker complaining about how he was being treated by his fellow office workers and threatening to burn the company down, was shown on Saturday Night Live and soon after on a few cable shows. Feeling he had a future in Animation, Judge dropped out of college. MTV had also seen the Milton cartoon, and waited Judge to work for them.

The network owed it's existence to Michael Nesmith, a musician who in the late 70s was an advocate for music videos, and was one of the founders of the music television format. He had been a member of the rock band The Monkees, who were a successful American rip-off of the Beatles who had a prime time sitcom. The band had not existed prior to the show, and they began primarily as actors cast to be the four band members. While the cast did sing the Monkees songs, for the first season other musicians recorded the instruments.  But after Monkees albums and singles began selling, they had little choice but to go on tour, which meant actually needing to learn how to play the instruments as they did in the show. A typical episode of The Monkees aped the Beatles movies A Hard Days Night ( 1964 ) and Help! ( 1965 ) and ended with them performing a short silent comedy while singing one of their songs, both similar to how the Beatles performed their songs in their movies, and the concept music videos that would be made years later. When the show ended, the Monkees attempted to continue as a group, but the record sales dropped off completely.  It was then that Nesmith first realized how important the series was to selling their records. He began to believe the future of the music business was for recording artists to release their albums on home video as video albums, with all the songs performed as concept music videos. When recorded executives explained to him that not enough Americans owned VCRs or Laserdisc players to sell video albums to, he argued that the record company could make up for the expense by using clips from the albums as promotional videos.  He was then explained that almost no shows in America wanted to air music videos. Nesmith realized that for video albums to be made, that first music video channels needed to exist. Just as record albums could not have existed before there were radio stations that played singles.

Promotional clips for television had been around since the 1950s. Much longer than that if you count the music shorts shown in theaters in the 1930s and 40s. They were originally shot on film, but beginning with Queens Bohemian Rhapsody were either shot completely on video, or shot on film and distributed on video carts. The term "Music Video" initially applied to promotional clips shot entirely in the cheaper video format, but eventually applied to all promotional clips. They were mostly for the European market, where they would be sent to shows in countries that the recording artist didn't have a visa to perform in, or could not travel to due to legal problems.  American television shows were reluctant to air them. They wanted their music guests live in their studio and not on a recorded clip any other show could air. Aside from the rare occasion that The Midnight Special was short on musical guests, videos just didn't air anywhere in America.  Nesmith created a video show called Popclips which aired on Nickelodeon during it's inaugural year on the air.  It was a hit for the channel. But the new president of programming Cyril Schneider, who was  hired to run Nickelodeon midway through the year, decided the channel should target pre-teens only, and canceled Popclips. Nesmith saw Popclips as a proof of concept. The next step was to pitch the creation of an all music video channel to Nickelodeon's parent company, Warner-Amex. Actually, executives at Warner-Amex had been planning to launch a music video channel for some time. In 1977, Warner Communications launched an experimental interactive cable system called CUBE, the direct forerunner to Warner-Amex. Among the channels was a music channel called Sight on Sound which aired performances of British and American recording artists from the German concert show Musikladen.  Warner-Amex executive Bob Pitman had been suggesting that the company launch a similar music channel, only using music videos instead of clips from Musikladen. Pitman and Nesmith were not the only ones to come up with the idea of creating a music channel. People had been suggesting it since the 60s. But it was Nesmith's clout as an actual rock star that got Popclips the green light. And once it had aired, was proof a music video show would work. So when he pitched the idea of turning Popclips into a channel. the Time-Warner executives listened. But Nesmith wanted the channel to pay for and produce their own videos. in a later meeting Pitman suggested the channel would not need to produce music videos as the record companies were already doing it. Deciding they didn't really need Nesmith, they went for the cheaper option and allowed Pitman to create MTV in 1981.

Like I said, a lot of people had already come up with the idea for a 24 hour music channel, and a lot of them gravitated to MTV. Most of the staff was either from music radio or the recording industry, and they saw MTV as a visual form of a typical FM radio station. Warner-Amex launched the I Want My MTV advertising campaign where a who's who of rock stars instructed teenagers with cable to call their cable companies and demand they add MTV as a channel. The campaign was very effective as cable companies across the country began adding the channel. Within two years the channel was phenomenally popular. So much so that areas that did not have cable, such as most major cities, there was suddenly a demand for cable just to get MTV. With each year it's viewership grew. It had become so successful that Viacom made a multimillion dollar offer to Warner Communications and American Express to sell their company Warner-Amex to them. In 1984 MTV became a Viacom company. Of course the first thing they did was install their own executives at the channel. And that was the beginning of the end.

