Roderick Thorp, Jeb Stuart, Steven de Souza, and John McTiernan, 1988
We interrupt the 2019 Skandies rundown for a couple of movies I have watched with Ellie over the past while. This one was a result of the “Die Hard is a Christmas movie!” meme; she mentioned that she hadn’t seen it in her entire life, and I realized that I hadn’t seen it in her entire life either. I saw it plenty of times before she was born, though. It was a favorite among the other members of “the Yalta Conference”, the group of dudes I played strategy board games with in high school. I remember being surprised when I learned this, because I remembered that there was a lot of skeptical chatter in the media when Die Hard was being made—the Moonlighting guy as an action hero? Really?—and it wasn’t until it was long out of theaters that I learned that all these guys I knew had actually gone to see it and liked it. Partly they liked the action/violence, of course, but mainly they liked quoting the dialogue. “Alas, your Mr. Takagi did not see it that way, so he won’t be joining us for the rest of his life.” “Oh my god the quarterback is toast!” “I read about them in Time magazine.” Eventually I caught it on VHS, and while I wasn’t as big a fan, I did like it, but for a different reason.
When I was in elementary school, my father’s office was located in this medical center in Fullerton, and when I was in junior high he relocated to this one in Brea. (Both these images reflect extensive renovations since the ’80s, and I picked older images because there have been even more renovations since the pictures above were taken.) I had to spend long stretches of time in these buildings after hours and on weekends. In Fullerton, that mostly meant being stuck in the communal waiting room, which was quite spacious with multiple sofas and a giant fish tank. There was also a fair amount of reading material, from Discover magazine to a coffee-table book of front pages of the Los Angeles Times from 1881 to 1981, which perhaps helped to spark my interest in history. At the Brea building, which had just been built when my father moved his office there, each medical practice had its own little waiting room, which was less comfortable—there weren’t even any sofas, only chairs. And so my brothers and I would explore and/or play hide-and-seek around the entire building, which was generally empty when we were there. Even with the vast majority of the doors locked, it was quite the playground: a maze of corridors! An elevator! Multiple staircases! Empty storerooms! Bathrooms! A front reception desk! So the idea of an action movie set not in an exotic locale but in a place as familiar as an office building struck me as very cool.
Anyway, Ellie’s take was that while ultimately this was a shoot-’em-up and thus not her cup of tea, she appreciated seeing an action movie built around a regular guy rather than some Rambo or Terminator figure. Somehow it was not until I was midway through this paragraph that I discovered that this wasn’t the filmmakers’ original intent: they offered the leading role to Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger before settling for Bruce Willis. (In fact, due to some language in a contract from the 1960s, the studio was obligated to offer the role to 70-year-old Frank Sinatra before it could ask anyone else! And yet somehow this is not the casting revelation that came as the biggest surprise to me over the past few days, as you’ll find out below…)
Alan Eisenstock, Larry Mintz, and Rod Amateau, 1983
Most of what Ellie and I have watched together recently have been Rifftrax movies. Rifftrax, founded in 2006 by the three Mystery Science Theater 3000 alumni who had starred on the Sci-Fi Channel version of the show, was initially based on what seemed like a winning premise: what if you could apply MST3K-style riffing to recent mainstream movies instead of dusty old monster movies and direct-to-video duds? The problem, of course, had always been securing the rights to movies that were any more commercially viable than the likes of Manos, the Hands of Fate. The solution: record just the jokes! And then viewers could sync up the video of any movie with its riff track—no licensing fees required! However, it appears that once the novelty had worn off, viewers found that process too cumbersome for Rifftrax to stay in business. So in recent years the Rifftrax folks have reverted to the old MST3K formula of riffing on very bad movies to which they can land the video rights, and releasing audio and video as a combined package. And these movies are, for the most part, very, very bad. Like, the budget is a first-grader’s lunch money, the script is that first-grader’s book report (which got an F), and the acting compares poorly to that in a first-grade class play. But High School U.S.A. is an exception. I mean, it’s not great cinema, but it was made sufficiently competently to secure an airing on NBC. And the casting—I mean, the reason I wanted to write this up is that I had no idea this thing existed and now that I’ve seen it I still have a hard time believing it exists.
Starting at the top, you’ve got Michael J. Fox of Family Ties playing the main character: not an Alex P. Keaton preppie type, but rather a lovable rogue who has run afoul of the preppies. Playing the leader of the preppies is Anthony Edwards, who would soon show off his range by playing the leader of the dweebs in Revenge of the Nerds. Though I suppose I should draw a distinction between dweebs and nerds, because High School U.S.A. has both. Playing the Michael J. Fox character’s best friend is Todd Bridges of Diff’rent Strokes, following in the footsteps of his TV brother Gary Coleman in playing a nerd with a 200 IQ. The Todd Bridges character creates a robot that looks like this. If you’re wondering, yes, the robot is dancing. Even more socially awkward than the Todd Bridges character, and unable to build any robots because he’s not a nerd but just a dweeb, is a character played by Crispin Glover, who would soon appear with Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, which is somewhat better known today than their earlier effort together. Playing the Crispin Glover character’s dad is—I swear, I am not making this up—Bob Denver, of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and Gilligan’s Island, and I mention both because he’s brought Dobie Gillis himself, Dwayne Hickman, and the universally beloved Mary Ann, Dawn Wells, along with him. And Bob Denver plays his character seriously! He’s a hard-drinking businessman with graying sideburns and a bitchin’ 1979 Trans Am (and I’m not being sarcastic there—the car is genuinely very cool). The above would be enough to make my jaw drop, but there’s more!
Playing the love interest over whom the Fox and Edwards characters battle is Nancy McKeon from The Facts of Life; her parents are played by Ken Osmond (Eddie Haskell from Leave It to Beaver) and Elinor Donahue (Mary Lee Morgan from my favorite MST3K movie, Girls Town). She has just started dating the Anthony Edwards character, and has thus been accepted into a new clique of popular girls, whose leader is played by Dana Plato, Todd Bridges’s adoptive sister on Diff’rent Strokes. Another member of the clique is played by Crystal Bernard, later of Wings, who in this movie goes undercover as a punker girl called “Helen Putrid” with a sidekick called “Vicky Slime”. There’s also a nerdy girl played by Lauri Hendler, the middle daughter on Gimme a Break!. The principal is played by Tony Dow, Wally Cleaver from Leave It to Beaver! The janitor is played by David Nelson from Ozzie and Harriet! Jerry Maren, who played the Munchkin who hands Dorothy a lollipop in The Wizard of Oz, plays the dancing robot! I repeat: this movie actually exists!
And it’s actually not all bad. I mean, Michael J. Fox is a talented comedic actor. He gets some good lines. Crispin Glover does his Crispin Glover thing, if you’re into that. In fact, the movie was successful enough on NBC that the network commissioned a pilot. The would-be showrunners even got Crispin Glover, Crystal Bernard, and many of the adults to come back. But they couldn’t get Michael J. Fox, or rather, they already had him working full time on another show. So they needed a new lead. They thought they had their man in a hot young comedian who’d racked up multiple appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live in his early twenties. His name was Joel Hodgson. Hodgson realized that he really, really did not want to star in a sitcom, so much so that he left Hollywood and moved back to Minnesota, where he did odd jobs for a few years before starting his own show on a local UHF station. That show was called Mystery Science Theater 3000. I’m not making that up either!
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