Movie Monday: The Big Bang Theory

This week's Movie Monday selection is the original pilot for The Big Bang Theory!


Sure, The Big Bang Theory isn't a movie, but after seeing the original, unaired pilot for the long-running TV series I thought it would be fun to talk about. Rarely has a hit show been spawned from such humble beginnings.

The original Big Bang Theory featured the show's two main characters, Leonard (Johnny Galecki) and Sheldon (Jim Parsons), but other than that the show is unrecognizable. Instead of next-door neighbor Penny (played on the series by Kaley Cuoco), here the boys meet a beautiful woman named Katie (Amanda Walsh) who has just been dumped by her boyfriend and is, for the moment, homeless. Leonard and Sheldon, as awkward as ever around women, nevertheless offer to let Katie stay with them, an offer she accepts.

Katie's hard-drinking, hard-living style throws the guys' world upside-down, also upsetting one of Leonard's colleagues, a female geek named Gilda (Iris Bahr). Gilda doesn't take too well to this Alpha Female in her midst, and tries her best to stand her ground, declaring Leonard as "hers."

After an argument between Leonard and Katie, she storms out, heading off to work at a cosmetics counter, leaving her homeless yet again. But Leonard shows up to apologize, with Katie seeing that Leonard is a nice guy. During their traditional take out dinner, the boys find Katie has returned, planning on living with them for the foreseeable future. The show ends with Katie taking Leonard, Sheldon, and Gilda dancing, where their geeky strut causes a bit of a scene. The End.

I didn't like The Big Bang Theory initially. I watched an episode or two of the first season, and the show's humor seemed forced and too loud and I gave up on it. But when my Significant Other wanted to try it out a year or two later, I gave it another shot and found that the show grew on me. I still thought the first season was the weakest, but over time I thought the characters developed in interesting ways, and we both got hooked.

In contrast, the characters on display in the pilot are basically the same guys, but with some crucial differences. The show spends some considerable time talking about Sheldon's sexual preferences, something virtually alien to the character as we now know him (Sheldon's utter lack of interest in sex makes him, to me, a refreshing change from the usual unrepentant horndogs that most TV men are written as). In addition, the jokes are generally a little cruder and darker than what would follow. And speaking of "dark", the show itself is a lot darker--its as if they didn't have enough money for proper lighting, so every scene in the main apartment set looks like a bulb or two has gone out.

The characters only seen in the pilot, Katie and Gilda, are clearly the building blocks for series regulars Penny and Leslie (played by Galecki's Roseanne co-star Sara Gilbert). It's obvious that Katie, as written, is much too grating and coarse to work as a weekly character. Its hard to know whether to blame the writing or the actor, but there's a general sunniness to actress Kaley Cuoco that Walsh here doesn't have, and IMO it nearly sinks the whole enterprise.

Usually when a network screens a pilot and doesn't like what it sees, it dumps the show and that's the end of it. But obviously CBS saw something it liked, and it ordered up a new, revamped pilot. Show creators Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady rewrote the show, replacing Katie with Penny, dumping Gilda, and essentially replacing her with Howard and Raj. That changed the show's comedic balance in drastic ways--some of the jokes from the original pilot are in the second pilot, but they're gentler and overall brighter and happier.

In addition, the original Thomas Dolby theme was replaced by the super-catchy Barenaked Ladies song, and the rest was history (one of the few shows that had a similar history was, of course, Star Trek, a little factoid Sheldon would undoubtedly find appropriate).

Seeing an unaired pilot like this is always a weird experience, since you're seeing characters you are so familiar with, yet here there are looking and acting completely different (I had a similar experience reading some of the post-movie-and-TV series M*A*S*H novels, where the characters have virtually no resemblance to the ones I came to love so much).

One other weird experience watching this show reminds me of how cruel the acting business can be--a working actor must think when they land a major network TV show pilot, they've won the lottery. Katie Walsh has a number of credits post-BBT, but it's nothing close to the riches and fame afforded to Kaley Cuoco, who has now had six straight years of high-rated TV fame (to say nothing of syndication money, which is a veritable fountain of cash for a TV series). I can't imagine how painful it might be to see The Big Bang Theory pop up on your TV almost every day and know you were so close.

Anyway, the original BBT pilot is available on YouTube and other online sources; if you're a fan of the show you'll probably enjoy seeing this, it's like getting a peek into one of the alternate dimensions Sheldon is always theorizing about!

Movie Monday: The Three Stooges

This week's Movie Monday selection is The Three Stooges!

No, not the brand new Farrelly Brothers movie, and not any of the classic shorts from the Golden Age of Hollywood. We're talking the about the 2000 TV movie (produced by Mel Gibson!) that purports to tell the true story of Moe, Larry, Curly, Shemp, and How They Came To Be.