The Viacom executives simply didn't get MTV. Whie the original MTV staff saw it as a mission to bring music to television, all the Viacom executives could see was that the channel did not own any programming, and that music videos were nothing more than commercials for records. Okay, they had won over a lot of the teenagers.  Now it was time to move from music to programming the teenagers would really love. It was time for MTV to evolve out of being a music channel into being a "lifestyle" channel with all sorts of original programming geared to teenagers. Now, you may wonder what all of this has to do with Beavis and Butt-Head? Actually, it has a lot to do with the show's history.  There was a war going on at MTV between the original staff members and the new Viacom overlords, and Beavis and Butt-Head became the overlords biggest weapon.

The Viacom executives staked their claim in 1987 by airing Remote Control, a game show where contestants were asked questions about classic television which had been developed for Nickelodeon before being pilfered by MTV. The Viacom executives defended airing a game show on what was supposed to be a music channel by claiming it was somehow a rock and roll  game show. And when no one bought that explanation, a final round was added where contestants were asked questions about music videos. It was much harder for MTV to explain why they began airing House of Style which looked at fashion, only some of which was embraced by music stars. And even less credibility that their shows were designed to appeal to the MTV viewers with The Half Hour Comedy Hour, a half hour of a stand up comic doing a cleaned up version of his routine.  The old guard at MTV was against ceding any time to programming that wasn't associated with music. They didn't found MTV just so it could be like every other channel.  MTV was a channel that earned millions while spending nearly nothing on programming.  It was a golden goose when Viacom bought it. For the executives running it now to insist they needed to spend more making their own shows meant that they needed to prove it was worth it all by increased ratings. And that just wasn't happening.  The original programming was either doing just the same in the ratings as the videos, or lost viewers whenever they aired. The old guard took solace that parent company Viacom would not put up with the nonsense of bleeding money on original programming much longer. 

On June 2, 1991, MTV debuted Liquid Television, a series which  comprised of short animated cartoons. And he back story to that show's history is pretty stupid. Cyril Schneider, the president at Nickelodeon who had cancelled Popclips because it appealed to teenagers and not children, was unceremoniously replaced by Viacom executive Geraldine Laybourne in 1984, the same day MTV's president Les Garland was replaced with Doug Herzog. While Doug fiddled around at MTV trying to come up with cheap programming to replace the music videos while claiming  it was the kind of shows MTV viewers wanted to see, Geraldine began building up the Nickelodeon brand with original programming. In 1991 she successfully lobbied Viacom for the budget for original animated cartoons. Doug finds out and runs to Viacom and complains "Why are you giving Nickelodeon all that money to make cartoons?" It should be pointed out that animated cartoons are very expensive to produce. So far the original programming done at both MTV and Nickelodeon were relatively cheap. The cartoons would cost millions to produce. So Viacom tells crybaby Doug "Nickelodeon is a channel for kids. Kids want to see cartoons. Besides, we can later sell those cartoons to the broadcast Networks to air on Saturday Morning." Doug wasn't having any of this. "MTV is your most profitable network! We should be the ones airing the cartoons!" It should be pointed out that the brand new FOX network had it's first major success with the animated series The Simpsons, the first primetime animated series to succeed since The Flintstones back in the 60s. And as this argument was going on, Fox had moved The Simpsons to Thursdays at 8pm to compete against NBC's juggernaut The Cosby Show. And MTV saw FOX as their direct rival, for some unexplained reason. In interviews the MTV executives would argue that they were losing viewers to FOX as a reason for changing the channel's format. The most successful show on FOX was The Simpsons. So logically, the MTV viewers wanted to see cartoons? Viacom caved in to Doug's demands and gives MTV a budget for cartoons.  It should probably be pointed out that there were some cartoons on MTV at the time. Viacom had been financing bumpers for MTV created by animators. Those five to ten second shorts that had the channel logo for the purpose of station ID. ( Allowing those with Nielsen diaries to log in the correct channel they are watching. That is until every network began putting their network  permanently in the bottom right corner. ) MTV asked many of those animators to submit short animated cartoons to Liquid Television.  Among them was Peter Chung who made six shorts called Æon Flux, one for every episode of the first season. While the cartoons on  Liquid Television should have been seen as pilots for potential MTV cartoons, Doug Herzog had other plans. He wanted Bill Plympton to animate a series for MTV. When Plympton turned down the offer, MTV attempted to steal The Ren & Stimpy Show from Nickelodeon. When that didn't happen, they finally decided to look for animators in the second season of Liquid Television. They had requested Mike Judge to submit his Milton cartoon, now retitled Office Space. He also submitted his latest cartoon Frog Baseball featuring two teenagers called Beavis and Butt-Head. MTV liked the short so much that they asked Judge to animate another Beavis and Butt-Head short. Frog Baseball ended up airing on the first episode of the second season of Liquid Television while a second Beavis and Butt-Head cartoon, Peace Love and Understanding, was completed in time for the 8th episode. Judge's animation style was similar to that of Plympton. And Beavis and Butt-Head were seen as perfect characters for an MTV audience. So they asked Judge to animate an entire Beavis and Butt-Head series for them. Amazingly they completely ignored Æon Flux, of which Peter Chung animated five more shorts for the second season of Liquid Television.

