Do you ever sit back and decide to rewatch movies form your child hood, remembering how fucking awesome they were? You think about all these scenes that totally kicked arse, and these special effects that were amazing. And then you watch it, and it sucks more balls than a 12 year old girl from Frankston/Redfern/Fortitude Valley/anywhere in Darwin?

Movies like The Never Ending Story II are the perfect example of what I’m talking about here, by the way. It’s kind of like your first goth club explerience. You have all these great memories of it, but if you went back there today you’d realise how lame it actually was, and how there are only eight new songs in rotation since then.

There are also those movies that are actually still just as awesome now as they were then. They usually involve puppets and tight pants, like The Labyrinth, or Dark Crystal (amazingly available in the one double set).

But there’s a strange class of movie out there. Movies that you thought sucked at the time, but were actually quite good, and have only appreciated with age, like a fine wine that is at first repugnant.

One such movie is Stay Tuned.

This movie never left much of an impression on me until I rewatched it last night and alsmot threw up from laughing at the terrible terrible play on words done with TV shows I was never particularly fond of. Shows such as Murder She Likes or My Three Sons of Bitches. The sort of TV I could really get into if only it actually existed outside of Robot Chicken.

The premise is simple, Roy Knable (who oddly enough was in Three’s Company) watches too much TV. Idle hands being the devil’s plaything, Mephistopheles (played by Jeffrey Jones, because he’s in fucking everything that came out in the early 90s) offers him a “large” screen TV (40″ @ 720p, which is basically standard now) in stereo, with 666 channels to chose from. He just has to literally live through all of those channels for 24 hours to reclaim his soul is all.

The acting is actually really good (except for the children, it’s always the children) as the entire cast is pretty much A-grade. Hell, there’s even a caemo by rap superstar group Salt’n'Peppa (does anyone remember them now?).

What’s really worth noting is how the film managed to be valid social commentary at the time. This is something that few comedy movies actually managed to achieve in the 90s. I’m aware that few manage to do it now either, particularly those in the parody genre, but let’s get real for a moment: the 90s were not exactly a time that Hollywood was doing much social reflection.

I bring this film up for a specific reason though. All of our childhood favourite films are getting amazingly raped and remade… yet this one, which would EASILY retranslate with just bigger & better tech and modern TV shows, has not been… And I wonder why.

Is it because the parody genre is being done to death by the slew of “Not Another …” movies? Admittedly they’re tkaing the piss out of a few TV shows, but the jokes rarely last longer than 20 seconds, and they’re not an actual part of the story line. The movies seem to be a bunch of disjointed Saturday Night Live sketches that have been thrown in together around the storyline of one of the parodies, as they fit… not in an actually cohesive manner. Then again, the same could be said of this film, even though the parodies are the plot line, directly.

Sure, the updates would be a little tricky to figure out in some instances. The game show segments would have to be replaced with “reality” shows… Maybe “Surreality” shows. Chuck Jones’ gorgeously animated cartoon parody, in which the Knables turn into mice that have to fight off a robot cat, couldn’t be translated directly into modern day. You’d have to do an anime or something… And that would be totally different. You’d have Roy as a ninja asking himself whether this was a cute, fluffy Pokèmon spin-off, or a hardcore violence and tentacle rape anime… I’m hoping the latter.

With that said, if the remake were to remain valid social commentary, perhaps the parody nature would have to drop a little away from the slapstick of the original, and move towards substantially blacker humour, considering the depths that some modern TV shows do go to. “Reality” tv game shows where people win cosmetic surgery, or the entire Jackass / Tom Green genre of pain and humiliation for the audience’s pleasure, go a fair way to show how much further society’s truly nasty inner-core has become exposed over the last 15 years since the film was made.

And there is always the penultimate example of depravity, narcissism, social detachement & short attention spans: You Tube. (I was really tempted to say College Humor, but on average, their stuff is actually pretty good).

Either way, it’s a good movie, and it’s actually funnier now that I’m old enough to appreciate most of the jokes in it.

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