 

The Three Stooges opens in 1959, inside the home of Moe Howard, played by Paul Ben-Victor (Entourage), as he sets off on his job...as a delivery man. While dropping off some food, he overhears one of the old Stooges shorts playing in a theater for some studio execs, who are laughing uproariously:

One of the younger execs notices that Moe Howard--Moe--is sitting right next to him! We follows Moe out, asking if he is who he thinks he is. Moe brushes him off, denying who he is, and goes about his business.

Moe makes his sandwich delivery to another exec, and inquires why the old Stooges shorts are being played again. The indifferent exec tells him that the Fox Studio is considering selling the shorts to TV for a pretty penny. Unfortunately, due to a lousy contract signed years ago, Moe or any of the other Stooges won't see any money from this bonanza. Moe dejectedly returns home.

It's here that the film flashes back to 1929, and we see the Stooges' early days, as the comedic back-up to vaudeville performer Ted Healy. While Healy is the main attraction, it's the Stooges who get all the laughs, and Healy is cruel on stage to his co-stars and cheap with them off. Shemp Howard (John Kassir, Tales From The Crypt) is the most upset over Healy's treatment of them, but Moe tries to keep his brother in line, for the sake of the act.

Soon after, they all stumble on the act of another comedian, Larry Fine (Evan Handler, Sex and the City), who is doing a slightly more risque bit involving a beautiful girl. They ask Larry to join, which he does with zeal--when asked if he'll part with the violin he plays on stage, he responds by smashing it to bits.

Healy and the Stooges get an offer to come to Los Angeles and make shorts for for a movie studio, and they all head off to California. Unfortunately, Healy's penchant for cruelty and drinking too much causes more trouble between him and the Stooges, so when a movie exec offers Moe a contract just for the Stooges, they accept--only to have Healy threaten the Stooges' lives! He promises they'll never work in Hollywood, and makes good on his threat--soon the studio calls and cancels the offer.

Moe decided to take the act back to vaudeville, but under bomb threats(!) from Healy toward any theater that will book them on the East Coast, the Stooges decide to travel the country. Unfortunately, Shemp's nerves simply can't take the stress, and he quits the act. Larry wonders if they're finished, but Moe promises, "I haven't run out of brothers yet":

 

Despite the protests of their parents, Curly (Michael Chiklis) joins the act, and his childlike energy rejuvenates the act. When Columbia executive Harry Cohn sees the Stooges perform at a club, he is so impressed he offers them a contract to make movies for him--and the rest is history.

At this point, The Three Stooges does a good job recreating the manic energy of the boys--Handler's Fine has that slight hangdog feel, and Chiklis is particularly good as Curly. We see recreations of some of the Stooges' shorts, and their rise to fame, but the details the movie provides that are really valuable is what happened backstage and after---how Cohn tricked the Stooges into a lousy contract, literally shielding them from knowing how popular they were, how much money they were generating, and glossing over the little fact that the Stooges would not have any share in the profits.

Years pass, and while the Stooges continue to perform, small fissures between the boys begin to develop. Larry and Curly spend their money with little thought of the future, with Moe having to look out for both of them, financially and emotionally. There's a painful scene where Curly, coming back to a hotel drunk, gets punched by a fan who enjoys their physical antics, not realizing it actually hurts.

While shooting one of the shorts, Curly has a stroke. While emotionally devastated, Moe soldiers on with the act, bringing Shemp back into the fold. Curly continues to deteriorate, eventually passing away. Sadly, Shemp dies just a few years later, necessitating the addition of a new Stooge, Joe Besser, who is portrayed here as fussy and not a good fit (he's even unwilling to take a piece in the face!). Besser is soon replaced by "Curly Joe" DeRita, who is much better selection, working perfectly with with Moe and Larry.


We flash back to 1959, and the young exec--who has been continually chasing after Moe--shows him some startling news: the Stooges shorts have been sold to TV, for a fortune:

Moe is enraged at Columbia's greed, leaving the Stooges out in the cold financially. After much persistence, he accepts an offer to regroup The Three Stooges for a live appearance. He's not expecting much, since he's convinced that no one remembers them. On the way to the event, even the young exec (who works in the still-new TV division) reveals his nervousness, telling Moe's wife in secret that the shorts just started airing on TV, so he has no idea if anyone will even bother to show up.

But when the Stooges step on stage, they are treated like heroes by a packed house:

Realizing for the first time just how popular they were and continue to be, the Stooges undergo a career resurgence. The End.

 

I remember watching The Three Stooges when it first aired, and I don't mind admitting that I got just a tad bit misty-eyed at this final scene, where Moe and Larry finally get some due for all their years of hard work. I grew up watching the Stooges, and knowing they were treated so poorly while making those classic shorts saddens me. Knowing they managed to have a "second act", which had them starring in movies, makes all the bad stuff a little easier to swallow.

