From Space Jam: A New Legacy to Hellzapoppin'
Disgust gives way to delight
Many movies have been called live-action cartoons, but few fit that definition better than the delirious Hellzapoppin’ from 1941. My journey to that film went from the profane to the unhinged.
It began with a half-hearted viewing of Space Jam: A New Legacy. I had read the none-too-positive reviews, but I was still morbidly curious. Unlike some people wearing the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, I don’t hold up the original Space Jam as a classic of my youth (I was 26). Unlike some other people, I don’t consider that movie a detestable tragedy either. Yeah, it was a commercial stretched out into a movie that didn’t use the beloved Looney Tunes particularly well, but I found it harmless. Me being a Beatlemaniac, I had known director Joe Pytka had also made the very clever video for the Beatles’ “Free as Bird,” chock-a-block with Fab Four Easter eggs. So I was inclined to be forgiving.
A New Legacy, however, did not put me in a forgiving mood. It’s a giant commercial for HBO Max, with precious little irony, and it’s even more crass than its predecessor. There are a few amusing gags in the hand-drawn animated segments, but most of the time it’s like being trapped in a tumbling dryer filled with roman candles. By the time the Tunes started to rap, I turned the TV off faster than the Road Runner (movius vomitus).
As loathsome as the villain Al G-Rhythm (yes, really) was, the YouTube algorithm actually turned out to be helpful. It pointed me to a very well done channel called The Royal Ocean Film Society.
Its latest video was a look at the struggles of Joe Dante, best remembered as the director of Gremlins, who made Looney Tunes: Back in Action in 2003. It made better use of Bugs and the gang than Space Jam, but Dante described making the film as an experience made miserable by studio interference. Sadly, he hasn’t directed a major Hollywood film since. He’s mostly been working in network TV lately, helming episodes of Hawaii Five-O, Legends of Tomorrow and MacGyver.
That YouTube video makes reference to Hellzapoppin as influencing Dante’s zany sensibility, particularly via his sorely underrated Gremlins 2: The New Batch. How much did Hellzapoppin influence other pop culture such as the Looney Tunes? There’s a sequence that Chuck Jones directly lifted for the classic Duck Amuck, in which the frame jumps with a horizontal line in the middle, with the characters in the top half of the frame fighting with the characters in the bottom half of the frame. Duck Amuck is much more widely known, but Hellzapoppin’ did that gag first.
My interest was further stoked by one of my favorite podcasts, Linoleum Knife, hosted by married film critics Alonso Duralde and Dave White. They have a Patreon show called Linoleum Knife presents more Linoleum Knife, where the pair discuss one film in depth, and they took on Hellzapoppin’. White took particular delight in the opening scene which looks like something out of The Great Ziegfeld, Ziegfeld Girl or Ziegfeld Follies, with elaborately costumed dancing girls descending a staircase, which promptly turns into a slide, sending the girls tumbling into Hell. The movie proceeds to absolutely demolish the fourth wall, with the characters onscreen even addressing the theater projectionist, played by Shemp Howard of the Three Stooges - although this movie is more like 3,000 stooges. The Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker guys who made Airplane! took more than a few ideas from here as well.
I’d talk more about what’s in the film, but it’s much better seen than read about. Normally I would not sanction viewing copyrighted works on YouTube, but there is simply no other way to see this daffy comedy in the United States. Check it out and delight as anything goes. At least something good came from the Space Jam sequel. To paraphrase a popular dieting site, Watch This, Not That!