list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Police Squad [TV Series] on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Police_Squad_TV_Series/130238/default.aspx Title: Police Squad [TV Series]
Year: 1982
Number of Lists: 6
Number of blog posts: 2
SpoutRating: 4
]]>Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:01:40 GMTPolice Squad [TV Series]1982624http://www.spout.com/images/no_image.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Police_Squad_TV_Series/130238/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/risselada/archive/2008/9/30/35731.aspxPost By: Risselada
Post To: Risselada Blog
Post Date: 9/30/2008 5:18:36 PM
Body: The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! Sometimes it's most difficult to say stuff about your favorite films. You've seen them so many times, expressed your love for them in so many ways. Anything you say about them now seems obvious and redundant in your experience. The Naked Gun and all of the early films from the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker comedy team fit this description for me. For me they comprise the most laugh-out-loud hilarious movies of all time. The comedy has an absurd logic to it that especially appeals to me. You begin with a film that is played completely straight. You write with all the clichés of a genre, without any humor or surprises. Then you pick out the absurdities. There is a consistency to the straight part of the film. The jokes almost exist on another plane. They come and go for the audiences benefit, rarely for the benefit of the characters of the plot. Sometimes they are even nullified from one shot to another. When well executed it makes me laugh like nothing else. It's a style that these guys perfected, if not created. Several generations later we have movies that try for the same style without any of the effect. That is because these guys had rules. They knew what was funny, and they stuck to it. There was some kind of wonderful, beautiful science about it. Now unfortunately even the guys from this first generation are being recruited by their bastard spawn of the genre to direct sub-par movies. It's a real shame. The Naked Gun is the movie version of a TV show called Police Squad. Only a few episodes were aired before it was canned. Someone at CBS said that the show was brilliant but didn't work on TV because you need to pay attention, and people who watch TV don't pay attention. I guess it's true if you are doing your laundry or chatting with someone while the TV is on, you can kind of gather what's happening with any basic stupid sitcom. But since all of the jokes in Police Squad / The Naked Gun are in the background or some contrast between the audio and visual, you need to be really focused on what's happening. So the material worked as a movie for a while, but does the steady decline of movies in this genre indicate that maybe people no longer pay attention at the movie theater either? Although I keep hoping some day a genius of comedy will return to helm a comedy film that lives up to this one. Rating: 10/10
]]>Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:18:36 GMTRisseladaRisselada Blog9/30/2008 5:18:36 PMThe Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! Sometimes it's most difficult to say stuff about your favorite films. You've seen them so many times, expressed your love for them in so many ways. Anything you say about them now seems obvious and redundant in your experience. The Naked Gun and all of the early films from the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker comedy team fit this description for me. For me they comprise the most laugh-out-loud hilarious movies of all time. The comedy has an absurd logic to it that especially appeals to me. You begin with a film that is played completely straight. You write with all the clichés of a genre, without any humor or surprises. Then you pick out the absurdities. There is a consistency to the straight part of the film. The jokes almost exist on another plane. They come and go for the audiences benefit, rarely for the benefit of the characters of the plot. Sometimes they are even nullified from one shot to another. When well executed it makes me laugh like nothing else. It's a style that these guys perfected, if not created. Several generations later we have movies that try for the same style without any of the effect. That is because these guys had rules. They knew what was funny, and they stuck to it. There was some kind of wonderful, beautiful science about it. Now unfortunately even the guys from this first generation are being recruited by their bastard spawn of the genre to direct sub-par movies. It's a real shame. The Naked Gun is the movie version of a TV show called Police Squad. Only a few episodes were aired before it was canned. Someone at CBS said that the show was brilliant but didn't work on TV because you need to pay attention, and people who watch TV don't pay attention. I guess it's true if you are doing your laundry or chatting with someone while the TV is on, you can kind of gather what's happening with any basic stupid sitcom. But since all of the jokes in Police Squad / The Naked Gun are in the background or some contrast between the audio and visual, you need to be really focused on what's happening. So the material worked as a movie for a while, but does the steady decline of movies in this genre indicate that maybe people no longer pay attention at the movie theater either? Although I keep hoping some day a genius of comedy will return to helm a comedy film that lives up to this one. Rating: 10/10 http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/6/16/31288.aspxPost By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 6/16/2008 5:01:14 PM
