Podcasts about zucker abrahams zucker

Prepare for silliness! This week on Cocktails & Classics, we're diving deep into the hilarious 1984 Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker masterpiece, "Top Secret!" Join us as we unravel the layers of absurdity, from singing cowboys to underwater bar fights and everything in between. We'll discuss Val Kilmer's comedic brilliance, the film's genius parody of spy movies and musicals, and its lasting impact on comedy. Feeling goofy? Craft a classic cocktail while you listen! Don't miss this episode for a laugh-out-loud exploration of a truly unique cinematic experience, fueled by classic cocktails and hilarious discussions.Topics: * The Smartest Dumb Movie: We take a look at the signature comedic style of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, including rapid-fire jokes, visual gags, and breaking the fourth wall. * Val Kilmer's Comedy Chops: We're blown away by Val Kilmer's surprisingly hilarious performance in his early career. * Spoofing Genres: Explore the film's clever parodies of spy movies, Elvis musicals, and even World War II films. * The Absurdity (and lack) of the Plot: Dive into the nonsensical and constantly shifting plot of "Top Secret!" As Dylan tries to recall what happens in the film. * Iconic Gags and Lines: We go over some of our favorite gags and quotes, and even some of the more off the wall bits. * Spoof Comedy Draft: We take turns choosing our favorite spoof comedies. What ones did we miss? What's your favorite absurd comedy? Share your thoughts on "Top Secret!" and your funniest movie moments on Instagram! Don't forget to share the laughs by sharing this episode with your friends and family, subscribe and leave a rating wherever you listen!

To celebrate the sixth anniversary of the podcast, Matt Ottinger returns to the show to discuss the classic Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker comedy Top Secret! starring the late great Val Kilmer.Visit Matt's archive on the television show I've Got a Secret: https://youtu.be/af9N7UhTMA8?si=rpnAM6L6eb-PO3fMFollow Johnny on Instagram and Tik Tok: @JohnnyMocnyComedyFollow Johnny on Letterboxd: @JohnnyMocny

An American rock star gets caught up in intrigue in Cold War East Germany. Or is it World War II? Nazis, Communists, whatever, right guys? Anyway, from the guys who made Airplane, it's "what if Elvis made a spy movie", and it's pretty good. Starring Val Kilmer, Lucy Gutteridge, Omar Sharif, Michael Gough, Jeremy Kemp, and one very odd cameo from Peter Cushing. Written by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Martyn Burke. Directed by Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker.

The twelfth episode of our special retrospective 20th season looks back to the awesome movie year of 1980 with our audience choice winner, the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker production Airplane!. Written and directed by Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker and starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack and Lloyd Bridges, Airplane! was producer David Rosen's pick for our audience choice poll of 1980 films.The contemporary reviews quoted in this episode come from Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/airplane-1980), Janet Maslin in The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/1980/07/02/arts/screenairplanedisasterfilm-spoof.html), and Ron Pennington in The Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/airplane-review-1980-movie-1018276/).Visit https://www.awesomemovieyear.com for more info about the show.Make sure to like Awesome Movie Year on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/awesomemovieyear and follow us on Twitter @AwesomemoviepodYou can find Jason online at http://goforjason.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JHarrisComedy/, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jasonharriscomedy/ and on Twitter @JHarrisComedyYou can find Josh online at http://joshbellhateseverything.com/, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/joshbellhateseverything/ and on Twitter @signalbleedYou can find our producer David Rosen's Piecing It Together Podcast at https://www.piecingpod.com, on Twitter at @piecingpod and the Popcorn & Puzzle Pieces Facebook Group at

Gyerekkorunk kedvenc amerikai komédiáit és paródiáit listáztuk a drámának szánt, mégis nevettető "Aranyoskámtól" a legszórakoztatóbb haverfilmen, a "Vaklármán" át a Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker-trió életművéig, amelyből a "Nagy durranást" akciófilmként nézték Heves megyében, de csúcsjelöltünk a "Csupasz pisztoly" lett, bár sokan biztos az "Airplane!"-re saccoltak volna, miközben Mel Brooks karrierjét is átfésültük. A beszélgetés résztvevői: Balázsy István Csunderlik Péter Dékány László Laska Pál A Régen minden jobb volt a Tilos Rádió hátrafelé nyilazó történelmi műsora: https://www.facebook.com/regen.minden.jobb.volt

Christmas stockings should be filled with what is on the physical media slate this week. Erik Childress is joined by Peter Sobczynski to take you through everything including Barbra Streisand's big Oscar win and one of the great adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel. Great things come in threes including Clint Eastwood and the works of Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker. They also come in twos with Buster Keaton and the works of Jim Henson. Though speaking of three, Warner Bros. has one of the 4K trifectas of the year with a Mel Brooks classic, one of Hitchcock's most purely entertaining and James Cameron's legendary breakthrough. Finally not to dampen the holiday mood but the film that may just be Sam Raimi's finest achievement with the great Bill Paxton gets a new 4K upgrade as well. 0:00 - Intro 1:24 – Criterion (Funny Girl 4K, Riyuichi Sakamoto: Opus) 10:46 – Sony (Little Women 4K) 15:55 – Kino (Seven Chances & Sherlock Jr, The Visitors, Two Mules for Sister Sara 4K, Play Misty for Me 4K, The Eiger Sanction 4K) 41:26 – Shout (Rush 4K, The Dark Crystal 4K, Labyrinth 4K) 1:04:16 – Paramount (ZAZ Collection 4K) 1:16:41 – Warner Bros. (Blazing Saddles 4K, North by Northwest 4K, The Terminator 4K) 1:48:27 – Arrow (A Simple Plan 4K) 2:03:28 – New TV & Theatrical Titles On Blu-ray 2:10:56 – New Blu-ray Announcements!

Welcome to the Jay Mohr Cinematic Universe, where your favourite comedy legends are apparently in mortal danger. Friend of the show Mikey “The Mouth” Stephens, having been heavily bribed and plied with favours and snacks, comes to discuss the infantile attempt at a mafia spoof, 1998's Mafia! (also known as Jane Austen's Mafia!, for some reason). Does this movie kind of work? (Mike says no, Bree says yes). What was the magic of the ZAZ-iverse (Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker) that was kinda missing here? Could Leslie Nielson have made this movie better? What is the best mafia movie of all time? (Spoiler alert: Not this one). Also, it's Christina Applegate Appreciation Hour!

This week, Stu McCallister joins the idiots. 00:00 Introductions 00:50 Hunter Biden 07:19 Transgender Issues 18:35 The Dumbest People on the Planet  25:52 Elon Musk 31:20 Feeding the Troll —Our favorite former addict who slept with his dead brother's widow—Hunter Biden—was found guilty of lying on a form. Of all the things he's done, this is what the Republicans got him for.  (Which, given it was a gun charge, is ironic.) For funnies, we discuss his infamous laptop photos. If you haven't seen them, you should remedy that. Side note: nathan tells a quick story about a friend of his who actually didn't lie on his medical intake form one day. Where did he tell the truth? Tune in and find out. —The American College of Pediatricians is a neat title, but in fact is basically a group of religious zealots who hate women, and gay people. That didn't stop Fox News from writing a fairly balanced article on the stance the ACP took on trans children. But, since reasonable discourse is frowned upon, they had to write a click-bait headline in order to spread confirmation bias. Yay, lazy public who doesn't read past the headline! Side note: nathan lectures Jake on the wonders of Top Secret, the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker follow up to Airplane! —Look no more, nathan has found the dumbest people on the planet.  We always feel sorry for people who are taken in a scam… Until we read about the scam, and then wonder just how dumb the people were for falling for it. Well, Kelli and Michael Regan, of North Texas, managed to spend $20,000 in order to not get the dog of their dreams. How? By being amazingly dimwitted. —If Hunter Biden is one of our favorite people, it's no secret that Elon Musk is the polar opposite of that title. Instead of running SpaceX and Tesla to new highs, he's running Twitter into the ground. What does Tesla have to say about that? They want to give him $50 billion in order to save the company. Up is down, down is up, and nothing makes sense. —What happens when someone less-than-smart comments on a podcast? They get made fun of on the next episode! Idiots on Parade: we mock the news, so you don't have to. Tune in and get your giggle on. Find Jake at @jakevevera Find nathan at nathantimmel.com

In the second half of our episode, we're reviewing the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker parody Top Secret! starring Val Kilmer playing an Elvis/Beach Boys pop star who is invited to perform in East Germany as a means of distraction from a plot to destroy NATO submarines. Typical of most ZAZ films, it's chock full of weird sight gags, bent cliches and multi-layered jokes that don't distract (much) from the main story's ability to make progress and give you an outcome you didn't realize you were invested in. COMING ATTRACTIONS: We stick with the spy genre for a while, but on a less-comedic note as we visit several movies based on John LeCarre novels. In our next episode we start with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965) and from there we visit The Russia House (1990). Join us, won't you? --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wordsandmovies/support

The voice of the NYC Subway Bernie Wagenblast (Cranford Radio, ITE Talks Transportation) and the lads conquer their drinking problems and call each other Shirley as they cover the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker comedy blockbuster Airplane!. Topics include the film's incredible joke variety, the brilliance of Leslie Nielson, and what it means to like gladiator movies and to have seen a grown man naked in the year of our lord 2024. Want more TWOAPW? Get access to our full back catalogue of premium/bonus episodes and add your name to the masthead of our website by subscribing for $5/month at Patreon.com/worstofall! Bernie Wagenblast: Twitter // Instagram // TikTok Cranford Radio presents the sounds and voices of Cranford, New Jersey. Hosted by Bernie Wagenblast. Available on Apple Podcasts // Spotify ITE Talks Transportation is a collaboration between ITE and Bernie Wagenblast, founder and editor of the Transportation Communication Newsletter and host of Transportation Radio. Each month, a new podcast features a thought leader within the transportation industry. In keeping with #transportationtuesday, a new episode will be available the 4th Tuesday of every month. Available on Apple Podcasts // Spotify The Stream by AASHTO explores environmental topics important to people involved in transportation and infrastructure programs. Available on Apple Podcasts // Spotify The Transport Communications Newsletter Media Referenced in this Episode: Airplane! Dir. by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker. Paramount Pictures. 1980. Bernie Wagenblast, the voice of NYC subways, finding her true voice after sharing her transition by CBS. "Finger Flickin' Funny" by Rich Markey. UW Alumni Magazine, Spring 2007. “How We Made: Airplane!” by Simon Bland. The Guardian. May 25th, 2020. “Short Takes : Airport Announcer Is No Star” by the Los Angeles Times. Jan. 7th. 1991. Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! by David Zuker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zuker. St. Martin's Publishing Group. 2023. TWOAPW theme by Brendan Dalton: Patreon // brendan-dalton.com // brendandalton.bandcamp.com

Nick Rivers, cantante popolarissimo e idolo delle ragazze, viene ingaggiato da pseudo nazisti della Germania Est, nel bel mezzo della Guerra Fredda. Sarà coinvolto, suo malgrado, nell'attività della resistenza, tra gag a ripetizione e situazioni surreali. Dopo il successo de L'aereo più pazzo del mondo, il goliardico trio ci riprova, stavolta con ambientazione diversa, parodiando le spy story più famose. Val Kilmer, nel ruolo del protagonista, è simpaticissimo e le situazioni più che divertenti. Di certo un cult della commedia parodistica anni 80, a cui non posso fare a meno di essere affezionato. GRANAAATAAA!!!