The movie tells us what happened to the Stooges at the end of their lives, like how Larry died in 1972 with Moe following shortly thereafter. It understandably glosses over the detail that, even after Larry's death, Moe tried to continue the act, with longtime foil Emil Sitka filling in:

This photo just makes me sad.

On the plus side, a detail the movie gets wrong is presenting Moe as financially struggling in his later years. In truth, Moe was superb at handling money, always saving and investing, so much so that when he was always able to bail out Larry, who continued his reckless ways. So while the above photo might look like the act of a desperate man, its good to know that Moe was doing this mostly because he just loved being a Stooge, as opposed to being forced to due to finances.

The Three Stooges is a bit generic, with some of the performances a little broad (Harry Cohn talks like a gangster--but who knows, maybe he really did) and some of the historical moments a bit too pat. But overall I enjoyed it, and its a, er, fine tribute to these comedy legends.

I haven't seen the new Three Stooges movie, and I'm not sure I'll bother, since I don't think I'm up for a "straight" Stooges story. When it was first mentioned that the Farrellys were going after Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, and Jim Carrey (to play Moe, Larry, and Curly, respectively) I assumed it was going to be for a real-life bio-pic, a sort of big budget version of this film.

I guess that's not to be, so as it stands The Three Stooges works pretty well as the only time this particular story will be told. If you're a Stooges fan, its worth searching out. Nyuk! Nyuk!

 

Movie Monday: Mars and Beyond

This week for Movie Monday we go to Mars and Beyond!

With movies about Mars all the rage right now (or not), I thought it'd be fun to try something different this week. Instead of a movie, we're going to look at an episode of Disneyland (the original title to Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, which ran off and on from 1954-1990!) called "Mars and Beyond" all about the red planet and human beings' fascination with it. It originally aired December 4, 1957.

Mars and Beyond opens with a live-action piece featuring a robot named Garco talking to Walt Disney himself, who introduces the episode and tells us about what we're about to see: Mars!

The first third of the episode is animated, but not in the typically realistic, florid Disney style. No, this segment (narrated by the legendary Paul Frees) looks like those classic UPA cartoons, with their super-exaggerated people and mix of different styles and forms:

This opening segment tells the entire history of the world in about fifteen minutes flat, and then moves on to how the mystery of Mars has haunted the human imagination for almost as long, starting with how H.G. Wells presented martians in War of the Worlds:

Mars as seen in books, comics, cartoons, and movies is covered, and gently poked fun at (as you can tell from the above and below stills). There's a few minutes devoted to parodying sci-fi movies and their tropes, like how the lead character is always some bookish scientist only interested in Discovery:

Even though this show (and pretty much all their output, really) is meant for kids, this segment really made me laugh, realizing that Disney was ribbing sci-fi cliches...in 1957. At one point, our heroine is chased by a bunch of grotesquely silly aliens, including one character regular viewers were bound to be familiar with:

The show then shifts back to the natural history of the Earth, starting with protozoa and working its way through the dinosaurs, and then finally to man. Appropriately, the style of animation shift to something a little more serious-looking:

We then "move" to Mars, and talk about what kind of life might be put there by us, or what might be there already:

There are also some live-action segments, featuring real life scientists and assorted poindexters as they talk about exploring Mars:

The show ends with visions of life in the deepest reaches of space, and we watch alien ships rendevous with a space station and then fly away:

Not being a particular aficionado of Disney stuff, I was really impressed--shocked, even--by Mars and Beyond. Its utterly delightful, crammed with more visual imagination than about your average five sci-fi blockbusters of today. Even though the science is of course half a century out of date, this show's 55 or so minutes filled with me a sense of wonder and excitement about the red planet that the recent John Carter could not muster in all of its two-plus hour running time.

Considering how skilled Disney is at marketing (the aforementioned John Carter being a major, painful exception), I'm surprised The Mouse hasn't dug through their vaults and released some of these WDWWOC shows on DVD. The show ran for decades, and if they brought even half the creativity to some of those other episodes that they did to Mars and Beyond, it would make one hell of a boxed set. I think if Tim Burton got his hands on just this show, he could probably spin two or three movies out of the material found herein.

I thought I'd end this odd little post with a shot of the credits. The artistic geniuses who put this show together deserve a shout-out:

...nicely done, boys!

Update: Between writing this post and it going live, I looked up WDWWOC on Amazon and found that Disney has, in fact, released some of the episodes of the series on DVD, including Mars and Beyond! By the Tharks of Barsoom, that's great news!

