the groundhog day project

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! adds a writer--Pat Proft--who wasn't with the Zucker Abrahams Zucker team before. He had worked on Police Squad! with them, but as far as movies go, he'd worked on five Police Academy films and Real Genius , among others. Pretty early on, it's already clear that this movie has far fewer non sequitur gags. And pretty much no puns. Four years from Airplane! to Top Secret! , another four from Top Secret! to The Naked Gun , and the difference between the latter two seems far larger than the difference between the former two. If I wanted to break down in a horribly detailed fashion the changes in joke delivery in film over the course of the 1980s, the changes here might mean something, but I think whatever it is is escaping me for now. Like, were the non sequitur gags and asides something we needed as a response to, say, some late-term Cold War societal pressures, and by 1988 those pressures were dying down? I don't kno...

(I will probably get to another teacher movie tomorrow. But, today--the 30th anniversary of the release of Real Genius , I will be watching... well, Real Genius .) Real Genius was #7 at the box office it's first weekend. Back to the Future was #1 in its sixth weekend. Summer Rental was #2. Pee Wee's Big Adventure (which I never saw in the theater) was #3. European Vacation was #4. Fright Night , which I would see when we rented it from the Wherehouse , was #5. Weird Science , which I wouldn't see until cable, was #6. Rounding out the top ten were Cocoon , Follow that Bird and Silverado . ( Rambo: First Blood Part II was #13 in its 12th weekend, by the way.) Now, that we've got box office out of the way--and let's not even mention how it was the first instance for me of the movie not including something that was in the trailer (Chris (Val Kilmer) floating in a lawn chair dangling from balloons outside a window) but not in the movie. Speaking of which, I sa...