Body: The best time for a Get Smart movie would have been the late ’60s, when the original television series was still on the air. In fact, there was a theatrical Get Smart film in the works during the run of the show, but it was canceled when the theatrical release of Munster, Go Home! bombed at the box office. Many years later, in 1980, a Get Smart feature titled The Nude Bomb was released to theaters, but it also performed poorly. Now we’re getting a remake version starring Steve Carell in the role that was so iconically defined by the late Don Adams. Will it do the show justice? Reportedly the budget was $80 million, a significant amount of which was probably put towards pointless effects. But the best thing Warner Bros. could have done with that money is to give a large amount to series creators Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, who probably even today could churn out a better script than Failure to Launch scribes Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember. Despite its lack of original Get Smart talent, though, it could still be marginally funny. Yet the real problem is that it may be too outdated and obsolete for audiences to care. In the four decades since the show went off the air, there has been plenty of similar-themed movies, from spy spoofs to films with bumbling heroes. The following ten titles are the best evidence of why this new Get Smart movie is completely unnecessary: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery - It’s interesting that Get Smart is going up against a Mike Myers movie this weekend, because in a way it’s also going up against Myers’ Austin Powers movies, as well. Sure, spy parodies have been around in spades since around the time of the first James Bond movie, but nothing has been as popular as this series, which of course includes the much bigger-grossing sequels, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Austin Powers in Goldmember. Inspector Gadget - The original animated series was based on Get Smart and even featured the voice of Don Adams. Also like Get Smart, it was remade into a feature film with a different cast. However, it did find room to employ both Adams (as the voice of the dog, Brain) and Andy Dick (who had played Maxwell Smart’s son in a 1990s Get Smart series). Regardless, it was still a failure, both in terms of its box office gross and the way it ruined our childhood memory of the beloved cartoon. Perhaps if the Get Smart movie is good enough, then it could make up for Inspector Gadget (and its sequel), but it would have to be really, really good. The Pink Panther - You might say that Get Smart came about as a response to both the Bond films and the original Pink Panther movies, which featured a bumbling police inspector instead of a bumbling spy. The recent remake of The Pink Panther already showed us that some characters should really be forever remembered by their most iconic portrayer. In this case Steve Martin was nothing compared to Peter Sellers, while in the case of Get Smart, Steve Carell is only muddying the memory of Don Adams. Even if he does a good job, he’s just not the real Maxwell Smart. He should just be in another lame generic spy spoof instead. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy - Want to see Steve Carell act clueless? Watch Anchorman again, because he can’t top his performance as Brick Tamland. “I love lamp.” The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! - The show Police Squad was in a way like Get Smart, only with a clueless detective rather than a clueless spy (I guess it could be seen as more like The Pink Panther then?). Fortunately that series only took a few years to spin-off a feature film, and thanks to the genius of Jim Abrahams and the Zucker Bros., who are almost equal in spoofing ability to Mel Brooks, it is funnier than any single episode or film of Get Smart can be without Brooks’ involvement. Spy Hard - Leslie Nielsen starred as the bumbling detective in the Naked Gun movies and then later played a bumbling spy in this spoof. The result: if Nielsen hadn’t already supplanted the Maxwell Smart character earlier, he did so here, even if really, really poorly. The Man Who Knew Too Little - More clueless spy stuff, this one an underrated movie starring Bill Murray. It actually made less money than The Nude Bomb (even without an inflation adjustment), but I enjoyed it a lot, probably more than I’ll enjoy Get Smart. Johnny English - Yep, I’m still just listing the other recent spy spoofs. But, really, there’s a point. When even Rowan Atkinson has done the bumbling spy bit, it’s time to hang up on the idea. I Spy - Did I already point out that #s 6-10 are more spy comedies? And there’s a lot that I’m not even including! This one is significant because it’s also based on a hit TV series. And it was a huge bomb. Spies Like Us - The thing I like best about the original Get Smart, as well as a number of the films on this list, is that the incompetent hero isn’t really aware of how incompetent he really is. The best movie to utilize this premise, though, has to be Spies Like Us. But that movie came out toward the end of the Cold War, when spy stuff was seeming ridiculously outdated. Comparatively, Get Smart arrives post 9/11, when the fact that American intelligence is incompetent is not so funny anymore. I think that now audiences would much prefer to see more serious spy films, like the Bond reboot Casino Royale (note the significance of this film being kind of a remake of a Bond parody) and the Bourne Identity franchise. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:01:14 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com6/16/2008 5:01:14 PMThe best time for a Get Smart movie would have been the late ’60s, when the original television series was still on the air. In fact, there was a theatrical Get Smart film in the works during the run of the show, but it was canceled when the theatrical release of Munster, Go Home! bombed at the box office. Many years later, in 1980, a Get Smart feature titled The Nude Bomb was released to theaters, but it also performed poorly. Now we’re getting a remake version starring Steve Carell in the role that was so iconically defined by the late Don Adams. Will it do the show justice? Reportedly the budget was $80 million, a significant amount of which was probably put towards pointless effects. But the best thing Warner Bros. could have done with that money is to give a large amount to series creators Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, who probably even today could churn out a better script than Failure to Launch scribes Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember. Despite its lack of original Get Smart talent, though, it could still be marginally funny. Yet the real problem is that it may be too outdated and obsolete for audiences to care. In the four decades since the show went off the air, there has been plenty of similar-themed movies, from spy spoofs to films with bumbling heroes. The following ten titles are the best evidence of why this new Get Smart movie is completely unnecessary: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery - It’s interesting that Get Smart is going up against a Mike Myers movie this weekend, because in a way it’s also going up against Myers’ Austin Powers movies, as well. Sure, spy parodies have been around in spades since around the time of the first James Bond movie, but nothing has been as popular as this series, which of course includes the much bigger-grossing sequels, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Austin Powers in Goldmember. Inspector Gadget - The original animated series was based on Get Smart and even featured the voice of Don Adams. Also like Get Smart, it was remade into a feature film with a different cast. However, it did find room to employ both Adams (as the voice of the dog, Brain) and Andy Dick (who had played Maxwell Smart’s son in a 1990s Get Smart series). Regardless, it was still a failure, both in terms of its box office gross and the way it ruined our childhood memory of the beloved cartoon. Perhaps if the Get Smart movie is good enough, then it could make up for Inspector Gadget (and its sequel), but it would have to be really, really good. The Pink Panther - You might say that Get Smart came about as a response to both the Bond films and the original Pink Panther movies, which featured a bumbling police inspector instead of a bumbling spy. The recent remake of The Pink Panther already showed us that some characters should really be forever remembered by their most iconic portrayer. In this case Steve Martin was nothing compared to Peter Sellers, while in the case of Get Smart, Steve Carell is only muddying the memory of Don Adams. Even if he does a good job, he’s just not the real Maxwell Smart. He should just be in another lame generic spy spoof instead. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy - Want to see Steve Carell act clueless? Watch Anchorman again, because he can’t top his performance as Brick Tamland. “I love lamp.” The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! - The show Police Squad was in a way like Get Smart, only with a clueless detective rather than a clueless spy (I guess it could be seen as more like The Pink Panther then?). Fortunately that series only took a few years to spin-off a feature film, and thanks to the genius of Jim Abrahams and the Zucker Bros., who are almost equal in spoofing ability to Mel Brooks, it is funnier than any single episode or film of Get Smart can be without Brooks’ involvement. Spy Hard - Leslie Nielsen starred as the bumbling detective in the Naked Gun movies and then later played a bumbling spy in this spoof. The result: if Nielsen hadn’t already supplanted the Maxwell Smart character earlier, he did so here, even if really, really poorly. The Man Who Knew Too Little - More clueless spy stuff, this one an underrated movie starring Bill Murray. It actually made less money than The Nude Bomb (even without an inflation adjustment), but I enjoyed it a lot, probably more than I’ll enjoy Get Smart. Johnny English - Yep, I’m still just listing the other recent spy spoofs. But, really, there’s a point. When even Rowan Atkinson has done the bumbling spy bit, it’s time to hang up on the idea. I Spy - Did I already point out that #s 6-10 are more spy comedies? And there’s a lot that I’m not even including! This one is significant because it’s also based on a hit TV series. And it was a huge bomb. Spies Like Us - The thing I like best about the original Get Smart, as well as a number of the films on this list, is that the incompetent hero isn’t really aware of how incompetent he really is. The best movie to utilize this premise, though, has to be Spies Like Us. But that movie came out toward the end of the Cold War, when spy stuff was seeming ridiculously outdated. Comparatively, Get Smart arrives post 9/11, when the fact that American intelligence is incompetent is not so funny anymore. I think that now audiences would much prefer to see more serious spy films, like the Bond reboot Casino Royale (note the significance of this film being kind of a remake of a Bond parody) and the Bourne Identity franchise. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog