Friday night, I watched the Midnight Madness DVD that Netflix sent me. For those of you who don’t know — or don’t remember — what this movie is, I’ll provide a little background. In the 80s, there were only two pay movie channels: HBO and Cinemax. Since they were both owned by the same company, we ended up seeing a lot of the same movies over and over. Short Circuit was on a lot. So were most of the Police Academy movies. (Maybe they had a thing for Steve Guttenberg?) Beastmaster was on at least once a day. And then there was Midnight Madness.
This is a live-action Disney comedy (we’re already off to a great start, huh?), ca. 1981. It follows five teams of college students on an elaborate all-night scavenger hunt, and when I was 8 it was one of the funniest movies I’d ever seen. Curious to see how it stood up to the evolved tastes of my adulthood, I decided to give it another try, and I can honestly say there was not a single laugh in the whole goddamned movie. There are beer-drinking frat boys, awkward nerds, giggling fat girls, pushy feminists and the spoiled rich kid who tries to cheat his way through the contest.
Basically it’s 2 hours of awful stereotypes (not even FUNNY awful stereotypes) sleepwalking their way through a typical cookie-cutter plot/series of gags. Oh, and it features a very young (as opposed to just a very young looking) Michael J. Fox. Poor guy.
The other rental I watched this weekend was disc 1 of the Upright Citizens Brigade box set. The exact opposite happened with this — I remember it being kind of funny back when it was on Comedy Central, but it turned out to be much better than I recalled. I don’t need to rent the other discs… what I saw here sold me on my own copy of the set.
So I guess between the two, it was a wash.
Then there’s Beavis and Butt-head, which MTV2 has started showing again recently. This is neither worse nor better than I remember it — it’s exactly the same, and thank goodness for that. Somehow, despite the fact that I watched this religiously for years, MTV2 is showing episodes I either never saw or don’t remember seeing, and I’m laughing my ass off. I can neither explain nor defend my love of this show’s humor; I only know it provokes instinctive laughter in me like nothing else does. It’s just the right combination of elements that makes me actually laugh out loud, as opposed to simply smirking and commenting on the cleverness like I do with most everything else. Huh huh, those guys are cool.