Doug Herzog knew nothing about animation. Mike Judge had made only five cartoons, all self animated, but knew a little more about animation. For one thing, there was no way in hell he could animate a full  12 half hour episode season. It took him two months to animate a five minute cartoon. MTV would need to hire an animation studio to animate the episodes. To save money, segments would be made where Beavis and Butt-Head watched and commented on  real music videos which would pad out the half hour. It would also qualify the series to air on MTV. Each half hour was to have two fifteen minute episodes. An animation studio was picked, and it was a disaster. According to Judge, the animation for season 1 was horrendous. Furthermore, out of a 22 episode order, only three episodes were completed. Frog Baseball and Peace, Love and Understanding had to be combined so that there would be enough episodes for two half hours The two half hors aired as Season 1 of Beavis and Butt-Head on . March 8, 1993. Meanwhile MTV had to create their own inhouse animation studio to complete the 22 episode order, of which they added four more episodes and began airing them on May 17th of that year as the second season. The series turned out to be a huge success for MTV, drawing in far more viewers than the music videos were, and allowing the Herzog and the other Viacom executives to program more and more  original content while reducing the music to just the overnight hours. The old guard could not ignore Beavis and Butt-Head's success. They had lost the war. Music programming was going to be fazed out, bit by bit with each new MTV show added to the schedule. MTV soon realized that they only needed Mike Judge to voice Beavis and Butt-head and a few of the other characters. Gradually his creative input into the show was reduced. Meanwhile MTV green lit their second animated series. The Brothers Grunt began as a bumper for MTV  by animator Danny Antonucci where a group of men, each seen only from the head, look as if they are straining, after which an overhead shot shows a turd in the shape of an MTV logo drop into a toilet bowl. And for some reason Herzog thought this was the basis of a cartoon series. To be fair, somehow Antonucci figured out how to expand the bumper into a series. The men were all monks belonging to some subterranean monastery who are sent to find one of their brothers who has wandered off into the world above. Further episodes expanded on the Brother's back story suggesting they weren't really human to begin with. Once again there would be two fifteen minute episodes per half hour with music videos to pad out the episodes. Only, instead of commenting on the videos, an occasional brother would wander by the screen as the video played. Described by critics as the worst animated series ever, The Brothers Grunt was cancelled after 35 episodes aired, with another 10 episodes completed but unaired by MTV. The next two animated series were The Head where a guy with an unusually large head learns that he has an alien living inside of it . It was followed by another series called The Maxx, based on Sam Kieth's Image comic book of the same name. Actually a very decent cartoon, but short lived due to licensing issues with Image. And then finally in 1995, an Æon Flux series. But only one season was made. Aside from the cartoons, MTV had a puppet show. A sock puppet show. The Sifl and Olly Show. Needless to say, the MTV audience was not into sock puppets.