You can order the "Tomorrowland" themed-set via Amazon by clicking below. If you have kids (heck, even if you don't), I suggest picking up a copy:

Movie Monday: We Bought A Zoo

This week's movie is the 2011 family dramedy We Bought A Zoo!

Straight up, the only reason I was interested in this film was because of the director, Cameron Crowe. His film Jerry Maguire holds the record for the most times I've seen a film in the theater (ten), and I've loved/liked much of his previous work (Say Anything, Singles, Almost Famous). So while this film, from the trailers, looked like a bland family comedy/drama, I figured Crowe's participation demanded I give it a look.

The film opens during what is obviously a typically harried morning routine with reporter and all-around thrill-seeker Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) as he tries to get his two children, Dylan and Rosie, ready for school. Mee's wife passed away unexpectedly just a few months previous, so the family is still raw.

On the way to school, it's established Dylan is getting into a lot of trouble, and Matt just doesn't have the time to deal with it:

After Dylan is expelled from school after a series of behavioral transgressions, Mee (who has quit his job as a reporter, in a brief scene featuring the great Peter Reigert as his boss) decides to find the family a new house, wanting a fresh start for all concerned.

He ends up finding the perfect house...tons of space, sunshine, and scenic views. Just one problem: it comes with a zoo. And not just a zoo, but a dilapidated, failing zoo, full of wild animals and twitchy staff, led by Kelly Foster (Scarlett Johansson):

Mee doesn't know anything about zoos, or animals for that matter, but he believes in this new adventure, and plows ahead, spending lots and lots of money (which he has, courtesy of an inheritance, something he shares with his brother, played by Thomas Haden Church). The place needs all manner of repairs, and the animals are of course difficult to deal with, none more so than Scar, an elderly tiger who requires lots of complicated care.

Even more difficult to deal with is a government inspector who comes to make sure the animals are treated properly and the zoo is following regulations. As played by David Michael Higgins, this character seems to be coming from an entirely different, more cartoony, movie:

While Mee's daughter loves the zoo, the son does not. He remains gloomy and sullen, rejecting the good-natured advances of a girl his own age he meets there, and always pining to return to their original home.

When Dylan overhears his father talking to Kelly about him, it explodes into an argument, where father and son finally have it out:

Mee runs out of money to fix the zoo, until a bundle of unexpected cash falls into his lap, thanks to someone from the past. This convinces him to stick with it, and gear up for the zoo's opening day. After some more setbacks, and a thunderous, unusual rainstorm, Mee and his crew get everything ready.

On opening day, the sun is shining, and we see that the new, refurbished zoo will be a success:

We Bought A Zoo is one of those films that has a number of things "wrong" with it, but the whole enterprise is so straightforward and good-natured that you feel like a major league grump complaining about it. The story (based on real life events) is so simplistic and cheesy that this could have been an ABC Family Channel movie, save for the A-list talent involved (and on the soundtrack, more on that in a moment).

Everything here is so bland (except for the scene with Damon and Colin Ford, which has a real angry edge to it) that I kept thinking there was going to be some sort of dramatic, or at the very least idiosyncratic, flourish, something present in almost all of Crowe's films (I say almost because I have not seen the notorious Elizabethtown). I kept having to remind myself that he actually directed this, and not some journeyman TV movie director who grinds out Lifetime movies. After something like the third cutaway of the little girl adorably squealing "We bought a zoo!" to no one in particular, I wondered how much my sugar levels had risen while watching it.

The one area where Crowe is heavily present, and not in a good way, is on the soundtrack. Crowe's background in music is deep and well-known, and the soundtracks to his films are usually excellent. But in Zoo, I kept hearing so many songs by huge names (Tom Petty, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens) that it felt like Crowe was using them simply because he has personal access to people like Petty, Young, Dylan, etc.

Don't get me wrong--I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan and am always happy to hear his songs in a movie (especially when its an unusual one, like "Buckets of Rain", heard in Zoo), but they seemed very out of place here. Most of the time I couldn't fathom what they had to do with any given scene, or the characters. I hate to say this, but it kinda felt like the soundtrack is what someone Crowe's age would consider hip, when to most of the characters in the movie, these songs would be relegated to an oldies station (even more cringe-worthy was a scene where, ahem, Dylan, and the young farm girl played by Elle Fanning talk about Bob Dylan, as if either of them would have any clue who he is, or care. They must have have been gone to that school from Dangerous Minds).

Okay, that said, I still stand by what I stated above: We Bought A Zoo is such a nice movie, and tells such an affirming, sweet story, that simply pointing out all its flaws seems like an exercise in internet douchebaggery, and we have enough of that, thank you very much. Rated PG, full of cute animals and containing some solid performances, its ideal for family viewing. And considering how much garbage is marketed to kids as "family entertainment", you could do a lot worse than We Bought A Zoo.