Geburtstagsspezial Weiter geht es mit Teil 2 unseres Geburtstagsspektakels! Wieder mit dabei: Max, Max, Norman, Basti, Dochnad, Michael und Michael. Heute gibt es unter anderem: Koalas, die nach Eukalyptus riechen, Elemente, die das Gameplay weniger überraschend machen, witzige Fässer, Dinge, die besser werden, wenn man sie aufbaut, Norman der wenig philosophisches sieht, eine Persona-Ausstellung, zahnlose Zungen, Spoof-Gedöhns von Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, das Rare, dass nicht mehr so ist, wie wir es kennen, zersörbare Objekte, der Coolheitsgrad unserer Mütter, die besten Final-Fantasy-Teile, hinnige Musik in Jet Set Radio und Japaner, die versuchen sich amerikanische Kultur einzuverleiben. Podcast herunterladen 00:00:00 First Encounter Assault Recon 00:12:48 Das soll ja scheiße aussehen 00:17:03 Seifenfilter 00:40:15 Oh! Letzt rede ich über den Nenad! 00:46:45 War nicht der schlechteste Punkt 00:52:17 Ich hab keinen Bock drauf 00:56:08 Sokrates der lustige 01:06:30 Im zweiten Teil gibt es Fuhrer 01:18:22 Der Kalauer, der viel geilen Scheiß machte 01:25:41 Das Wort Suplex ist schon geil 01:35:11 Nach dem Anus flacht er seitlich ab 01:39:12 Wer Oscars kriegt, kennt auch Filmkritiker 01:59:51 Rückwärts gedreht 02:06:28 Geil! Persona 3 kaufen! 02:09:44 Double Dragon Ball Evolution 02:12:18 Über Ridley Scott darf man reden 02:20:58 Willst 'n krasser Typ sein, musst du erst mal ordentlich pumpen 02:22:00 Mega-Fell mit Rotzmechanik 02:36:32 Der aufzug nach oben führt in eine Höhle 02:48:00 Jemand der mehr drauf hat als Steven Seagal 02:57:37 Deine Mudda ist nicht so cool wie Michelle Yeoh 3:18:40 Bon Appétit, my love is sweet

Benvenuti nella raccolta in formato Podcast delle puntate di #CloseUp, a cura di Matteo Righi, aka Houssy. #CloseUp è la rubrica di recensioni cinematografiche in onda su Radio Italia Anni 60 Emilia-Romagna.

The boys from From the Files of Police Squad (in Color), our limited series about Police Squad! and The Naked Gun films are back and talking about something we didn't discuss there...Released in 1984, Zucker Abrahams Zucker's Top Secret is a send up of both Elvis movies and WWII espionage films. It's a very odd duck which stars Val Kilmer as Nick Rivers, a teen idol who has made a name for himself with a series of songs about surfing and skeet shooting. Nick goes behind the Iron Curtain to East Germany where things haven't changed much since WWII, especially that it's Nazis in charge of everything, rather than the communist party. He becomes embroiled in intrigue though Nick Rivers sticks his neck out for nobody until he meets the gorgeous Hillary Flammond (Lucy Gutteridge) and her band of freedom fighters. Chris Stachiw and Mark Begley join Mike to discuss the film while the episode features interviews with actors Ian McNeice and Christopher Villiers, screenwriter Martyn Burke, and writers/directors Jim Abrahams and David Zucker.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-projection-booth-podcast_2/support.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5513239/advertisement

The boys from From the Files of Police Squad (in Color), our limited series about Police Squad! and The Naked Gun films are back and talking about something we didn't discuss there...Released in 1984, Zucker Abrahams Zucker's Top Secret is a send up of both Elvis movies and WWII espionage films. It's a very odd duck which stars Val Kilmer as Nick Rivers, a teen idol who has made a name for himself with a series of songs about surfing and skeet shooting. Nick goes behind the Iron Curtain to East Germany where things haven't changed much since WWII, especially that it's Nazis in charge of everything, rather than the communist party. He becomes embroiled in intrigue though Nick Rivers sticks his neck out for nobody until he meets the gorgeous Hillary Flammond (Lucy Gutteridge) and her band of freedom fighters. Chris Stachiw and Mark Begley join Mike to discuss the film while the episode features interviews with actors Ian McNeice and Christopher Villiers, screenwriter Martyn Burke, and writers/directors Jim Abrahams and David Zucker.