Beavis and Butt-Head had become so popular that there were plans for it to be turned into a movie. A live action movie with David Spade as Beavis and Adam Sandler as Butt-Head. Somehow, that film never got off the ground. By 1996 Mik Judge was ready to move on from Beavis and Butt-Head, where he was reduced to just the character's voice actor, and was not getting a cut of the merchandising revenues. After Viacom's acquisition of Paramount Pictures, MTV formed MTV Productions with plans to turn media they owned into movies and sort of force Paramount to distribute them. Which consisted of few reality shows, a few game shows, the failed cartoons, and the bumpers and short films the channel had commissioned. They had already given the green light to film maker John Payson to expand his two minute film, Joe's Apartment, into a full length feature film. Joe's Apartment aired along with bumpers as a way to fill out the hour whenever  they were two minutes short on time. it's plot was that Joe lived with talking roaches who he asks to leave the apartment as he has a date coming over. Instead they all hide in a celling lamp to spy on Joe and his date, resulting in all of them falling from the lamp and onto his date, causing her to run away screaming. And MTV thought it would be a good idea to turn it into a feature film. It bombed, of course. And critics hated it. Now the future of MTV Productions rested on the hands of Mike Judge, who had only agreed to do a Beavis and Butt-Head movie, but only if he got to write and direct it. Fortunately for MTV, Mike Judge saved them again. Critics loved Beavis and Butt-Head Do America and it earned $63 million. Which should have lead to a sequel... but you have already read how MTV f#*ked that one up.

[stethacantus]

MILE 3

Rat Race ( 2001 )

Studio:    Paramount Pictures
Director: Jerry Zucker

%9 Points, 3 Lists, #3 Pac-Man

TRAILER

The wealthy owner of a Las Vegas casino offers a group of patrons the chance to win a million dollars. All they need to do is to be the first among the group  to reach the locker in a New Mexico train station where the bag of money is hidden.

This is the third variant of Stanley Kramer's It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in this LoC ( including the forementioned film itself ), and the only one to appear on more than one list, which is why it is all the way up here at #3. It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was made by filmmakers who didn't know comedy,  but studied comedies from the past to attempt to make the ultimate motion picture comedy. And cast  the greatest living comedians of the time who took what was weak material and made it work. Million Dollar Mystery started with a gimmick and then ripped off It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, then threw together a script as an afterthought.  But Rat Race was directed by Jerry Zucker who was an expert in comedy, and knew exactly what material would work on screen, as well as how to shoot it. The result is one of the funniest comedies of the  2000s. The movie didn't seem to be headed in that direction.  It began as a spec script written by  Darryl Quarles, who's only success at the time was his script for Big Mama's House.   In 1999 the spec script was  sold to the Disney owned studio, Hollywood Pictures.  Then given to producer Jerry Bruckheimer who then decided it needed a complete rewrite, keeping just the premise. So he assigned Andy Breckman for the rewrite, a former writer for Saturday Night Live who had a not so spectacular history of screenplays.  He has a particularly bad year in 1988 where he wrote three notorious bombs. Richard Pryor's Moving,  Author 2: On The Rocks,  and to top off the summer, a rewrite of the Bobcat Goldthwait talking horse film Hot to Trot. A trifecta of the three worst comedies of the year. His writing skills seemed to have improved by the time he wrote the script for Sgt Bilko ( 1996 ). That same year he left SNL to work for Disney  Studios for five years where, aside from this film, he had only one other screen credit for the company, a movie for the Disney Channel. The script completed, Bruckheimer handed the script in and the studio declined to greenlight it. Disney, the studio responsible for most of the worst comedies of the 90s. Who in 1997 alone greenlit Jungle to Jungle, Rocket Man, and Mr Magoo thought the script for a Jerry Bruckheimer action comedy wasn't good enough to greenlight. So it was immediately sold to Jerry Zucker. I'm not sure how Zucker heard of the script. Perhaps Bruckheimer had asked him to direct it when it was still property owned by Disney.  While not credited, Zucker did some rewriting on the script.  Exactly how much rewriting was done, how much of Andy Breckman's script was used, and if anything from Quarles' was left, is unknown.  What is known is that John Cleese, who was cast as the wealthy casino owner Donald Sinclair, claimed it was one of only two scripts he was ever given that he fully enjoyed.  That would include both the scripts for Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Monty Python's Life of Brian, at least one of which Cleese didn't think was as good as Rat Race .

Jerry Zucker was a member of the writing and directing team ZAZ, short for Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker.  The team began in when Jerry, his brother David and friend Jim Abrahams formed a sketch comedy group called Kentucky Fried Theater. In 1977 the trio wrote  the script for a sketch film called Kentucky Fried Movie, but were unable to find any studio willing to make it. Deciding to self finance the film, they hired an up and coming director named John Landis to direct one of the sketches to use as a promo reel. A distributor liked the reel, and agreed to finance the entire film. Kentucky Fried Movie became a hit on the Midnight Movie circuit, and by 1980 ZAZ had a deal with Paramount to write and direct their own comedy, Airplane! This was followed by the television series Police Squad!, and the combo parody of Elvis films a d spy thrillers, Top Secret!. Their final film as a directing team was Ruthless People ( 1986) from a script written by Dale Launer, Their last full collaboration was The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! ( 1988 ) which they all co-wrote the script for, but only David Zucker directed, and would be the only ZAZ member to make the two sequels. With the ZAZ members going there separate ways, Jerry Zucker went on to direct Ghost ( 1990 ) which earned a best picture nomination.  His next film was the far less celebrated King Arthur drama First Knight. Rat Race would be his third and final time as a solo  director.  And I also have to mention that among the cameos in this film, is the band Smash Mouth who play themselves during a charity concert at the end of the film. A recording act who in a short span of time has equaled The Beatles and Fran Sinatra as having the most songs used in movies. (  Walkin' On The Sun  is the go to background song whenever a character or group of characters walk in slow motion, establishing in movie shorthand that they are supposed to be cool. ) Among their songs that have been overused in movies is All-Star, which was written for the Mystery Men ( 1999 ) soundtrack, the music video for that song also promoting the film. It would then be used in no less than four movies in the next two years. One of those films, the live action version of Inspector Gadget ( 1999 ), was actually released a month before Mystery Men . I have no idea how that happened. Astro Lounge, the Smash Mouth album the song is featured on, was released only one month before Inspector Gadget, so it must have been added at the last minute with no one mentioning to Disney that it was the closing theme of Mystery Men and would be on their soundtrack album.  It was in the soundtrack again in Digimon: The Movie ( 2000 ). And then in the opening credits for [i[]Shrek[/i] ( 2001 ). Smash Mouth had actually recorded a different song for  Shrek's opening credits. A remake of the Moneke's I'm A Believer but was substituted for All-Star by the director. ( It wasn't completely cut from the film. Donkey and the other characters reprise the song at the end of the film, so part of the Smash Mouth version was edited into that scene replacing the beginning of Murphy's version with the wedding band. ) . And then All-Star was in this film, which beat them all by having the actual band Smash Mouth performing it.

[stethacantus]

MILE 2

National Lampoon's Vacation ( 1983 )

Studio: Warner Bros.
Director: Harold Ramis

71 Points, 4 Lists, #1 Pac-Man

TRAILER

Cark Griswald wants to take his family on a cross country car trip from Chiago to California to visit Wally World.

The humor magazine The Harvard Lampoon was founded by the college's students in the 1840s, and is still published to this day.  Their brand of humor, which is mostly parody, seemed like a perfect artistic outlet for the late 1960s where many of the Harvard students considered themselves part of the counterculture, and could use the magazine to directly attack the establishment.  The magazine circulated mostly behind the walls of Harvard, leading three of it's graduating staff to decide the Lampoon brand of humor should be nationwide.  Thus National Lampoon Magazine was born in April of 1970. Attracting some of that generation's most talented comedy writers, the magazine soon surpassed Mad Magazine in sales. The brand began to grow. First with National Lampoon books. Then National Lampoon records. And the National Lampoon stage show Lemmings, followed by a National Lampoon radio show. In 1976 National Lampoon branched out into television with a 50 minute sketch film for HBO called National Lampoon's Disco Beaver From Outer Space ( 1978 ). Sketch movies like The Groove Tube ( 1974 ), Kentucky Fried Movie ( 1977 ) and the long delayed release of the Monty Python sketch film And Now For Something Completely Different ( 1971 ) had all been hits on the Midnight Movie circuit.  The National Lampoon felt they could easily produce their own sketch films.  They had talent comedy writers on their staff, and had the Second City Comedy Troupe who had performed on their stage shows and were the on air talent for their radio shows. Sure, they had all gone on to become cast members of Second City Television and Saturday Night Live. But National Lampoon was sure they could find the time to do their movies. Co-founder of the magazine and it's head writer, Dough Kenny, had wanted to do a sketch film based on their stand alone parody book National Lampoon's High School Yearbook. Once Chriss Miller was on board, he suggested they follow the characters from the Yearbook parody into college.  He had written an article  called The Night of the Seven Fries which was based on his own experience living in a college fraternity, and thought it could be used for a few of the skits. They were contacted by Ivan Reitman, who had been  producing horror films for David Cronenberg and wanted to move out of that genre and into comedy.  He had heard National Lampoon was going to start making movies, and wanted to throw his hat into the ring as a director.  When he realized they didn't even have a producer, he offered to do that as well. Harold Ramis, one of the performers from their stage and radio shows who had become a cast member of Second City Television and had  just left the show, contacted National Lampoon and offered  to write movie scripts for them. He was brought in to the high school/college sketch film Kenny and Miller were writing where he was able to convince them they had enough material to do a film with a plot. Just drop the high school part and have it take place entirely at college. With that script completed, Reitman was able to get Universal Pictures to finance and release it. But not if he was the director. They wanted someone with experience directing comedies. So Reitman picked John Landis, the director of Kentucky Fried Movie.

