Dissolve's Forgotbusters: Movie Hits That Audiences Forgot

never heard of Let's Do It Again.

!! movie is pretty good, the soundtrack is incredible (Curtis Mayfield + The Staple Singers)

i know weekly movie box office is hard to read into pre-jaws changing everything cuz it was super rare for things to go in wide release everywhere iirc but still, holy cow at that the day of the locust adaptation being #1 for almost a month. like i guess someone could look at se7en being a blockbuster also but that's some cartoonish grimness, it's frank miller dark. day of the locust is ~your dreams will never come true/your life is inconsequential~ grimness, it's fucking iceman cometh dark.

This is boggling my mind:

The Man Who Fell to Earth
Julia
The Front
Coming Home

all #1 for at least three weeks.

As the title hints, Let's Do It Again was a followup to the popular Uptown Saturday Night, with the same stars, so it was able to build on that momentum I think.

in 1980 Coal Miner's Daughter was #1 for nine weeks

yeah i remember that movie being huge

haven't seen it in a very very long time but iirc as oscar bait biopics go it's pretty good

It is.

do we have a thread about movies that seem to exist to be oscar bait?

Cissy Spacek was on a roll

movie is okay

xp

lol @ Reds holding at #1 for two weeks in the fall of '81 during Reagan's first year in office.

I don't think I really noticed it as a thing until The Cider House Rules but I wasn't really up on my film criticism

xp to self, obv

but yeah, I think I said this upthread, but Forgotbusters was a great premise/pitch unfortunately dreamed up by a man driven to write over-long, recap-oriented, and too-clever prose, at the expense of actually addressing the premise.. feel like any given movie, tossed to this thread, would quickly generate much more informative and interesting commentary that really interrogates; to what audience did this appeal? what chords did it strike? what became of those folks? etc. but he would pick super-hyped genre junk. who can possibly explain why this mega-hyped, action-packed blockbuster with big-name stars was popular in 1992?? The Dissolve deserved better imho.

dying laughing - ringo starr's caveman was the #1 movie at the box office for two weeks in 1981. alan alda's four seasons was the big memorial day blockbuster. baby boomers man.

Four Seasons is funny! kinda.

lol I have a distinct memory of a kid on the playground describing Caveman to me and making it sound totally awesome

xp

one of the better Forgotbuster essays, Dr. C, is about The Four Seasons.

nathan rabin isn't a particularly great writer (though he gets too much flack from some ppl here for being a white guy who really shouldn't write about hip-hop, some real mike love 'this guy is eating my lunch' action) but he can come up w/ some great ideas for running features. this applies to alot of that original av club crew tbh.

reading through the entirety of the thread this morning, I was wondering if Mr. Snrub is Rabin

i have very distinct memories of my mom and my first stepfather and their friends watching caveman w/ me on cable and them loving it more than me because they were high af.

were they eating fondue and Sociables?

i wonder - was "in search of noah's ark" basically a passion-of-the-christ kind of movie success? like it taps into this parallel audience of moviegoers who may or may not go to lots of other movies, but are definitely going to go to this one. more religious, more small-town/rural, etc.? thinking of the success of true grit and things like that.

i started watching the CNN "the 70s" series on netflix, which is a real mixed bag of short-attention-span history, but has some nice moments so far. it brought my attention to something probably very familiar to folks iit: the 1971-ish network cancellation of the "hillbilly shows" - petticoat junction, green acres, mayberry rfd, hee-haw, etc. - which were all still popular, but not with the coveted demographics. there are still tons of rural and small-town dwellers in america, and i believe there were way way more back then. entertainment that appealed to them might not sell a lot of advertising air time but it could probably sell a lot of movie tickets. just spitballing here though.

re: rabin, yeah, i just wish that, after coming up with this great idea, he had passed it around the dissolve for other people to pitch specific articles in this series. have to think they would have picked more interesting movies and had fresher takes. i have no real animus to him, just feels like he's turned himself into a certain kind of niche writer whose approach just doesn't work for anything but a certain kind of niche article. longform semi-comic recaps of capitol critters, stuff like that.

nah they were just smoking weed and drinking busch and laughing at ringo starr and listening to juice newton records and i'm in a corner reading encyclopedia brown

in search of noah's ark definitely would have appealed to evangelical crowd but the series in general would've appealed to a wide if somewhat fringe crowd, very post-60s we can't trust the establishment maan phenomenon. the cbs hillbilly shows got canceled cuz babe paley overheard someone make a joke at her expense about it at lunch.

xps I think I mentioned this already itt but ages ago someone recommended this site where they "hilariously" reviewed bad films and it was full of stupidly long articles that literally just described everything that happened in the film, like those Wikipedia contributors who don't know what a synopsis is. That was my introduction to this "recap" thing, which I do not get at all.

