YOU SHOULD BE VERY ASHAMED OF YOURSELF: “A new take on “Every Which Way But Loose” is headed to the big screen, the 1978 comedy that teamed Clint Eastwood with an orangutan named Clyde.” In fact, I want you to sit in a corner and think about what you’ve done. Because do you think that Hollywood is going to let us have a simple trucker-with-a-monkey flick? No. No, they will not. We will get something else.
Something unholy.
Eh. Get back to me when they try to remake Animal House.
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Mew
Bite your tongue, you might give them ideas. Look what they did to Ghostbusters – it’ll probably star the same cast, or lena dunham.
Oh @$#%. I can’t UN-SEE that!
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*reaches for the bleach*
What, Leslie Jones would make a great replacement for John Belushi .. or maybe Melissa McCarthy for Belushi and Jones for Flounder..
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Dunham fits as Otter .. or maybe better as Pinto.. the one who seduced the mayor’s well-underage daughter ..
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Mew
Even if they just make a simple trucker-with-a-monkey flick…that is a terrible idea….
If they went gonzo, they could make it work.
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Make Clyde the trucker, waging an underground resistance against the international conspiracy of the various cameras of the regulatory state with the help of an amiable hitchhiker who helps him keep up appearances, with a guest appearance by Perry the Platypus…
But if they’re going to do that, why keep the name?
I predict the reboot will feature Jackie Chan as an aging UPS driver who, along with Koto and Poto, his pet ferrets, stumbles upon an ancient death-cult masquerading as an underground fight tournament. Chan uses his power to communicate with animals to win the tournament and defeat the ancient evil.
You know, like Blood Sport IV: Beastmaster Returns.
Yeah, but we’d all watch that.
And likely run games based on it.
Damnation Decade has rules for that, at that.
I don’t even understand the why. Was there a great clamor for an updated version of a film about a guy and his ape?
I don’t think there was an original clamor for a film about a man and his ape. I think that itch was scratched with “Tarzan.” Of course there’s also King Kong, if want your ape Super-Sized.
It was a product of its time. There was also the tv show about the trucker B. J. MacKay and his best friend Bear (who was a chimpanzee).
(And yeah, I’m of an age where I had long schoolyard discussions about which one was cooler. I was a strong supporter of MacKay.)
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There were also some practical reasons for it.
It gave the solitary protagonist someone to talk to, without taking away the solitude that was pretty central to his identity, and not having to have a narrator constantly telling us what the character was thinking. It made writing dialogue easy. And if Disney movies have taught us anything, it’s that animals with expressive faces make great sidekicks and comic relief.
But really, that’s rationalizing it to an extent. It was probably more about the audience tuning out the pronouncements that America’s best days were behind it, and that nuclear war was going to kill us all if the degrading environment didn’t do it first, and instead enjoying shows about truckers and their apes.
So .. basically, Knight Rider, during the brief rennisance period when “everyone knew” computers couldn’t talk, roughly overlapping the period where every “dusty loner” had some connection to the confederate states…
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Mew
Maybe if KITT blew more raspberries.
Hollyweird is *out of ideas*.
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As a result, you’re getting people who *really should know better* remembering what they liked from when they were kids and .. pitching ’em as “gritty reboots”.
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That in mind, we’re most likely to get a PETA-supporting vegan trucker who rescued the ape from a lab or something ..
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Mew
PETA-supporting, vegetarian trucker retired from MMA fighting. To make the bare-knuckle boxing side of it sort of plausible.
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Screwball comedies from the mid-70s just seems a weird seam to go mining, and this one seems particularly a product of a particular time. On one hand, anyway. On the other, it did well enough at the time to rate a sequel.
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Still … weird choice. Can’t be much of a built-in audience, and probably three quarters of them are going to have roughly Moe’s reaction to the idea. (I’d be willing to bet my father’s reaction will be, in so many words, “Why?!”)