Animal House was released in the summer of 1978 and was a hit. Reitman and the others immediately began work on a story for the sequel, to be called National Lampoon's Animal House 2: Summer of Love  which was to take place a few years after the events of Animal House with the characters reuniting for a wedding in San Francisco. However, after the treatment for the script was written, Universal shelved the project. In 1973 they had released a film by an up and coming director named George Lucas called American Graffiti about a group of high school graduates who spend a final night together in 1962. It was a hit, and lead to a trend in 50s and early 60s nostalgia, such as the films The Lords of Flatbush ( 1974 ), Grease ( 1978 ) and The Wanderers ( 1979 ), not to mention the television series Happy Days. Animal House had been greenlit because it fell within that genre. Of course, Universal wanted a sequel, but Lucas was reluctant to make one, and after Star Wars, didn't need to. Finally agreeing to allow a sequel while in pre-production for his second Star Wars film, Lucas hired director Nill L Norton to direct and write it. More American Graffiti ( 1979 ) takes place on New Years Eve, but for each character on a different year in a different location, intercutting between the story of each. Audiences found it confusing, and it bombed at the box office, officially signaling the end of the 50s/60s nostalgia genre. Universal executives worried that the script for the Animal House sequel was too similar to More American Graffiti and thought it would be prudent to hold off on making any Animal House sequel for a few years. This mean that the second National Lampoon movie was officially to be National Lampoon Goes to the Movies The idea was conceived before Animal House became a single plot film instead of a bunch of skits about college. Goes to the Movies  was to be a sketch film making fun of different film genres, and had pretty much every National Lampoon staff member not working on the Animal House films involved. Tod Carroll, Ellis Weiner, Gerald Sussman, Pat Mephitis and Sharly Flenniken all contributed to the script, along with some other National Lampoon staff members who's material ended up not being used. With initially ten segments parodying both film and television when the script was completed, which would have run over four hours if it had been filmed, the script was cut down to just the strongest material. It would be three segments that parodied television genres, and the main feature a parody of a disaster film called The Bomb. Meanwhile Paramount Pictures had foolishly acquired  the film rights to the book The Joy of Sex, realized they could do nothing with a sex manual, and had decided all they could do was to turn it into a comedy. They asked the writers of National Lampoon to do something with the book and release it as National Lampoon's The Joy of Sex. with the entire staff either working on the Animal House sequel or Goes to the Movies, National Lampoon turned to their one writer who had the time to write it. Freelance contributor John Huges.

Huges had begun hid career in comedy after dropping out of college in 1970. He began writing and selling jokes to Joan Rivers and other comedians. Needing something that paid better, he used his skills to get a job at a Chicago advertising agency.  That agency frequently made trips to their Madison Avenue offices, which was eventually Huges job.  While in New York, he began visiting the offices of National Lampoon to see if they were hiring. The staff soon became friendly with him, and told him that he was welcome to contribute articles, but would only be paid for the articles that were selected to be published, He was told that each issue had a theme. He would have to call their office to find out what theme the editors selected, then write an article within that theme. Editor P.J. O'Rourke noted that Huges was an extremely fast writer, able to write articles within a day or two of being given the theme. So he was handed the Joy of Sex assignment, and told to come up with at least 90 minutes of comedy based on the sex manual. He completed it so fast that he was immediately assigned another assignment. What was to be the fourth National Lampoon film. ( Fifth if Universal was to suddenly greenlight the Animal House sequel. ) 20th Century Fox wanted a parody of the current slasher movie trend. They had  hired Philip Kaufman to direct , fresh off  the success of his film The Wanderers. Both Huges and Kaufman collaborated on the story, which would take place at a tenth year class reunion, then Huges wrote the script. Meanwhile, Goes to the Movies was completed and screened to a test audience in Rhode Island. It did not go well. The audience hated it. They loudly booed it. An audience member ripped  the top of a seat off of the rest of the seat and hurled it at the screen. Soon most of the rest of the audience was ripping apart their seats, and putting seat sized holes through the screen. Huges learned that 20th Century Fox had fired Kaufman from the horror movie parody and replaced him with another director, Michael Millier, who had just completed the first Chuck Norris horror film Silent Rage ( 1992 ). Huges would later say that he too was in effect fired from the film. Miller wanted to build up the thriller aspects of the film, and had the script rewritten. Huges had no idea of this at the time as the only time he was allowed on the set was to film his cameo. Meanwhile, news broke that John Belushi had died of a drug overdose. He had been cast as the lead in National Lampoon's The Joy of Sex. But once he was dead, the film was cancelled. Also cancelled permanently was National Lampoon's Animal House 2: The Summer of Love.