I think you're talking about ILE Oscar threads

Oh Christ I've never opened one of those

demographics doesn't really become a major influence on tv programming until the 80s and then as a way for networks to sell shows that got mediocre ratings overall but did ok w/ a segment that advertisers liked. i think nbc kicked it off as a way to save st. elsewhere basically and then abc went all in on the strategy in the late 80s pitching hardcore at the boomer market w/ thirtysomething etc and then when something like the wonder years had broad appeal it was gravy. then nbc just went nuts w/ it in the 90s.

wow presumed innocent. i think it's a really solid movie for reasons that balls articulates pretty well. the cast alone is just so good imo, like almost a dream team of '90s character actors and star power. kinda like something along the lines of 'hunt for red october' in that regard. ford of course, but julia and bedelia and scacchi and dennehy and spencer and whitford and winfield and even a young jeffrey wright.

i didn't see it until a few years later, and previously the ending had been spoiled for me by a Kids in the Hall sketch haha.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L8wftRFLX0

a few days ago my friends and were speculating about Matlock and In the Heat of the Night, which hung in there for years getting steady ratings by appealing to the Geritol crowd. I don't include Murder, She Wrote because that thing was its own beast, a ratings juggernaut.

then in the '90s we got Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman on a Saturday night.

god in the heat of the night is still on in reruns an insane amount, it must be a really cheap show to get. i can remember exactly which town it's shot in but if you ever want to know what 70% of georgia looks like watch an episode of in the heat of the night.

balls, that's interesting, and makes sense - both on the noah's ark fringe appeal (is there a chariots of the gods? crossover here?) and the broadcaster/demographics business.

"hilarious" reviews of bad films are such a magnet for recap-heads. there are some podcasts i'll throw on as total background while i'm doing something else, like movie fighters, where if they would just talk about the movie it would be really great because they will make some weird connections between things or have a deep knowledge of certain genres or whatever. but the marching through each scene of the movie with how ridiculous and crazy and whatever it is, it's like, you guys have made something longer than the movie itself, and you are not the plinkett star was prequel reviews.

In the Heat of the Night was pretty decent for awhile there, but it was a lightweight show, went down very easy. and not really in the "comfort food movie" way that I find the original compelling (w/r/t atmosphere and music and casting and a straightforward mystery told cleanly, punctuated by an iconic scene or two...reminds me of Bullitt in that way for some reason.)

yeah totally in that chariots of the gods ballpark

i tell myself it's me dropping any snobbish hangups though i suspect it's just me aging into the demo but i rather enjoy some of the recentish cbs dramas - person of interest, numb3rs, *breathes deep* ncis. have gained a real appreciation for hourlong dramas that don't involve superheros but also don't think or pretend they're prestige tv.

for awhile there i was watching criminal minds like i was a 75 yr old retiree.

i checked out after Paget Brewster left though

idk how many hours of in the heat of the night i've actually inadvertantly watched in laundromats etc but i'm not sure i've ever gotten past 'hey - it's archie bunker! and there's rog's wife from what's happening now! and there's archie bunker again!'

haha my sister watches criminal minds alot, though never first run iirc. was tempted to watch it when i found out paget brewster was on it but i think she had left by then. definitely have a thing for paget.

My wife binge-watches NCIS and just hearing the characters' stupid dialogue from across the room makes me want to poke my eardrums out.

Paget Brewster is my favorite celebrity sighting story, in the middle of my criminal minds obsession i went to the grocery store to buy some baby wipes and she was in line ahead of me with a dozen bottles of red wine. She turned and looked at me and said i should cut in line ahead of her and said the wine wasn't all for herself, haha. so i cut ahead of her, thanked her as i left, and she told me to have a nice night.

there's a season of numb3rs where every episode has a former cast member of either deadwood or the wire pop up until they ran out of ppl i guess and then it was someone who was in clueless popped up in every episode.

my mom had/has a thing for criminal minds, so whenever i'd be home visiting i'd invariably get dragooned into watching some. it's kinda like svu with the brakes off in terms of grossness and the melodrama cranked up to 11. in one episode jason alexander plays a maniac with long white hair who dresses like siegfried and/or roy.

Thomas Gibson on CM is probably the most dour dude on network TV. i also saw HIM at a grocery story, hovering in a produce section, looking at some squash like it was a corpse.

o god yes i've seen that jason alexander criminal minds

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--4dzecnA4--/c_fill,fl_progressive,g_north,h_358,q_80,w_636/18m7v1ffijkgkjpg.jpg

here's yr new col sanders

i'd suggest someone do a poll of jason alexander performances post-seinfeld but we all know the winner

https://youtu.be/-qcZ9M-QoOc

what about before Seinfeld – as Richard Gere's shitback rapist pal in Pretty Woman?

lol all this criminal minds talk reminds that joe walsh will have pics of him hanging out w/ beatles and stones and it's not big whoop here i am on vacation w/ paul again but then he'll run into thomas gibson and joe mantegna somewhere and be all 'OMG I GOT MY PICTURE TAKEN W/ THE GUYS FROM CRIMINAL MINDS' and then when they ask him to do a guest appearance he'll be all 'CAN YOU BELIEVE IT - I'M GONNA BE ON CRIMINAL MINDS! ME, A BOY FROM CLEVELAND. DREAMS DO COME TRUE.'

in 1981 jason alexander was in the original production of merrily we roll along, four years later he was in this -
https://youtu.be/Eh1kmVwS4Hw

Preppy dude in green polo looks like he want to bone him

am I crazy or was "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" in the same block of programming as "Walker, Texas Ranger" for a while?

my family watched the latter because it was so bad and hilarious. pretty sure we knew the words to the theme song, which is really bad, and sung by Chuck Norris. it pleases me that Conan O'Brien had a gag where he had a lever he could pull to play "random" scenes from the show for a while, because it showed that we weren't the only ones watching it for the badness