This week, we talk about the 1980s Marvel Cinematic Universe that could have been, and eventually was. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the undisputed king of intellectual property in the entertainment industry. As of February 9th, 2023, the day I record this episode, there have been thirty full length motion pictures part of the MCU in the past fifteen years, with a combined global ticket sales of $28 billion, as well as twenty television shows that have been seen by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. It is a entertainment juggernaut that does not appear to be going away anytime soon.   This comes as a total shock to many of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, who were witness of cheaply produced television shows featuring hokey special effects and a roster of has-beens and never weres in the cast. Superman was the king of superheroes at the movies, in large part because, believe it or not, there hadn't even been a movie based on a Marvel Comics character released into theatres until the summer of 1986. But not for lack of trying.   And that's what we're going to talk about today. A brief history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the 1980s.       But first, as always, some backstory.   Now, I am not approaching this as a comic fan. When I was growing up in the 80s, I collected comics, but my collection was limited to Marvel's Star Wars series, Marvel's ROM The SpaceKnight, and Marvel's two-issue Blade Runner comic adaptation in 1982. So I apologize to Marvel comics fans if I relay some of this information incorrectly. I have tried to do my due diligence when it comes to my research.   Marvel Comics got its start as Timely Comics back in 1939. On August 31, 1939, Timely would release its first comic, titled Marvel Comics, which would feature a number of short stories featuring versions of characters that would become long-running staples of the eventual publishing house that would bear the comic's name, including The Angel, a version of The Human Torch who was actually an android hero, and Namor the Submariner, who was originally created for a unpublished comic that was supposed to be given to kids when they attended their local movie theatre during a Saturday matinee.   That comic issue would quickly sell out its initial 80,000 print run, as well as its second run, which would put another 800,000 copies out to the marketplace. The Vision would be another character introduced on the pages of Marvel Comics, in November 1940.   In December 1940, Timely would introduce their next big character, Captain America, who would find instant success thanks to its front cover depicting Cap punching Adolph Hitler square in the jaw, proving that Americans have loved seeing Nazis get punched in the face even a year before our country entered the World War II conflict. But there would be other popular characters created during this timeframe, including Black Widow, The Falcon, and The Invisible Man.   In 1941, Timely Comics would lose two of its best collaborators, artists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, to rival company Detective Comics, and Timely owner Martin Goodman would promote one of his cousins, by marriage to his wife Jean no less, to become the interim editor of Timely Comics. A nineteen year old kid named Stanley Lieber, who would shorten his name to Stan Lee.   In 1951, Timely Comics would be rebranded at Atlas Comics, and would expand past superhero titles to include tales of crime, drama, espionage, horror, science fiction, war, western, and even romance comics.   Eventually, in 1961, Atlas Comics would rebrand once again as Marvel Comics, and would find great success by changing the focus of their stories from being aimed towards younger readers and towards a more sophisticated audience. It would be November 1961 when Marvel would introduce their first superhero team, The Fantastic Four, as well as a number of their most beloved characters including Black Panther, Carol Danvers, Iron Man, The Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man, and Thor, as well as Professor X and many of the X-Men.   And as would be expected, Hollywood would come knocking. Warner Brothers would be in the best position to make comic book movies, as both they and DC Comics were owned by the same company beginning in 1969. But for Marvel, they would not be able to enjoy that kind of symbiotic relationship. Regularly strapped for cash, Stan Lee would often sell movie and television rights to a variety of Marvel characters to whomever came calling. First, Marvel would team with a variety of producers to create a series of animated television shows, starting with The Marvel Super Heroes in 1966, two different series based on The Fantastic Four, and both Spider-Man and Spider-Woman series.   But movies were a different matter.   The rights to make a Spider-Man television show, for example, was sold off to a production company called Danchuck, who teamed with CBS-TV to start airing the show in September of 1977, but Danchuck was able to find a loophole in their contract  that allowed them to release the two-hour pilot episode as a movie outside of the United States, which complicated the movie rights Marvel had already sold to another company.   Because the “movie” was a success around the world, CBS and Danchuck would release two more Spider-Man “movies” in 1978 and 1981. Eventually, the company that owned the Spider-Man movie rights to sell them to another company in the early 1980s, the legendary independent B-movie production company and distributor, New World Pictures, founded and operated by the legendary independent B-movie producer and director Roger Corman. But shortly after Corman acquired the film rights to Spider-Man, he went and almost immediately sold them to another legendary independent B-movie production company and distributor, Cannon Films.   Side note: Shortly after Corman sold the movie rights to Spider-Man to Cannon, Marvel Entertainment was sold to the company that also owned New World Pictures, although Corman himself had nothing to do with the deal itself. The owners of New World were hoping to merge the Marvel comic book characters with the studio's television and motion picture department, to create a sort of shared universe. But since so many of the better known characters like Spider-Man and Captain America had their movie and television rights sold off to the competition, it didn't seem like that was going to happen anytime soon, but again, I'm getting ahead of myself.   So for now, we're going to settle on May 1st, 1985. Cannon Films, who loved to spend money to make money, made a big statement in the pages of the industry trade publication Variety, when they bought nine full pages of advertising in the Cannes Market preview issue to announce that buyers around the world needed to get ready, because he was coming.   Spider-Man.   A live-action motion picture event, to be directed by Tobe Hooper, whose last movie, Poltergeist, re-ignited his directing career, that would be arriving in theatres for Christmas 1986. Cannon had made a name for themselves making cheapie teen comedies in their native Israel in the 1970s, and then brought that formula to America with films like The Last American Virgin, a remake of the first Lemon Popsicle movie that made them a success back home. Cannon would swerve into cheapie action movies with fallen stars like Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson, and would prop up a new action star in Chuck Norris, as well as cheapie trend-chasing movies like Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. They had seen enough success in America where they could start spending even bigger, and Spider-Man was supposed to be their first big splash into the superhero movie genre. With that, they would hire Leslie Stevens, the creator of the cult TV series The Outer Limits, to write the screenplay.   There was just one small problem.   Neither Stevens nor Cannon head honcho Menachem Golan understood the Spider-Man character.   Golan thought Spider-Man was a half-spider/half-man creature, not unlike The Wolf Man, and instructed Stevens to follow that concept. Stevens' script would not really borrow from any of the comics' twenty plus year history. Peter Parker, who in this story is a twenty-something ID photographer for a corporation that probably would have been Oscorp if it were written by anyone else who had at least some familiarity with the comics, who becomes intentionally bombarded with gamma radiation by one of the scientists in one of the laboratories, turning Bruce Banner… I mean, Peter Parker, into a hairy eight-armed… yes, eight armed… hybrid human/spider monster. At first suicidal, Bruce… I mean, Peter, refuses to join forces with the scientist's other master race of mutants, forcing Peter to battle these other mutants in a basement lab to the death.   To say Stan Lee hated it would be an understatement.   Lee schooled Golan and Golan's partner at Cannon, cousin Yoram Globus, on what Spider-Man was supposed to be, demanded a new screenplay. Wanting to keep the head of Marvel Comics happy, because they had big plans not only for Spider-Man but a number of other Marvel characters, they would hire the screenwriting team of Ted Newsom and John Brancato, who had written a screenplay adaptation for Lee of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, to come up with a new script for Spider-Man.   Newsom and Brancato would write an origin story, featuring a teenage Peter Parker who must deal with his newfound powers while trying to maintain a regular high school existence, while going up against an evil scientist, Otto Octavius. But we'll come back to that later.   In that same May 1985 issue of Variety, amongst dozens of pages of ads for movies both completed and in development, including three other movies from Tobe Hooper, was a one-page ad for Captain America. No director or actor was attached to the project yet, but comic book writer James L. Silke, who had written the scripts for four other Cannon movies in the previous two years, was listed as the screenwriter.   By October 1985, Cannon was again trying to pre-sell foreign rights to make a Spider-Man movie, this time at the MIFED Film Market in Milan, Italy. Gone were Leslie Stevens and Tobe Hooper. Newsom and Brancato were the new credited writers, and Joseph Tito, the director of the Chuck Norris/Cannon movies Missing in Action and Invasion U.S.A., was the new director. In a two-page ad for Captain America, the film would acquire a new director in Michael Winner, the director of the first three Death Wish movies.   And the pattern would continue every few months, from Cannes to MIFED to the American Film Market, and back to Cannes. A new writer would be attached. A new director. A new release date. By October 1987, after the twin failures of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Masters of the Universe, Cannon had all but given up on a Captain America movie, and downshifted the budget on their proposed Spider-Man movie. Albert Pyun, whose ability to make any movie in any genre look far better than its budget should have allowed, was brought in to be the director of Spider-Man, from a new script written by Shepard Goldman.   Who?   Shepard Goldman, whose one and only credit on any motion picture was as one of three screenwriters on the 1988 Cannon movie Salsa.   Don't remember Salsa? That's okay. Neither does anyone else.   But we'll talk a lot more about Cannon Films down the road, because there's a lot to talk about when it comes to Cannon Films, although I will leave you with two related tidbits…   Do you remember the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme film Cyborg? Post-apocalyptic cyberpunk martial-arts action film where JCVD and everyone else in the movie have names like Gibson Rickenbacker, Fender Tremolo, Marshall Strat and Pearl Prophet for no damn good reason? Stupid movie, lots of fun. Anyway, Albert Pyun was supposed to shoot two movies back to back for Cannon Films in 1988, a sequel to Masters of the Universe, and Spider-Man. To save money, both movies would use many of the same sets and costumes, and Cannon had spent more than $2m building the sets and costumes at the old Dino DeLaurentiis Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina, where David Lynch had shot Blue Velvet. But then Cannon ran into some cash flow issues, and lost the rights to both the He-Man toy line from Mattel and the Spider-Man characters they had licensed from Marvel. But ever the astute businessman, Cannon Films chairman Menahem Golan offered Pyun $500,000 to shoot any movie he wanted using the costumes and sets already created and paid for, provided Pyun could come up with a movie idea in a week. Pyun wrote the script to Cyborg in five days, and outside of some on-set alterations, that first draft would be the shooting script. The film would open in theatres in April 1989, and gross more than $10m in the United States alone.   A few months later, Golan would gone from Cannon Films. As part of his severance package, he would take one of the company's acquisitions, 21st Century Films, with him, as well as several projects, including Captain America. Albert Pyun never got to make his Spider-Man movie, but he would go into production on his Captain America in August 1989. But since the movie didn't get released in any form until it came out direct to video and cable in 1992, I'll leave it to podcasts devoted to 90s movies to tell you more about it. I've seen it. It's super easy to find on YouTube. It really sucks, although not as much as that 1994 version of The Fantastic Four that still hasn't been officially released nearly thirty years later.   There would also be attempts throughout the decade to make movies from the aforementioned Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Daredevil, the Incredible Hulk, Silver Surfer and Iron Man, from companies like New Line, 20th Century-Fox and Universal, but none of those would ever come to fruition in the 1980s.   But the one that would stick?   Of the more than 1,000 characters that had been featured in the pages of Marvel Comics over the course of forty years?   The one that would become the star of the first ever theatrically released motion picture based on a Marvel character?   Howard the Duck.   Howard the Duck was not your average Marvel superhero.   Howard the Duck wasn't even a superhero.   He was just some wise crackin', ill-tempered, anthropomorphic water fowl that was abducted away from his home on Duckworld and forced against his will to live with humans on Earth. Or, more specifically, first with the dirty humans of the Florida Everglades, and then Cleveland, and finally New York City.    Howard the Duck was metafiction and existentialist when neither of these things were in the zeitgeist. He smoked cigars, wore a suit and tie, and enjoy drinking a variety of libations and getting it on with the women, mostly his sometimes girlfriend Beverly.   The perfect character to be the subject of the very first Marvel movie.   A PG-rated movie.   Enter George Lucas.   In 1973, George Lucas had hit it big with his second film as a director, American Graffiti. Lucas had written the screenplay, based in part on his life as an eighteen year old car enthusiast about to graduate high school, with the help of a friend from his days at USC Film School, Willard Huyck, and Huyck's wife, Gloria Katz. Lucas wanted to show his appreciation for their help by producing a movie for them. Although there are variations to the story of how this came about, most sources say it was Huyck who would tell Lucas about this new comic book character, Howard the Duck, who piqued his classmate's interest by describing the comic as having elements of film noir and absurdism.   Because Universal dragged their feet on American Graffiti, not promoting it as well as they could have upon its initial release and only embracing the film when the public embraced its retro soundtrack, Lucas was not too keen on working with Universal again on his next project, a sci-fi movie he was calling The Journal of the Whills. And while they saw some potential in what they considered to be some minor kiddie movie, they didn't think Lucas could pull it off the way he was describing it for the budget he was asking for.   “What else you got, kid?” they'd ask.   Lucas had Huyck and Katz, and an idea for a live-action comic book movie about a talking duck.   Surprisingly, Universal did not slam the door shut in Lucas's face. They actually went for the idea, and worked with Lucas, Stan Lee of Marvel Comics and Howard's creator, Steve Gerber, to put a deal together to make it happen.   Almost right away, Gerber and the screenwriters, Huyck and Katz, would butt heads on practically every aspect of the movie's storyline. Katz just thought it was some funny story about a duck from outer space and his wacky adventures on Earth, Gerber was adamant that Howard the Duck was an existential joke, that the difference between life's most serious moments and its most incredibly dumb moments were only distinguishable by a moment's point of view. Huyck wanted to make a big special effects movie, while Katz thought it would be fun to set the story in Hawaii so she and her husband could have some fun while shooting there. The writers would spend years on their script, removing most everything that made the Howard the Duck comic book so enjoyable to its readers. Howard and his story would be played completely straight in the movie, leaning on subtle gags not unlike a Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker movie, instead of embracing the surreal ridiculousness of the comics. They would write humongous effects-heavy set pieces, knowing they would have access to their producer's in-house special effects team, Industrial Light and Magic, instead of the comics' more cerebral endings. And they'd tone down the more risqué aspects of Howard's personality, figuring a more family-friendly movie would bring in more money at the box office.   It would take nearly twelve years for all the pieces to fall into place for Howard the Duck to begin filming. But in the spring of 1985, Universal finally gave the green light for Lucas and his tea to finally make the first live-action feature film based on a Marvel Comics character.   For Beverly, the filmmakers claimed to have looked at every young actress in Hollywood before deciding on twenty-four year old Lea Thompson, who after years of supporting roles in movies like Jaws 3-D, All the Right Moves and Red Dawn, had found success playing Michael J. Fox's mother in Back to the Future. Twenty-six year old Tim Robbins had only made two movies up to this point, at one of the frat boys in Fraternity Vacation and as one of the fighter pilots in Top Gun, and this was his first chance to play a leading role in a major motion picture. And Jeffrey Jones would be cast as the bad guy, the Dark Overlord, based upon his work in the 1984 Best Picture winner Amadeus, although he would be coming to the set of Howard the Duck straight off of working on a John Hughes movie, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.   Howard the Duck would begin shooting on the Universal Studios lot of November 11th, 1985, and on the very first day of production, the duck puppet being used to film would have a major mechanical failure, not unlike the mechanical failure of the shark in Jaws that would force Steven Spielberg to become more creative with how he shot that character. George Lucas, who would be a hands-on producer, would suggest that maybe they could shoot other scenes not involving the duck, while his crew at ILM created a fully functional, life-sized animatronic duck costume for a little actor to wear on set. At first, the lead actor in the duck suit was a twelve-year old boy, but within days of his start on the film, he would develop a severe case of claustrophobia inside the costume. Ed Gale, originally hired to be the stuntman in the duck costume, would quickly take over the role. Since Gale could work longer hours than the child, due to the very restrictive laws surrounding child actors on movie and television sets, this would help keep the movie on a good production schedule, and make shooting the questionable love scenes between Howard and Beverly easier for Ms. Thompson, who was creeped out at the thought of seducing a pre-teen for a scene.   To keep the shoot on schedule, not only would the filmmakers employ a second shooting unit to shoot the scenes not involving the main actors, which is standard operating procedure on most movies, Lucas would supervise a third shooting unit that would shoot Robbins and Gale in one of the film's more climactic moments, when Howard and Phil are trying to escape being captured by the authorities by flying off on an ultralight plane. Most of this sequence would be shot in the town of Petaluma, California, on the same streets where Lucas had shot American Graffiti's iconic cruising scenes thirteen years earlier.   After a month-long shoot of the film's climax at a naval station in San Francisco, the film would end production on March 26th, 1986, leaving the $36m film barely four months to be put together in order to make its already set in stone August 1st, 1986, release date.   Being used to quick turnaround times, the effects teams working on the film would get all their shots completed with time to spare, not only because they were good at their jobs but they had the ability to start work before the film went into production. For the end sequence, when Jones' character had fully transformed into the Dark Overlord, master stop motion animator Phil Tippett, who had left ILM in 1984 to start his own effects studio specializing in that style of animation, had nearly a year to put together what would ultimately be less than two minutes of actual screen time.   As Beverly was a musician, Lucas would hire English musician and composer Thomas Dolby, whose 1982 single She Blinded Me With Science became a global smash hit, to write the songs for Cherry Bomb, the all-girl rock group lead by Lea Thompson's Beverly. Playing KC, the keyboardist for Cherry Bomb, Holly Robinson would book her first major acting role. For the music, Dolby would collaborate with Allee Willis, the co-writer of Earth Wind and Fire's September and Boogie Wonderland, and funk legend George Clinton. But despite this powerhouse musical trio, the songs for the band were not very good, and, with all due respect to Lea Thompson, not very well sung.   By August 1986, Universal Studios needed a hit. Despite winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in March with Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa, the first six films they released for the year were all disappointments at the box office and/or with the critics.    The Best of Times, a comedy featuring Robin Williams and Kurt Russell as two friends who try to recreate a high school football game which changed the direction of both their lives. Despite a script written by Ron Shelton, who would be nominated for an Oscar for his next screenplay, Bull Durham, and Robin Williams, the $12m film would gross less than $8m.    The Money Pit, a comedy with Tom Hanks and Shelley Long, would end up grossing $37m against a $10m budget, but the movie was so bad, its first appearance on DVD wouldn't come until 2011, and only as part of a Tom Hanks Comedy Favorites Collection along with The ‘Burbs and Dragnet.   Legend, a dark fantasy film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Tom Cruise, was supposed to be one of the biggest hits… of 1985. But Scott and the studio would fight over the film, with the director wanting them to release a two hour and five minute long version with a classical movie score by Jerry Goldsmith, while the studio eventually cut the film down an hour and twenty-nine minutes with a techno score by Tangerine Dream. Despite an amazing makeup job transforming Tim Curry into the Lord of Darkness as well as sumptuous costumes and cinematography, the $24.5m film would just miss recouping its production budget back in ticket sales.   Tom Cruise would become a superstar not three weeks later, when Paramount Pictures released Top Gun, directed by Ridley's little brother Tony Scott.   Sweet Liberty should have been a solid performer for the studio. Alan Alda, in his first movie since the end of MASH three years earlier, would write, direct and star in this comedy about a college history professor who must watch in disbelief as a Hollywood production comes to his small town to film the movie version of one of the books. The movie, which also starred Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Michelle Pfieffer and screen legend Lillian Gish, would get lost in the shuffle of other comedies that were already playing in theatres like Ferris Bueller and Short Circuit.   Legal Eagles was the movie to beat for the summer of 1986… at least on paper. Ivan Reitman's follow-up film to Ghostbusters would feature a cast that included Robert Redford, Debra Winger and Daryl Hannah, along with Brian Denny, Terence Stamp, and Brian Doyle-Murray, and was perhaps too much movie, being a legal romantic comedy mystery crime thriller.   Phew.   If I were to do an episode about agency packaging in the 1980s, the process when a talent agency like Creative Artists Agency, or CAA, put two or more of their clients together in a project not because it might be best for the movie but best for the agency that will collect a 10% commission from each client attached to the project, Legal Eagles would be the example of packaging gone too far. Ivan Reitman was a client of CAA. As were Redford,  and Winger, and Hannah. As was Bill Murray, who was originally cast in the Redford role. As were Jim Cash and Jack Epps, the screenwriters for the film. As was Tom Mankewicz, the co-writer of Superman and three Bond films, who was brought in to rewrite the script when Murray left and Redford came in. As was Frank Price, the chairman of Universal Pictures when the project was put together. All told, CAA would book more than $1.5m in commissions for themselves from all their clients working on the film.   And it sucked.   Despite the fact that it had almost no special effects, Legal Eagles would cost $40m to produce, one of the most expensive movies ever made to that point, nearly one and a half times the cost of Ghostbusters. The film would gross nearly $50m in the US, which would make it only the 14th highest grossing film of the year. Less than Stand By Me. Less than The Color of Money. Less than Down and Out in Beverly Hills.   And then there was Psycho III, the Anthony Perkins-directed slasher film that brought good old Norman Bates out of mothballs once again. An almost direct follow-up to Psycho II from 1983, the film neither embraced by horror film fans or critics, the film would only open in eighth place, despite the fact there hadn't been a horror movie in theatres for months, and its $14m gross would kill off any chance for a Psycho IV in theatres.   In late June, Universal would hold a series of test screenings for Howard the Duck. Depending on who you talk to, the test screenings either went really well, or went so bad that one of the writers would tear up negative response cards before they could be given to the score compilers, to goose the numbers up, pun only somewhat intended. I tend to believe the latter story, as it was fairly well reported at the time that the test screenings went so bad, Sid Sheinberg, the CEO of Universal, and Frank Price, the President of the studio, got into a fist fight in the lobby of one of the theatres running one of the test screenings, over who was to blame for this impending debacle.   And a debacle it was.   But just how bad?   So bad, copywriters from across the nation reveled in giddy glee over the chances to have a headline that read “‘Howard the Duck' Lays an Egg!”   And it did.   Well, sort of.   When it opened in 1554 theatres on August 1st, the film would gross $5.07m, the second best opener of the weekend, behind the sixth Friday the 13th entry, and above other new movies like the Tom Hanks/Jackie Gleason dramedy Nothing in Common and the cult film in the making Flight of the Navigator. And $5m in 1986 was a fairly decent if unspectacular opening weekend gross. The Fly was considered a massive success when it opened to $7m just two weeks later. Short Circuit, which had opened to $5.3m in May, was also lauded as being a hit right out of the gate.   And the reviews were pretty lousy. Gene Siskel gave the film only one star, calling it a stupid film with an unlikeable lead in the duck and special effects that were less impressive than a sparkler shoved into a birthday cake. Both Siskel and Ebert would give it the dreaded two thumbs down on their show. Leonard Maltin called the film hopeless. Today, the film only has a 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with 81 reviews.   But despite the shellacking the film took, it wouldn't be all bad for several of the people involved in the making of the film.   Lea Thompson was so worried her career might be over after the opening weekend of the film, she accepted a role in the John Hughes movie Some Kind of Wonderful that she had turned down multiple times before. As I stated in our March 2021 episode about that movie, it's my favorite of all John Hughes movies, and it would lead to a happy ending for Thompson as well. Although the film was not a massive success, Thompson and the film's director, Howard Deutch, would fall in love during the making of the film. They would marry in 1989, have two daughters together, and as of the writing of this episode, they are still happily married.   For Tim Robbins, it showed filmmakers that he could handle a leading role in a movie. Within two years, he would be starring alongside Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham, and he career would soar for the next three decades.   And for Ed Gale, his being able to act while in a full-body duck suit would lead him to be cast to play Chucky in the first two Child's Play movies as well as Bride of Chucky.   Years later, Entertainment Weekly would name Howard the Duck as the biggest pop culture failure of all time, ahead of such turkeys as NBC's wonderfully ridiculous 1979 show Supertrain, the infamous 1980 Western Heaven's Gate, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman's Ishtar, and the truly wretched 1978 Bee Gees movie Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.   But Howard the Duck, the character, not the movie, would enjoy a renaissance in 2014, when James Gunn included a CG-animated version of the character in the post-credit sequence for Guardians of the Galaxy. The character would show up again in the Disney animated Guardians television series, and in the 2021 Disney+ anthology series Marvel's What If…   There technically would be one other 1980s movie based on a Marvel character, Mark Goldblatt's version of The Punisher, featuring Dolph Lundgren as Frank Castle. Shot in Australia in 1988, the film was supposed to be released by New World Pictures in August of 1989. The company even sent out trailers to theatres that summer to help build awareness for the film, but New World's continued financial issues would put the film on hold until April 1991, when it was released directly to video by Live Entertainment.   It wouldn't be until the 1998 release of Blade, featuring Wesley Snipes as the titular vampire, that movies based on Marvel Comics characters would finally be accepted by movie-going audiences. That would soon be followed by Bryan Singer's X-Men in 2000, and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man in 2002, the success of both prompting Marvel to start putting together the team that would eventually give birth to the Marvel Cinematic Universe we all know and love today.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 102, the first of two episodes about the 1980s distribution company Vestron Pictures, is released.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Howard the Duck, and the other movies, both existing and non-existent, we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

