I’m shooting for a show that comes on late Saturday nights, where a funny guy and his friends pan the sh*t out of those cheesy Marionation movies; among others.
Every week, they would do another film; and it would be a surprise to find out exactly which horrible movie they picked.
Then, me and all my friends would cram onto a small studio apartment love seat and drink and smoke and generally just laugh and have a good time.
The problem with those unfunny movies is that they’re less about cobbling jokes that work on some meta-referential level and more about “oh, hey, do you recognize this thing from that one movie?”
Like in Disaster Movie, where a character shows up dressed like Po from Kung Fu Panda and says “I’m Kung Fu Panda!” That’s it. That’s the entire joke. Repeat for AN ENTIRE MOVIE.
Compare with, like, ANYTHING in Airplane!, which was more interested in sending up genre conventions and cliches than having someone go "I’m Burt Lancaster from Airport! "
Friedberg and Seltzer are such awesome black holes of talent that they actually decrease the talent of any person who stands near them.
They are the point at which all molecular motion of talent ceases.
You’re being far too kind.
But yeah, smart and genuinely funny parody movies? I’d like to see that part of pop culture revived.
Another one we don’t see much of anymore- Buddy comedies like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau or Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.
The commonly-held fallacy that serious is difficult and award-worthy, while fun is easy and forgettable, has never been more strong.
But then look at the sheer detail (and density) of creativity that went into Airplane! or Top Secret!, even before the seriously talented cast were taken into account.
That said, Airplane! was seriously aided by Zero Hour, which it was adapted from. Huge chunks of the script are just taken straight from Zero Hour. They just punched it up and made it funny.
Would those friends be robot puppets?
Oh, wow, now that would be really cool !
As I’ve said on this Forum before, my primary obsession is game shows (MST3K is a secondary one). I’m not going to answer game shows in general - at the moment, at least, there are still plenty of those.
No, I’m going to answer KIDS game shows. Without shows like Double Dare and Legends Of The Hidden Temple and Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, I would not be an obsessive-level game show fan today.
Alas, I’m in my thirties now and - while I am admittedly the wrong person to ask - it seems unlikely to me that kids in 2023 actually watch kids TV. Nickelodeon still premieres an occasional new game show, and it inevitably flops, seemingly regardless of quality.
Basically, I want to live in a world where a new Carmen Sandiego game show gets produced. Perhaps more then any other, being on that show was my childhood fantasy. Unfortunately, kids game shows are dead and the 2019 Carmen Sandiego cartoon on Netflix missed the point so completely that I’ve taken to calling it CASINO, for CArmen Sandiego In Name Only.
I probably could go on for several paragraphs more about this if you let me.
Right now, I’d bring back this 6th grade nostalgia.
DVDs/Blu-Rays actually having Special Features
Massive saturation of the marketplace and a huge decrease in quality.
I would like to bring back public access TV. It may still exist in a few places, but it’s mostly dead. YouTube shows are not a good replacement. You actually had to learn to use the equipment when it came to public access TV, so you got some real shows, even if they were on the amateurish side. Some of them were so good they went on to get shown on regular TV. There was a public access show in the town of Bloomington, IN where I grew up, that was so entertaining that it got MTV airplay in the 90s. I was in a couple of episodes (not the MTV one). “J & B on the Rox.” The creators uploaded them all to YouTube if you’re curious.
YAS THIS. Cartoon Network doesn’t cut it.
Also home improvement shows that actually show the work, without giant budgets or spousal drama or barking clown host antics. This may not qualify as pop culture, but I have an axe.
Yes ! Public Access was the stuff !
My friends and I would call in to this show in the mid-eighties…I haven’t watched all the clips, yet, but we were known as the U.S.P.B. (United States Puppy Brigade).
That was the first computer game I played obsessively, and I wanted to be on the show so badly! I would say that it wouldn’t be the same with Rockapella, however.
I was surprised to learn that This Old House was still going strong. I found this comparison of EV chargers pretty informative:
I liked the show so much I bought a couple of Rockapella albums back then.