National Lampoon's Class Reunion ( 1982 )  was released on October 29th, the weekend of Halloween, as planned. To Huges horror, most of his script had been altered. What it was replaced with was terrible. Yet, he was the only one credited as the script writer. Furthermore, the studio had decided to promote Class Reunion as a reunion comedy without once mentioning in the trailers or print ads that it was a horror parody. It was apparent that their goal was to make the film seem like a sequel to Animal House. MGM/UA released  the other National Lampoon film a week later, mistakenly believing that Class Reunion would have been another huge hit, and audiences that loved it would then flock to see what was now called  National Lampoon's Movie Madness ( 1982 ). it had been on the shelf for a year after the disastrous test screening, and their solution to fixing the film was to cut out the 45 minute segment The Bomb which audiences hated the most.  This left the so called movie parody film parodying television shows. Both films were critical disasters. Both films bombed at the box office. Both should have been the doom of the National Lampoon brand. The magazine itself had been losing most of it's staff. Many to become writers for Saturday Night Live, and the rest to become full time screen writers. Meanwhile Paramount was going to release National Lampoon's The Joy of Sex but with a completely different script. National Lampoon ended up paying them not to use there name on the movie. They had only one sliver of hope. Before the two terrible National Lampoon movies were released, they had managed to option Vacation 58 to Warner Bros. who wanted too get in on all the national Lampoon action. ( It should be pointed out that the success of National Lampoon's Animal House had every studio wanting to release their own National Lampoon film. In fact, it even made movies based on magazines popular. E.C. Publications began licensing  Mad Magazine to studios, with their only release being the Animal House rip-off Mad Magazine Presents: Up the Academy. )

Vacation 58 was an article Huges had written for the magazine for a vacation themed issue. It was ultimately rejected as they already had enough strong material submitted by the staff, but published in a later issue. Huges had written it during a blizzard in 1979. Written from the memories of a man who was a child in 1958, it told of a disastrous road trip to Disneyland that ends with the boy's father going insane and shooting Walt Disney himself. Huges had thought it was a good enough idea for a movie, and began shopping it around to the studios. Paramount was the first studio offered the story, and passed because they thought it was too episodic. Warner Bros. greenlit the film, provided it was under the National Lampoon banner, and it was already in production by the time the two National Lampoon films were released. This time Lampoon went out of their way to make sure they got it right. Huges adapted his short story into the script, with the biggest change being the renaming of Disneyland to Walley World, the park owner renamed Roy Walley, and the events taking place in the 80s instead of the 50s.  Harold Ramis, who co-wrote Animal House, was brought in to direct. Chevy Chase, who had been a cast member and writer on The National Lampoon Radio Hour was the star. Aside from some uncredited rewrites from Ramis and Chase to turn the father Clark Griswald into the focus of the film instead of the son Rusty, the movie was Faithful to Huges script. Test audiences did not like the original ending, where after finding Walley World closed, Clark buys a gun, goes to Roy Walley's hose, and forces him to dance ad entertain hi family before the police arrive. A brand new ending was written by Huges and shot where Clark uses the gun to kidnap the security guard and force him to take Clark and the family on the rides. According to Chevy Chase, he owns a print of the original edit of the film with the alternate ending, but when contacting Warner Bros. about it, was told they were not interested in obtaining it. The alternate  ending has not appeared on any home video release. National Lampoon's Vacation was both a critical and financial hit, redeeming the reputation of both National Lampon and John Huges.