This week, we talk about the 1980s Marvel Cinematic Universe that could have been, and eventually was. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the undisputed king of intellectual property in the entertainment industry. As of February 9th, 2023, the day I record this episode, there have been thirty full length motion pictures part of the MCU in the past fifteen years, with a combined global ticket sales of $28 billion, as well as twenty television shows that have been seen by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. It is a entertainment juggernaut that does not appear to be going away anytime soon.   This comes as a total shock to many of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, who were witness of cheaply produced television shows featuring hokey special effects and a roster of has-beens and never weres in the cast. Superman was the king of superheroes at the movies, in large part because, believe it or not, there hadn't even been a movie based on a Marvel Comics character released into theatres until the summer of 1986. But not for lack of trying.   And that's what we're going to talk about today. A brief history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the 1980s.       But first, as always, some backstory.   Now, I am not approaching this as a comic fan. When I was growing up in the 80s, I collected comics, but my collection was limited to Marvel's Star Wars series, Marvel's ROM The SpaceKnight, and Marvel's two-issue Blade Runner comic adaptation in 1982. So I apologize to Marvel comics fans if I relay some of this information incorrectly. I have tried to do my due diligence when it comes to my research.   Marvel Comics got its start as Timely Comics back in 1939. On August 31, 1939, Timely would release its first comic, titled Marvel Comics, which would feature a number of short stories featuring versions of characters that would become long-running staples of the eventual publishing house that would bear the comic's name, including The Angel, a version of The Human Torch who was actually an android hero, and Namor the Submariner, who was originally created for a unpublished comic that was supposed to be given to kids when they attended their local movie theatre during a Saturday matinee.   That comic issue would quickly sell out its initial 80,000 print run, as well as its second run, which would put another 800,000 copies out to the marketplace. The Vision would be another character introduced on the pages of Marvel Comics, in November 1940.   In December 1940, Timely would introduce their next big character, Captain America, who would find instant success thanks to its front cover depicting Cap punching Adolph Hitler square in the jaw, proving that Americans have loved seeing Nazis get punched in the face even a year before our country entered the World War II conflict. But there would be other popular characters created during this timeframe, including Black Widow, The Falcon, and The Invisible Man.   In 1941, Timely Comics would lose two of its best collaborators, artists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, to rival company Detective Comics, and Timely owner Martin Goodman would promote one of his cousins, by marriage to his wife Jean no less, to become the interim editor of Timely Comics. A nineteen year old kid named Stanley Lieber, who would shorten his name to Stan Lee.   In 1951, Timely Comics would be rebranded at Atlas Comics, and would expand past superhero titles to include tales of crime, drama, espionage, horror, science fiction, war, western, and even romance comics.   Eventually, in 1961, Atlas Comics would rebrand once again as Marvel Comics, and would find great success by changing the focus of their stories from being aimed towards younger readers and towards a more sophisticated audience. It would be November 1961 when Marvel would introduce their first superhero team, The Fantastic Four, as well as a number of their most beloved characters including Black Panther, Carol Danvers, Iron Man, The Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man, and Thor, as well as Professor X and many of the X-Men.   And as would be expected, Hollywood would come knocking. Warner Brothers would be in the best position to make comic book movies, as both they and DC Comics were owned by the same company beginning in 1969. But for Marvel, they would not be able to enjoy that kind of symbiotic relationship. Regularly strapped for cash, Stan Lee would often sell movie and television rights to a variety of Marvel characters to whomever came calling. First, Marvel would team with a variety of producers to create a series of animated television shows, starting with The Marvel Super Heroes in 1966, two different series based on The Fantastic Four, and both Spider-Man and Spider-Woman series.   But movies were a different matter.   The rights to make a Spider-Man television show, for example, was sold off to a production company called Danchuck, who teamed with CBS-TV to start airing the show in September of 1977, but Danchuck was able to find a loophole in their contract  that allowed them to release the two-hour pilot episode as a movie outside of the United States, which complicated the movie rights Marvel had already sold to another company.   Because the “movie” was a success around the world, CBS and Danchuck would release two more Spider-Man “movies” in 1978 and 1981. Eventually, the company that owned the Spider-Man movie rights to sell them to another company in the early 1980s, the legendary independent B-movie production company and distributor, New World Pictures, founded and operated by the legendary independent B-movie producer and director Roger Corman. But shortly after Corman acquired the film rights to Spider-Man, he went and almost immediately sold them to another legendary independent B-movie production company and distributor, Cannon Films.   Side note: Shortly after Corman sold the movie rights to Spider-Man to Cannon, Marvel Entertainment was sold to the company that also owned New World Pictures, although Corman himself had nothing to do with the deal itself. The owners of New World were hoping to merge the Marvel comic book characters with the studio's television and motion picture department, to create a sort of shared universe. But since so many of the better known characters like Spider-Man and Captain America had their movie and television rights sold off to the competition, it didn't seem like that was going to happen anytime soon, but again, I'm getting ahead of myself.   So for now, we're going to settle on May 1st, 1985. Cannon Films, who loved to spend money to make money, made a big statement in the pages of the industry trade publication Variety, when they bought nine full pages of advertising in the Cannes Market preview issue to announce that buyers around the world needed to get ready, because he was coming.   Spider-Man.   A live-action motion picture event, to be directed by Tobe Hooper, whose last movie, Poltergeist, re-ignited his directing career, that would be arriving in theatres for Christmas 1986. Cannon had made a name for themselves making cheapie teen comedies in their native Israel in the 1970s, and then brought that formula to America with films like The Last American Virgin, a remake of the first Lemon Popsicle movie that made them a success back home. Cannon would swerve into cheapie action movies with fallen stars like Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson, and would prop up a new action star in Chuck Norris, as well as cheapie trend-chasing movies like Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. They had seen enough success in America where they could start spending even bigger, and Spider-Man was supposed to be their first big splash into the superhero movie genre. With that, they would hire Leslie Stevens, the creator of the cult TV series The Outer Limits, to write the screenplay.   There was just one small problem.   Neither Stevens nor Cannon head honcho Menachem Golan understood the Spider-Man character.   Golan thought Spider-Man was a half-spider/half-man creature, not unlike The Wolf Man, and instructed Stevens to follow that concept. Stevens' script would not really borrow from any of the comics' twenty plus year history. Peter Parker, who in this story is a twenty-something ID photographer for a corporation that probably would have been Oscorp if it were written by anyone else who had at least some familiarity with the comics, who becomes intentionally bombarded with gamma radiation by one of the scientists in one of the laboratories, turning Bruce Banner… I mean, Peter Parker, into a hairy eight-armed… yes, eight armed… hybrid human/spider monster. At first suicidal, Bruce… I mean, Peter, refuses to join forces with the scientist's other master race of mutants, forcing Peter to battle these other mutants in a basement lab to the death.   To say Stan Lee hated it would be an understatement.   Lee schooled Golan and Golan's partner at Cannon, cousin Yoram Globus, on what Spider-Man was supposed to be, demanded a new screenplay. Wanting to keep the head of Marvel Comics happy, because they had big plans not only for Spider-Man but a number of other Marvel characters, they would hire the screenwriting team of Ted Newsom and John Brancato, who had written a screenplay adaptation for Lee of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, to come up with a new script for Spider-Man.   Newsom and Brancato would write an origin story, featuring a teenage Peter Parker who must deal with his newfound powers while trying to maintain a regular high school existence, while going up against an evil scientist, Otto Octavius. But we'll come back to that later.   In that same May 1985 issue of Variety, amongst dozens of pages of ads for movies both completed and in development, including three other movies from Tobe Hooper, was a one-page ad for Captain America. No director or actor was attached to the project yet, but comic book writer James L. Silke, who had written the scripts for four other Cannon movies in the previous two years, was listed as the screenwriter.   By October 1985, Cannon was again trying to pre-sell foreign rights to make a Spider-Man movie, this time at the MIFED Film Market in Milan, Italy. Gone were Leslie Stevens and Tobe Hooper. Newsom and Brancato were the new credited writers, and Joseph Tito, the director of the Chuck Norris/Cannon movies Missing in Action and Invasion U.S.A., was the new director. In a two-page ad for Captain America, the film would acquire a new director in Michael Winner, the director of the first three Death Wish movies.   And the pattern would continue every few months, from Cannes to MIFED to the American Film Market, and back to Cannes. A new writer would be attached. A new director. A new release date. By October 1987, after the twin failures of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Masters of the Universe, Cannon had all but given up on a Captain America movie, and downshifted the budget on their proposed Spider-Man movie. Albert Pyun, whose ability to make any movie in any genre look far better than its budget should have allowed, was brought in to be the director of Spider-Man, from a new script written by Shepard Goldman.   Who?   Shepard Goldman, whose one and only credit on any motion picture was as one of three screenwriters on the 1988 Cannon movie Salsa.   Don't remember Salsa? That's okay. Neither does anyone else.   But we'll talk a lot more about Cannon Films down the road, because there's a lot to talk about when it comes to Cannon Films, although I will leave you with two related tidbits…   Do you remember the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme film Cyborg? Post-apocalyptic cyberpunk martial-arts action film where JCVD and everyone else in the movie have names like Gibson Rickenbacker, Fender Tremolo, Marshall Strat and Pearl Prophet for no damn good reason? Stupid movie, lots of fun. Anyway, Albert Pyun was supposed to shoot two movies back to back for Cannon Films in 1988, a sequel to Masters of the Universe, and Spider-Man. To save money, both movies would use many of the same sets and costumes, and Cannon had spent more than $2m building the sets and costumes at the old Dino DeLaurentiis Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina, where David Lynch had shot Blue Velvet. But then Cannon ran into some cash flow issues, and lost the rights to both the He-Man toy line from Mattel and the Spider-Man characters they had licensed from Marvel. But ever the astute businessman, Cannon Films chairman Menahem Golan offered Pyun $500,000 to shoot any movie he wanted using the costumes and sets already created and paid for, provided Pyun could come up with a movie idea in a week. Pyun wrote the script to Cyborg in five days, and outside of some on-set alterations, that first draft would be the shooting script. The film would open in theatres in April 1989, and gross more than $10m in the United States alone.   A few months later, Golan would gone from Cannon Films. As part of his severance package, he would take one of the company's acquisitions, 21st Century Films, with him, as well as several projects, including Captain America. Albert Pyun never got to make his Spider-Man movie, but he would go into production on his Captain America in August 1989. But since the movie didn't get released in any form until it came out direct to video and cable in 1992, I'll leave it to podcasts devoted to 90s movies to tell you more about it. I've seen it. It's super easy to find on YouTube. It really sucks, although not as much as that 1994 version of The Fantastic Four that still hasn't been officially released nearly thirty years later.   There would also be attempts throughout the decade to make movies from the aforementioned Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Daredevil, the Incredible Hulk, Silver Surfer and Iron Man, from companies like New Line, 20th Century-Fox and Universal, but none of those would ever come to fruition in the 1980s.   But the one that would stick?   Of the more than 1,000 characters that had been featured in the pages of Marvel Comics over the course of forty years?   The one that would become the star of the first ever theatrically released motion picture based on a Marvel character?   Howard the Duck.   Howard the Duck was not your average Marvel superhero.   Howard the Duck wasn't even a superhero.   He was just some wise crackin', ill-tempered, anthropomorphic water fowl that was abducted away from his home on Duckworld and forced against his will to live with humans on Earth. Or, more specifically, first with the dirty humans of the Florida Everglades, and then Cleveland, and finally New York City.    Howard the Duck was metafiction and existentialist when neither of these things were in the zeitgeist. He smoked cigars, wore a suit and tie, and enjoy drinking a variety of libations and getting it on with the women, mostly his sometimes girlfriend Beverly.   The perfect character to be the subject of the very first Marvel movie.   A PG-rated movie.   Enter George Lucas.   In 1973, George Lucas had hit it big with his second film as a director, American Graffiti. Lucas had written the screenplay, based in part on his life as an eighteen year old car enthusiast about to graduate high school, with the help of a friend from his days at USC Film School, Willard Huyck, and Huyck's wife, Gloria Katz. Lucas wanted to show his appreciation for their help by producing a movie for them. Although there are variations to the story of how this came about, most sources say it was Huyck who would tell Lucas about this new comic book character, Howard the Duck, who piqued his classmate's interest by describing the comic as having elements of film noir and absurdism.   Because Universal dragged their feet on American Graffiti, not promoting it as well as they could have upon its initial release and only embracing the film when the public embraced its retro soundtrack, Lucas was not too keen on working with Universal again on his next project, a sci-fi movie he was calling The Journal of the Whills. And while they saw some potential in what they considered to be some minor kiddie movie, they didn't think Lucas could pull it off the way he was describing it for the budget he was asking for.   “What else you got, kid?” they'd ask.   Lucas had Huyck and Katz, and an idea for a live-action comic book movie about a talking duck.   Surprisingly, Universal did not slam the door shut in Lucas's face. They actually went for the idea, and worked with Lucas, Stan Lee of Marvel Comics and Howard's creator, Steve Gerber, to put a deal together to make it happen.   Almost right away, Gerber and the screenwriters, Huyck and Katz, would butt heads on practically every aspect of the movie's storyline. Katz just thought it was some funny story about a duck from outer space and his wacky adventures on Earth, Gerber was adamant that Howard the Duck was an existential joke, that the difference between life's most serious moments and its most incredibly dumb moments were only distinguishable by a moment's point of view. Huyck wanted to make a big special effects movie, while Katz thought it would be fun to set the story in Hawaii so she and her husband could have some fun while shooting there. The writers would spend years on their script, removing most everything that made the Howard the Duck comic book so enjoyable to its readers. Howard and his story would be played completely straight in the movie, leaning on subtle gags not unlike a Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker movie, instead of embracing the surreal ridiculousness of the comics. They would write humongous effects-heavy set pieces, knowing they would have access to their producer's in-house special effects team, Industrial Light and Magic, instead of the comics' more cerebral endings. And they'd tone down the more risqué aspects of Howard's personality, figuring a more family-friendly movie would bring in more money at the box office.   It would take nearly twelve years for all the pieces to fall into place for Howard the Duck to begin filming. But in the spring of 1985, Universal finally gave the green light for Lucas and his tea to finally make the first live-action feature film based on a Marvel Comics character.   For Beverly, the filmmakers claimed to have looked at every young actress in Hollywood before deciding on twenty-four year old Lea Thompson, who after years of supporting roles in movies like Jaws 3-D, All the Right Moves and Red Dawn, had found success playing Michael J. Fox's mother in Back to the Future. Twenty-six year old Tim Robbins had only made two movies up to this point, at one of the frat boys in Fraternity Vacation and as one of the fighter pilots in Top Gun, and this was his first chance to play a leading role in a major motion picture. And Jeffrey Jones would be cast as the bad guy, the Dark Overlord, based upon his work in the 1984 Best Picture winner Amadeus, although he would be coming to the set of Howard the Duck straight off of working on a John Hughes movie, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.   Howard the Duck would begin shooting on the Universal Studios lot of November 11th, 1985, and on the very first day of production, the duck puppet being used to film would have a major mechanical failure, not unlike the mechanical failure of the shark in Jaws that would force Steven Spielberg to become more creative with how he shot that character. George Lucas, who would be a hands-on producer, would suggest that maybe they could shoot other scenes not involving the duck, while his crew at ILM created a fully functional, life-sized animatronic duck costume for a little actor to wear on set. At first, the lead actor in the duck suit was a twelve-year old boy, but within days of his start on the film, he would develop a severe case of claustrophobia inside the costume. Ed Gale, originally hired to be the stuntman in the duck costume, would quickly take over the role. Since Gale could work longer hours than the child, due to the very restrictive laws surrounding child actors on movie and television sets, this would help keep the movie on a good production schedule, and make shooting the questionable love scenes between Howard and Beverly easier for Ms. Thompson, who was creeped out at the thought of seducing a pre-teen for a scene.   To keep the shoot on schedule, not only would the filmmakers employ a second shooting unit to shoot the scenes not involving the main actors, which is standard operating procedure on most movies, Lucas would supervise a third shooting unit that would shoot Robbins and Gale in one of the film's more climactic moments, when Howard and Phil are trying to escape being captured by the authorities by flying off on an ultralight plane. Most of this sequence would be shot in the town of Petaluma, California, on the same streets where Lucas had shot American Graffiti's iconic cruising scenes thirteen years earlier.   After a month-long shoot of the film's climax at a naval station in San Francisco, the film would end production on March 26th, 1986, leaving the $36m film barely four months to be put together in order to make its already set in stone August 1st, 1986, release date.   Being used to quick turnaround times, the effects teams working on the film would get all their shots completed with time to spare, not only because they were good at their jobs but they had the ability to start work before the film went into production. For the end sequence, when Jones' character had fully transformed into the Dark Overlord, master stop motion animator Phil Tippett, who had left ILM in 1984 to start his own effects studio specializing in that style of animation, had nearly a year to put together what would ultimately be less than two minutes of actual screen time.   As Beverly was a musician, Lucas would hire English musician and composer Thomas Dolby, whose 1982 single She Blinded Me With Science became a global smash hit, to write the songs for Cherry Bomb, the all-girl rock group lead by Lea Thompson's Beverly. Playing KC, the keyboardist for Cherry Bomb, Holly Robinson would book her first major acting role. For the music, Dolby would collaborate with Allee Willis, the co-writer of Earth Wind and Fire's September and Boogie Wonderland, and funk legend George Clinton. But despite this powerhouse musical trio, the songs for the band were not very good, and, with all due respect to Lea Thompson, not very well sung.   By August 1986, Universal Studios needed a hit. Despite winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in March with Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa, the first six films they released for the year were all disappointments at the box office and/or with the critics.    The Best of Times, a comedy featuring Robin Williams and Kurt Russell as two friends who try to recreate a high school football game which changed the direction of both their lives. Despite a script written by Ron Shelton, who would be nominated for an Oscar for his next screenplay, Bull Durham, and Robin Williams, the $12m film would gross less than $8m.    The Money Pit, a comedy with Tom Hanks and Shelley Long, would end up grossing $37m against a $10m budget, but the movie was so bad, its first appearance on DVD wouldn't come until 2011, and only as part of a Tom Hanks Comedy Favorites Collection along with The ‘Burbs and Dragnet.   Legend, a dark fantasy film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Tom Cruise, was supposed to be one of the biggest hits… of 1985. But Scott and the studio would fight over the film, with the director wanting them to release a two hour and five minute long version with a classical movie score by Jerry Goldsmith, while the studio eventually cut the film down an hour and twenty-nine minutes with a techno score by Tangerine Dream. Despite an amazing makeup job transforming Tim Curry into the Lord of Darkness as well as sumptuous costumes and cinematography, the $24.5m film would just miss recouping its production budget back in ticket sales.   Tom Cruise would become a superstar not three weeks later, when Paramount Pictures released Top Gun, directed by Ridley's little brother Tony Scott.   Sweet Liberty should have been a solid performer for the studio. Alan Alda, in his first movie since the end of MASH three years earlier, would write, direct and star in this comedy about a college history professor who must watch in disbelief as a Hollywood production comes to his small town to film the movie version of one of the books. The movie, which also starred Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Michelle Pfieffer and screen legend Lillian Gish, would get lost in the shuffle of other comedies that were already playing in theatres like Ferris Bueller and Short Circuit.   Legal Eagles was the movie to beat for the summer of 1986… at least on paper. Ivan Reitman's follow-up film to Ghostbusters would feature a cast that included Robert Redford, Debra Winger and Daryl Hannah, along with Brian Denny, Terence Stamp, and Brian Doyle-Murray, and was perhaps too much movie, being a legal romantic comedy mystery crime thriller.   Phew.   If I were to do an episode about agency packaging in the 1980s, the process when a talent agency like Creative Artists Agency, or CAA, put two or more of their clients together in a project not because it might be best for the movie but best for the agency that will collect a 10% commission from each client attached to the project, Legal Eagles would be the example of packaging gone too far. Ivan Reitman was a client of CAA. As were Redford,  and Winger, and Hannah. As was Bill Murray, who was originally cast in the Redford role. As were Jim Cash and Jack Epps, the screenwriters for the film. As was Tom Mankewicz, the co-writer of Superman and three Bond films, who was brought in to rewrite the script when Murray left and Redford came in. As was Frank Price, the chairman of Universal Pictures when the project was put together. All told, CAA would book more than $1.5m in commissions for themselves from all their clients working on the film.   And it sucked.   Despite the fact that it had almost no special effects, Legal Eagles would cost $40m to produce, one of the most expensive movies ever made to that point, nearly one and a half times the cost of Ghostbusters. The film would gross nearly $50m in the US, which would make it only the 14th highest grossing film of the year. Less than Stand By Me. Less than The Color of Money. Less than Down and Out in Beverly Hills.   And then there was Psycho III, the Anthony Perkins-directed slasher film that brought good old Norman Bates out of mothballs once again. An almost direct follow-up to Psycho II from 1983, the film neither embraced by horror film fans or critics, the film would only open in eighth place, despite the fact there hadn't been a horror movie in theatres for months, and its $14m gross would kill off any chance for a Psycho IV in theatres.   In late June, Universal would hold a series of test screenings for Howard the Duck. Depending on who you talk to, the test screenings either went really well, or went so bad that one of the writers would tear up negative response cards before they could be given to the score compilers, to goose the numbers up, pun only somewhat intended. I tend to believe the latter story, as it was fairly well reported at the time that the test screenings went so bad, Sid Sheinberg, the CEO of Universal, and Frank Price, the President of the studio, got into a fist fight in the lobby of one of the theatres running one of the test screenings, over who was to blame for this impending debacle.   And a debacle it was.   But just how bad?   So bad, copywriters from across the nation reveled in giddy glee over the chances to have a headline that read “‘Howard the Duck' Lays an Egg!”   And it did.   Well, sort of.   When it opened in 1554 theatres on August 1st, the film would gross $5.07m, the second best opener of the weekend, behind the sixth Friday the 13th entry, and above other new movies like the Tom Hanks/Jackie Gleason dramedy Nothing in Common and the cult film in the making Flight of the Navigator. And $5m in 1986 was a fairly decent if unspectacular opening weekend gross. The Fly was considered a massive success when it opened to $7m just two weeks later. Short Circuit, which had opened to $5.3m in May, was also lauded as being a hit right out of the gate.   And the reviews were pretty lousy. Gene Siskel gave the film only one star, calling it a stupid film with an unlikeable lead in the duck and special effects that were less impressive than a sparkler shoved into a birthday cake. Both Siskel and Ebert would give it the dreaded two thumbs down on their show. Leonard Maltin called the film hopeless. Today, the film only has a 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with 81 reviews.   But despite the shellacking the film took, it wouldn't be all bad for several of the people involved in the making of the film.   Lea Thompson was so worried her career might be over after the opening weekend of the film, she accepted a role in the John Hughes movie Some Kind of Wonderful that she had turned down multiple times before. As I stated in our March 2021 episode about that movie, it's my favorite of all John Hughes movies, and it would lead to a happy ending for Thompson as well. Although the film was not a massive success, Thompson and the film's director, Howard Deutch, would fall in love during the making of the film. They would marry in 1989, have two daughters together, and as of the writing of this episode, they are still happily married.   For Tim Robbins, it showed filmmakers that he could handle a leading role in a movie. Within two years, he would be starring alongside Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham, and he career would soar for the next three decades.   And for Ed Gale, his being able to act while in a full-body duck suit would lead him to be cast to play Chucky in the first two Child's Play movies as well as Bride of Chucky.   Years later, Entertainment Weekly would name Howard the Duck as the biggest pop culture failure of all time, ahead of such turkeys as NBC's wonderfully ridiculous 1979 show Supertrain, the infamous 1980 Western Heaven's Gate, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman's Ishtar, and the truly wretched 1978 Bee Gees movie Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.   But Howard the Duck, the character, not the movie, would enjoy a renaissance in 2014, when James Gunn included a CG-animated version of the character in the post-credit sequence for Guardians of the Galaxy. The character would show up again in the Disney animated Guardians television series, and in the 2021 Disney+ anthology series Marvel's What If…   There technically would be one other 1980s movie based on a Marvel character, Mark Goldblatt's version of The Punisher, featuring Dolph Lundgren as Frank Castle. Shot in Australia in 1988, the film was supposed to be released by New World Pictures in August of 1989. The company even sent out trailers to theatres that summer to help build awareness for the film, but New World's continued financial issues would put the film on hold until April 1991, when it was released directly to video by Live Entertainment.   It wouldn't be until the 1998 release of Blade, featuring Wesley Snipes as the titular vampire, that movies based on Marvel Comics characters would finally be accepted by movie-going audiences. That would soon be followed by Bryan Singer's X-Men in 2000, and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man in 2002, the success of both prompting Marvel to start putting together the team that would eventually give birth to the Marvel Cinematic Universe we all know and love today.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again soon, when Episode 102, the first of two episodes about the 1980s distribution company Vestron Pictures, is released.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Howard the Duck, and the other movies, both existing and non-existent, we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

Last week, we discussed the affectionate blaxploitation spoof "Black Dynamite" and this week we're wrapping up this entire season of The Shirley Chronicles by returning to director David Wain, the heir apparent to Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker, with Wain's closest analog to "Airplane!": "They Came Together". It's a tale that involves Dry Sweltering American Summers, jokes designed to test the patience of audiences, crushes that have yet to dissipate, and last-minute wraparound segments.Ryan's Recommendation(s); "Edge of Tomorrow" (2014)For every single episode at least a week early and great biweekly bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesTwitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com). Artwork by: Lacie Barker.  The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledged.Support the show

Last week, we wrapped up our deep dive into the films of Judd Apatow. This week, we're discussing the heir apparent to the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker dynasty, a man named David Wain, and his directorial debut "Wet Hot American Summer". It's a tale that involves negligent chaperoning, the downsides of shooting spring for summer, an ensemble murderer's row, jettisoned dark story points, and comedic references to everything from "Meatballs" to "Sleepaway Camp".Join your wonky yet affable host!This Week's Recommendation(s): "Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!" (2008)For every single episode at least a week early and great WEEKLY bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesTwitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com). Artwork by: Lacie Barker.  The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledged.Support the show

This week, we return to the well of Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker with three solo films from brothers David and Jerry Zucker: 2001's mad mad mad mad mad comedy "Rat Race", 2003's Ashton Kutcher joint "My Boss's Daughter", and my vote for possibly the most misguided and wrongheaded comedy of the 2000s, "An American Carol". This one's gonna get rough, folks.Join your wonky yet affable host!This Week's Recommendation(s): “The Muppet Movie" (1979)For every single episode at least a week early and great WEEKLY bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesTwitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com). Artwork by: Lacie Barker.  The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledgedSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschronicles)

We've covered Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker and their influences, but what about the filmmakers they inspired? Today, it's the first part of a three-part deep dive into the gross-out directing duo who worshipped at the altar of Z-A-Z: Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the Farrelly Brothers! We begin with their first three films: "Dumb & Dumber", "Kingpin", and "There's Something About Mary".It's a tale that involves precious bodily fluids ruining a perfectly good hairdo, unexpectedly sweet comedies about Amish bowlers, and the two dumbest guys you're ever likely to meet.Join your wonky yet affable host!This Week's Recommendation(s): “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (1964)For every single episode at least a week early and great WEEKLY bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesTwitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com). Artwork by: Lacie Barker.  The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledgedSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschronicles)

It's time for more solo work from the three men known as Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker, three films that couldn't be more different: Jerry Zucker's "First Knight", Jim Abrahams' "Jane Austen's Mafia!" and David Zucker's "BASEketball".It's a tale that involves fake sports, medieval romances without magical elements, and spaghetti sauce IV drips. Plus, the very first time your wonky yet affable host sneaked into an R-rated movie. Secrets!This Week's Recommendation(s): “The Quiet Man" (1952)For every single episode at least a week early and great WEEKLY bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesTwitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com). Artwork by: Lacie Barker.  The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledged.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschronicles)

The Amazing Colossal Podcast celebrates the 40th anniversary (original airdate March 4, 1982) of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker's much-loved series "Police Squad" with this episode from 2017 featuring writer-director-producer David Zucker ("Airplane!," "The Naked Gun," "Kentucky Fried Movie"). Also in this episode: Vincent Price takes a pass, Woody Allen boxes a kangaroo, "ZAZ" lifts a plotline from Charles Bronson and David discusses the greatest hits (and misses) of the Marx Brothers. PLUS: "Top Secret!" "A Fistful of Yen"! In praise of Chevy Chase! John Byner sends up Robert Stack! And David remembers his old friend Leslie Nielsen! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, we're returning to the well of Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker with a discussion of their final film together as directors: 1986's "Ruthless People". It's a tale that involves a vicious circle of blackmail, urine injections for weight loss, identifying emotionally with kidnappers, and marked-down ransom amounts.Plus, in the second half of this episode, Matt and Ashley from "Mashley at the Movies" stop by for another Community Outreach segment discussing their show and the 1984 Milos Forman masterpiece "Amadeus". Join your wonky yet affable host!This Week's Recommendation(s): “Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982)For every single episode at least a week early and great WEEKLY bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesTwitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com). Artwork by: Lacie Barker.  The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledged.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschronicles)

This week, we're returning to Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker by covering my highlight of this season, the moment we've been building to for sixteen weeks, 1984's underappreciated masterpiece "Top Secret!".It's a tale that involves cow galoshes, insanely intricate sequences, tons of bird shit, an unexpected amount of musical numbers, and oodles of an impossibly pretty young man named Val Kilmer.Plus, Jim from "Film Rage" stops by for a discussion of his podcast and the 1988 Ken Russell adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Lair of the White Worm". Join your wonky yet affable host!This Week's Recommendation(s): “The Big Sleep" (1946)For every single episode at least a week early and great WEEKLY bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesTwitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com). Artwork by: Lacie Barker.  The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledged.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschronicles)

This week, it's the final part of a three-part deep dive as we dial back the clock to detail the pre-Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker master of parody, Mel Brooks. We're diving deep into the comedian/director's difficult 1990s. We begin with "Life Stinks" and conclude on even shakier ground with "Dracula: Dead and Loving It".Plus, Karyn from the hit podcast "Chick-Lit" stops by to help your wonky yet affable host discuss Brooks' most fondly remembered '90s film, "Robin Hood: Men in Tights"!This Week's Recommendation(s): “Petey Wheatstraw" (1977)For every single episode at least a week early and great WEEKLY bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesTwitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com). Artwork by: Lacie Barker.  The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledged.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschronicles)

This week, it's the second part of a three-part deep dive as we dial back the clock to detail the pre-Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker master of parody, Mel Brooks. We're diving deep into the comedian/director's post-"Young Frankenstein" 1970s and 1980s, including "Silent Movie", "High Anxiety", and "History of the World Part I"Plus, Scott and Cam from the hit podcast "SpyHards" stop by to help your wonky yet affable host discuss 1987's "Spaceballs"!This Week's Recommendation(s): “I Wanna Hold Your Hand" (1978)For every single episode at least a week early and great WEEKLY bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesTwitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com). Artwork by: Lacie Barker.  The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledged.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschronicles)

We're finally back to full podcasting strength! Mike S returns and we deliver on an episode that we had promised a few weeks back - it's another Mike Makes Mike Watch! This time around, Mike D has to watch the cult classic Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker comedy TOP SECRET!, while Mike S has to check out Tony Scott's 2004 action thriller MAN ON FIRE - plus, we reveal our exciting, Halloween-themed plans for the podcast as October rolls around!

This week, it's the first part of a three-part deep dive as we dial back the clock to the late 60s and detail the pre-Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker master of parody, Mel Brooks. It's finally time for three legitimate comedy classics including the most delightfully offensive song in film history and the endless joy afforded by cowboy farts!Plus, Nathaniel Jonsson of "At the Devil's Ball" stops by to help your wonky yet affable host dissect (see what I did there?) 1974's "Young Frankenstein"!This Week's Recommendation(s): “I Married a Witch" (1942)For every single episode at least a week early and great WEEKLY bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesTwitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com). Artwork by: Lacie Barker.  The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledged.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschronicles)

Is the sequel even close to the quality of the original classic?  Let's just say that there was a reason why Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker weren't involved in Airplane II. However, there are redeeming comedic qualities to be found and we discuss those on this episode.  Robert Hays, Julie Haggerty, Peter Graves, and Lloyd Bridges reprise their original roles and William Shatner is an addition to the sequel.

Season 2, The Shirley Chronicles, continues with the meat of this podcast sandwich: a deep dive into Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker's directorial debut, the 1980 landmark parody "Airplane!" We'll discuss stealth MVPs, working for rugs, Leslie Nielsen's fart machine, red zones and white zones, Mayo clinics, and forgotten Yuban commercials. Plus, C.J. and Mattix from Talkin' Shiz stop by for another Community Outreach segment!This Week's Recommendation(s): “The Orange Years: The Nickelodeon Story" (2020)For every single episode at least a week early and great WEEKLY bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesTwitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com)  The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledged.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschronicles)

The gang from Police Squad! pulled it together one final time in the spring of 1994 to supply a third film in the Naked Gun series, right before O.J. effectively torpedoed the whole franchise! Sarah & Joe take an extensive look at the entire Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker catalog, from the Kentucky Fried Movie through to the 21st century knock-offs of the genre, while also exploring the mysteries of the Naked Gun movies. Were there actual plans for a fourth film? Does O.J.'s presence sully the enjoyment of these movies? How did Priscilla Presley get cast with such limited acting experience? How similar are the career trajectories for her and Pia Zadora? Is this the best work Anna Nicole Smith ever did? Where is Scientology leader David Miscavige's wife Shelly? And how many songs have been written about Vanna White? It's a pretty wide ranging discussion of the third best Naked Gun film in this week's surreal twentieth episode of It Happened One Year!

Season 2, The Shirley Chronicles, begins with a deep dive into the very first Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker joint, 1977's "The Kentucky Fried Movie"! It's a tale that involves Wisconsinite sketch comedy, Hasidic blaxploitation, ape suits, Hare Krishna beer commercials, rejected titles, and Donald Sutherland as the Clumsy Waiter.Plus, Mike White from The Projection Booth stops by to help your wonky yet affable host discuss "A Fistful of Yen" and the film it parodies, "Enter the Dragon"! This Week's Recommendation(s): “The Band Wagon” (1953)For every single episode at least a week early and great WEEKLY bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesTwitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com)  The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledged.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschronicles)

Husband and wife comedians Mike Bobbitt and Allyson Bobbitt take turns making each other watch a movie the other has never seen. This week, Mike made Allyson watch the 1984 debut of Val Kilmer, the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker film Top Secret! How does this joke machine of a movie stand up to time and against their biggest hit Airplane? If you want to let us know what you thought about Top Secret!, or you have a movie you think we should watch, let us know. Join our https://www.facebook.com/groups/youmademewatch (Facebook group) for more movie talk! https://www.facebook.com/groups/youmademewatch Logo by Martin Butler. Follow him on Instagram @MartyButtons Theme song by Thomas Medelheim. https://www.fiverr.com/medelheim

This week, something completely different to anything we've done before, as a 1950's B-movie is turned into a comedy for all time, while sticking surprisingly close to the original's story, script and even performances. Zero Hour! is a straightforward slice of mid-budget disaster movie, as a former military pilot has to use his long-dormant skills to save a flight beleagured by food poinsoning and a storm, while carrying his estranged wife and son as passengers. None of the team had seen this before, so the question going in was: would it stand a chance of still working on its own terms, or would it become laughable... ...because the second film we're discussing needs little introduction. Considered by many to be the funniest film ever made, Airplane! is a Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker classic. It's also more than forty years old now so, returning to it, has the comedy aged, fallen out of favour, or is it still as relentlessly hilarious as we all remember it to be? Along the way, we get a bit sidetracked into a discussion of what became of the big budget spoof in the years after AIrplane!, from the Naked Gun and Hot Shots films, through to today. If you're interested in the team's views on non-remake properties, you can follow us on Letterboxd: Neal's profile - https://boxd.it/1EHhT Ben's profile - https://boxd.it/1lH3J We want your feedback, 3-word reviews and suggestions for any other films that have been remade, so find us in these places: Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Goodbadremake/ and on Twitter: twitter.com/GoodBadRemake And get in touch here: goodbadremake@gmail.com Music is 'Bring Me the West' by phlaala

Leslie Nielsen at his best in another Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker film. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/jason-martin6/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jason-martin6/support

Place aux maîtres de la comédie satirique: David Zucker, Jim Abrahams et Jerry Zucker; aussi connus sous le nom de ZAZ.Dans les années 70, ils s'illustrent pour la première fois à titre de scénaristes pour le film à sketchs "Kentucky Fried Movie" (1977) de John Landis, mais la réalisation est cruciale pour populariser leur univers absurde.C'est "Airplane!" (1980) qui marque leurs débuts à titre de réalisateurs et l'impact est immense. Ils se servent du médium cinématographique pour livrer leur humour (mouvements de caméra, effets de perspective, voix-off, intertitres, musique, etc) et la quantité de gag devient leur marque de commerce.Top Secret! (1984) est probablement leur œuvre la plus sous-estimée puisqu'elle a été mal comprise à l'époque. Avec nos yeux d'aujourd'hui et notre bagage humoristique, c'est plus facile de comprendre cette parodie de films d'espionnage qui se déroule en Allemagne durant la guerre froide avec une vedette de rock'n'roll (et que dire du skeet surfing, les vrais savent).En 1988, le vétéran acteur Leslie Nielsen reprend son rôle de Frank Drebin dans le film "Naked Gun: From the files of Police Squad!", le premier opus de la trilogie policière qui est maintenant une référence en matière de comédie.Bien qu'ils ont fait des bons coups en solo dans les années 90 (Hot Shots!, Hot Shots! Part Deux, BASEketball), c'est en tant que trio que ces trois génies de l'humour ont influencé à leur manière le cinéma.

Place aux maîtres de la comédie satirique: David Zucker, Jim Abrahams et Jerry Zucker; aussi connus sous le nom de ZAZ.Dans les années 70, ils s'illustrent pour la première fois à titre de scénaristes pour le film à sketchs "Kentucky Fried Movie" (1977) de John Landis, mais la réalisation est cruciale pour populariser leur univers absurde.C'est "Airplane!" (1980) qui marque leurs débuts à titre de réalisateurs et l'impact est immense. Ils se servent du médium cinématographique pour livrer leur humour (mouvements de caméra, effets de perspective, voix-off, intertitres, musique, etc) et la quantité de gag devient leur marque de commerce.Top Secret! (1984) est probablement leur œuvre la plus sous-estimée puisqu'elle a été mal comprise à l'époque. Avec nos yeux d'aujourd'hui et notre bagage humoristique, c'est plus facile de comprendre cette parodie de films d'espionnage qui se déroule en Allemagne durant la guerre froide avec une vedette de rock'n'roll (et que dire du skeet surfing, les vrais savent).En 1988, le vétéran acteur Leslie Nielsen reprend son rôle de Frank Drebin dans le film "Naked Gun: From the files of Police Squad!", le premier opus de la trilogie policière qui est maintenant une référence en matière de comédie.Bien qu'ils ont fait des bons coups en solo dans les années 90 (Hot Shots!, Hot Shots! Part Deux, BASEketball), c'est en tant que trio que ces trois génies de l'humour ont influencé à leur manière le cinéma.

JIM ABRAHAMS, DAVID ZUCKER, JERRY ZUCKER JIM ABRAHAMS, DAVID ZUCKER, JERRY ZUCKER JIM ABRAHAMS, DAVID ZUCKER, JERRY ZUCKER JIM ABRAHAMS, DAVID ZUCKER, JERRY ZUCKER Mivel az adásban nagyon kevésszer hangzik el a nevük. Ők a híres Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker trio, röviden ZAZ trió. Nem, nem ők éneklik a Je Veux című számot. A lényeg, hogy idén 40 éves az Airplane! És ezt most megünnepeljük egy teljes adással. Az adásban szó van róla, Pali ebből a csudálatos könyvből idéz: https://images.app.goo.gl/2MemTW333txaXsHq9 Ezen kívül szó van még ezekről: https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-v2BHNBVCs és https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPwNVG14OIM&fbclid=IwAR2oV3qPl_hE3uOr_Q3bXbolu1-wQ5n2l_JBWlTiIyFFWUoQoY0YOe-DNkE Ajánljuk: Ákos: https://24.hu/kultura/2020/10/15/psycho-60-alfred-hitchcock-zuhanyjelenet-magyar-szinesznok/ Bandi: https://port.hu/adatlap/film/mozi/becsuszo-szerelem-becsuszo-szerelem/movie-220350 Pali: https://port.hu/adatlap/film/mozi/sarlatan-charlatan-sarlatan/movie-221122

What starts out as a light-hearted palate cleanse quickly becomes more than Sean and Cody bargained for as they seek to lighten the mood with a classic Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker slapstick comedy. In The Naked Gun 2½, dimwitted Police Squad detective Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) bumbles into a plot where evil White House Chief of Staff John Sununu (Peter Van Norden) is trying to rig George Bush's environmental policy so fossil fuel fat cats like the dapperly mustachioed Quentin Hapsburg (Robert Goulet) can keep killing the planet for profit. But with Drebin, Ed and Nordberg on the case, are the oily baddies finally about to meet their Waterloo? Environmental issues discussed include the evolution of climate change denial as official U.S. policy, the consequences of the George H.W. Bush presidency, the cultural resonance of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster, and the influence of fossil fuel industry lobby groups on public opinion. Why did John Sununu hate science so much? How did tobacco company shills and defense analysts pushing beam weapons to Ronald Reagan in the ‘80s prime the pump for the rise of global warming denialism? What was the most embarrassing oil company commercial of all time? Was Hazelwood really drunk when the Exxon Valdez crashed into that reef, or was that an urban myth? How do you stretch an 85-minute comedy into three excruciating hours of television? How did Priscilla Presley get into Scientology? Is The Sound of Music really a Christmas movie? Does anybody remember who Mel Tormé was? Why is this film so damned depressing and enraging? All of these questions are ready to be taken downtown and interrogated in this episode of Green Screen. The Naked Gun 2½ (1991) at IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102510/ The Naked Gun 2½ (1991) at Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/the-naked-gun-2-the-smell-of-fear/ Next Movie Up: King Kong (1933) Website For This Episode

There aren't many films that can be credited with creating an entire subgenre, but Airplane! certainly qualifies. It's difficult to imagine what the past four decades of parody films would've been like if this weird little lampoon hadn't been as big of a hit as it was. Airplane! turned the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team into a cottage industry and it completely changed the career trajectory of character actor Leslie Nielsen, but its impact left even more ripples. Airplane! defied the assumptions of what kind of comedic film could make money. Airplane! redefined how a comedy film could be structured. Hell, it isn't even that much of a stretch to argue that the rapid fire, 13-gags-per-second pace of Airplane! influenced everything from The Simpsons to 30 Rock. Ryan is joined by Rachel for an episode where they defy conventional wisdom and examine why they think certain jokes are funny. Talking points include Leslie Nielsen's status as an American treasure, the complexities behind this film's casting of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and how Airplane! was a minor miracle that nobody could quite recreate in many, many subsequent attempts. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ryan-valentine3/support

Hi, everyone! Mackenzie, here, with a new episode of Mack & the Movies! Today, we are looking at select films from the parody comedy trio of Zucker Abrahams and Zucker. Time Codes: Intro: 0:00-3:05 Kentucky Fried Movie: 3:05-6:52 Airplane!: 6:52-11:10 The Naked Gun: 11:10-15:29 Hot Shots: 15:29-19:46 Brain Donors: 19:46-27:21 BASEketball: 27:21-32:11 Outro: 32:11-33:46 Support the Program: Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=UXZNDGDH4M42W Cash App: $mjl716 Venmo: Mackenzie-Lambert716 Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CinemaMack/ Twitter: @CinemaMack Instagram: mackenzielambert7928 Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwziB2U_N-CfywXjBaR1-dQ? Inquiries: Contact: m.j.lambert2283@gmail.com Audio/Visual Credits: Mack & the Movies logo by masteringsounds https://www.fiverr.com/masteringsounds Intro by androzguitar https://www.fiverr.com/androzguitar Audio Clips Used: Brain Donors (dir. Dennis Dugan) Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Best Brains) Kentucky Fried Movie (dir. John Landis) "The New Carioca" (Jonathan and Darlene Edwards) John Cleese & Eric Idle interview (Universal) "Notre Dame Victory March" (Elmer Bernstein) Airplane! (dir. Zucker Abrahams Zucker) "The Naked Gun theme" (Ira Newborn) "Dream Lover" (Bobby Darin) Hot Shots (dir. Jim Abrahams) "Brain Donors theme" (Mark Mothersbaugh) Ghost (dir. Jerry Zucker) "Beer" (Reel Big Fish) BASEketball (dir. David Zucker) Filmotomy - 1957 in Film: Zero Hour! https://filmotomy.com/1957-in-film-zero-hour/

The 1980’s were a banner age for comedy, so much so that the decade is widely considered to be the “golden age of comedy”. From Caddyshack to Ghostbusters to The Goonies, each year churned out more classic funfests than perhaps any other time in cinema history. Though many directors were in their heyday during these goofy times, there was a trio that utilized a consistently effective formula of rapid-fire jokes, slapstick setpieces, and satirically deadpan protagonists to craft several of the funniest pure comedies ever made. Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker were the team that created Airplane!, Top…Listen Now!Episode 36: Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (AKA: Airplane! Bois)

Authors on the Air host Pam Stack welcomes legendary comedian and comic writer David Misch. After graduating from Pomona College, David moved to Boston, where he wrote political satire, hosted a live music radio show and performed as a comic folksinger and stand-up comedian at colleges, coffeehouses and nightclubs in New England and the Midwest. His song “Somerville” was released nationally by Fretless Records and he was named “Best Comedian In Boston” by Boston Magazine. He moved to California to write for “Mork & Mindy,” which was nominated for two Emmy awards. He also co-wrote “Leave It To Dave,” the pilot for David Letterman’s first talk-show. He’s since written, created and/or produced programs for all the major networks and many of the major (and minor) cable outlets. Among his credits: he co-wrote and directed an episode of the syndicated series “Monsters” which was chosen for competition at the Banff International Television Festival, Executive Story Editor on the legendary Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker series “Police Squad!,” co-writer and producer of “Callahan,” a pilot later screened at the Los Angeles Museum of Art Television Festival, guest writer on “Saturday Night Live.” David was Executive Consultant on “She Spies” (chosen as one of “5 TV Spies To Love” by Time Magazine) and wrote the TV-movie “Behind The Camera: The Unauthorized Story of ‘Mork & Mindy’” (NBC). David’s books include A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO CORRUPTION which Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller said “David Misch is one funny mother …” @Copyrighted . Listen to the podcast on your favorite app.

David Misch has wanted to be a comedian his whole life. And here he discusses his life long passion, why laughter and humor are important and the book he wrote dissecting what is funny. Authors on the Air host Pam Stack welcomes legendary comedian and comic writer David Misch. After graduating from Pomona College, David moved to Boston, where he wrote political satire, hosted a live music radio show and performed as a comic folksinger and stand-up comedian at colleges, coffeehouses and nightclubs in New England and the Midwest. His song “Somerville” was released nationally by Fretless Records and he was named “Best Comedian In Boston” by Boston Magazine. He moved to California to write for “Mork & Mindy,” which was nominated for two Emmy awards. He also co-wrote “Leave It To Dave,” the pilot for David Letterman’s first talk-show. He’s since written, created and/or produced programs for all the major networks and many of the major (and minor) cable outlets. Among his credits: he co-wrote and directed an episode of the syndicated series “Monsters” which was chosen for competition at the Banff International Television Festival, Executive Story Editor on the legendary Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker series “Police Squad!,” co-writer and producer of “Callahan,” a pilot later screened at the Los Angeles Museum of Art Television Festival, guest writer on “Saturday Night Live.” David was Executive Consultant on “She Spies” (chosen as one of “5 TV Spies To Love” by Time Magazine) and wrote the TV-movie “Behind The Camera: The Unauthorized Story of ‘Mork & Mindy’” (NBC). David’s books include A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO CORRUPTION which Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller said “David Misch is one funny mother …” @Copyrighted . Listen to the podcast on your favorite app.

Authors on the Air host Pam Stack welcomes legendary comedian and comic writer David Misch.  After graduating from Pomona College, David moved to Boston, where he wrote political satire, hosted a live music radio show and performed as a comic folksinger and stand-up comedian at colleges, coffeehouses and nightclubs in New England and the Midwest. His song “Somerville” was released nationally by Fretless Records and he was named “Best Comedian In Boston” by Boston Magazine. He moved to California to write for “Mork & Mindy,” which was nominated for two Emmy awards. He also co-wrote “Leave It To Dave,” the pilot for David Letterman’s first talk-show. He’s since written, created and/or produced programs for all the major networks and many of the major (and minor) cable outlets. Among his credits: he co-wrote and directed an episode of the syndicated series “Monsters” which was chosen for competition at the Banff International Television Festival, Executive Story Editor on the legendary Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker series “Police Squad!,” co-writer and producer of “Callahan,” a pilot later screened at the Los Angeles Museum of Art Television Festival, guest writer on “Saturday Night Live.” David was Executive Consultant on “She Spies” (chosen as one of “5 TV Spies To Love” by Time Magazine) and wrote the TV-movie “Behind The Camera: The Unauthorized Story of ‘Mork & Mindy’” (NBC). David’s books include A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO CORRUPTION which Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller said “David Misch is one funny mother …” @Copyrighted . Listen to the podcast on your favorite app.

Chris and Jason are joined by inflatable co-pilot Young Nick Blake, who shares his love for 1980's iconic, seminal Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movie 'Airplane'.  The intrepid trio covers: Chris' inventive comedic introduction to the episode (00:01) The number of jokes in the entirety of "Airplane" (9:00) Airplane origin story (10:00) Bizarro scenes from 'Zero Hour', the film the ZAZ guys based Airplane on/ripped off.  (15:00) Clip of the ZAZ guys on Letterman (21:00) Ethel Merman clip from 'Airplane' (22:30) Nick Blake/Jason fight over cigarette smoking scene in Airplane (24:30) Julie Hagerty comedic genius scene in Albert Brooks' "Lost In America" with Garry Marshall and Brooks (26:30) Donna Pescow/Peter Johansen shout-out (30:00) Robert Hayes being Just Good Enough in the role (31:00) Jeff/Beau Bridges: Which Is The More Talented Bridgeses?  (33:00) How awesome is the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE TV THEME! (35:40) Great films with exclamation points in their titles (43:30) The joy of paperback photo sections in 1970's books (47:00) Johnny (Stephen Stucker) Comp Reel (51:00) Jim Nabors anecdote (55:00) ALTERNATIVE CASTING (56:00) David Letterman's Screen Test for 'Airplane' clip (57:45) Barry Manilow, Dom DeLuise, Christopher Lee, Fred Willard (59:00) Yuban Coffee Commercial (01:03:00) LATCH KEY TV (01:04:00) He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe, Skeletor, Transformers, Ghostbusters Cartoon, Lorenzo Music, Garfield, The Real Ghostbusters. Comic-Con, Flaming Carrot, PBS, NOVA   Airport '77 (01:15:00)  'Airplane!' Wiki Page 'Airplane!' IMDB Page Watch 'Airplane!' on iTunes Subscribe to the podcast Learn about Chris' beloved comic book Flaming Carrot    

Is it really true that now the Bickersons have done two Bette Midler movies where she plays a character named Barbara? Or for that matter, two Bette Midler movies? Well, here they are, doing Ruthless People! Jon loses 20 pounds chained in a basement. Ali gets in a found object fight in Judge Reinhold's kitchen. Can both get away with the ransom money?Ruthless People was directed by Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker and stars Danny DeVito, Bette Midler, Judge Reinhold, Not Meg Ryan, the principal from Head Of the Class, and Lone Starr.

Siblo and Whalen close the book on Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker month with a Bad or Rad? segment on David Zucker's FOX News-approved Dickens riff An American Carol (49:00) as well as a broad discussion of the trio's work in Wall To Wall Carpet (1:08:55). But first, your Carpeteers punch a couple few Rad Tickets by discussing The Meg (3:15) and BlacKkKlansman (14:00), with quick takes on Are We Not Cats, Madeline's Madeline, and Crazy Rich Asians (38:05).

Siblo and Whalen pivot from the vintage ZAZ classics Airplane! and Police Squad! to the trio's minor fare, including the troubled 1984 cult fave Top Secret! (24:00) and the Devito/Midler pairing Ruthless People (42:40). But first, patch up a Hole in the Carpet as Siblo catches Whalen up on Paul Feig's 2015 send up Spy(4:05).

The Carpet follow Lynne Ramsay month with some much-needed levity by yucking it up with the comedy trio Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, beginning with their uproarious 1980 hit Airplane! (38:00) and their short-lived cult favorite TV series Police Squad! (1:05:25). But before that, Siblo and Whalen Carpet Clean what may be the most widely seen ZAZ-related film of all: Jerry Zucker's Oscar-winning 1990 fantasy romance Ghost (3:55). Looks like we picked a bad week to quit film clubbing!

"We've got a fantastic movie in our podcast this week!" "Your podcast? What is it?" "It's a digital audio file with losers who never shut up... but that's not important right now." In our wide-ranging conversation about the slapstick comedy classic Airplane!, we chat about how you say "golly" in jive, what happens when the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker trio breaks up, and we pay homage to the king of deadpan delivery, Leslie Nielsen. Plus we kick the episode off with a spoiler-filled analysis of Rogue One, and how that movie could affect Princess Leia's role in Episodes VIII and IX. Looks like you picked the wrong week to quit podcasts... especially if you want to know if Airplane! stands the Test of Time.

Two hosts from my favorite movie podcast return for a second appearance!  Sean Dwyer and Frank Knezic from Film Junk are back to have some laughs and deconstruct the art of the parody genre, focusing on the acclaimed trio Zucker Abrahams Zucker.  We talk about the origins of the term “spoof,” revisit and review the three films that ZAZ created together, and talk about other comedies that each of them directed. There’s also a discussion over the recent wave of bad parody films, the legacy of Leslie Nielsen, and many more topics throughout.  How silly can we get?  Find out as we dive head first into the world of comedy. Surely, you’ll enjoy this episode?    00:00 – 25:41 - Introduction 25:42 – 26:35 - Director(s) Song 26:36 – 56:14 - Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane! 56:15 – 01:40:12 - Top Secret, The Naked Gun 01:40:13 – 02:07:49 - Other Comedies We Watched 02:07:50 – 02:12:50 - Top 3 ZAZ Films / Outro Big thanks to Sean and Frank for coming on the show and be sure to listen to Film Junk if you haven't already!  The next episode will arrive in two weeks, featuring returning guest Sergio Mims as we talk about the work of the legendary Nicholas Ray, director of such classics like Rebel Without a Cause.  In the meantime, send me an email over at directorsclubpodcast@gmail.com, visit the website at http://directorsclubpodcast.com and of course, the NPN network where this show along with many great movie and music podcasts are available: http://nowplayingnetwork.net Visit Film Junk: http://filmjunk.com Support Film Junk: http://filmjunk.bandcamp.com

Movie Madness’ very own Erik Childress returns once again for another blockbuster action filmmaker. This time it’s the self-proclaimed perfectionist James Cameron, arguably one of the great innovators behind the science-fiction genre especially when it comes to state-of-the-art special effects.  We pretty much cover his entire career despite not having enthusiasm for where his career has gone most recently.  There is a lot to say especially when it comes to Cameron’s improvement behind each “sequel” with Erik having a fondness for ALIENS and my love of TERMINATOR 2. Throughout the conversation we also discuss the issue of special editions, longer running times, Cameron’s penchant for strong female characters, and how many times we saw TITANIC in the theater.  00:00 – 11:23 – Intro 11:24 – 13:00 – Director Song 13:01 – 49:31 -  Terminator 49:32 – 01:28:17 - Aliens, The Abyss 01:28:18 – 01:49:00 - Terminator 2, True Lies 01:49:01 – 02:14:21 - Titanic, Avatar 02:14:22 – 02:29:31 - Top 5 / Outro In about a week, I am excited to completely change things up and talk once again about the art of comedy – this time focusing on the parody genre as well as the career of the comedy team Zucker Abrahams Zucker.  Joining me for that episode will be Sean & Frank of Film Junk, which remains my favorite podcast and one of the reasons this show exists.  Please stay tuned for that and an epic discussion on a classic filmmaker at the end of the month with guest Sergio Mims.  As always, send me an email over at DirectorsClubPodcast@gmail.com, and visit the website:  http://directorsclubpodcast.com Check out Erik’s podcast: http://www.nowplayingnetwork.net/moviemadness Check out the podcast network: http://www.nowplayingnetwork.net/

Journalist and Meetup All-Stars founder Jeremy Pelzer joins Sean, Toni and Scott to discuss Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker's classic 1980 spoof.

...It's a free radio show that you can download and listen to at your leisure (and all the producers ask in return is that you go and rate it at iTunes)...But that's not important right now!  This July marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the Zucker Abrahams Zucker disaster parody AIRPLANE!. We know we're a little early to this party, but we feel it is never too soon to commemorate the great sacrifice of one Lt. George Zip (RIP!). And so we've decided to Striker while the iron is hot, and get one Oveur the competition.*  Flixwise regulars, Martin Kessler and Gary Lampert, join host, Lady P, in reciting as many AIRPLANE! jokes as they can cram into a 40 minute time-span. And incidentally, they also attempt to determine if the film is worthy of inclusion in the Flixwise Favorite's List. Is Ethel Merman correct? Is everything indeed coming up roses? Or is AIRPLANE! as tasteless and gross as well... airplane food? Calm down and get a hold of yourself! All you have to do is hit play to find out. *Editors Note--I know it's terrible, but cut me some slack, Jack.

Felipe y Diego comentan con José Doval la B.S.O. Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker: el humor absurdo. La música de las delirantes películas "Top Secret", "Agárralo como Puedas" y "Hot Shots", entre otras.