Were Airplane and The Naked Gun really that much better?
I don't know if Scary Movie was that awful, but all the sequels were pretty bad.
I blame Family Guy. The whole idea that you don't have a joke or comic situation that fits into the plot but just drag in some non sequitur, some off-the wall comment or scene that has nothing to do with story. It makes a show like 30 Rock unwatchable (assuming it would be watchable otherwise).
Airplane was, that’s one of the funniest movies ever made. Naked Gun was OK. Scary Movie wasn’t awful, but it provided the blueprint for the awful that has come. At least Family Guy is trying to be funny, non-sequitor humor can work, the classic WB cartoons are filled with it. But these current spoofs have devolved to “you will recognize this scene, so laugh dammit”, might as well just be a guy holding up pictures.
The thing is, "Airplane" was the first of it's kind, really sort of ground-breaking, and personally, I think it's the best. The problem was that they kept on doing them (and the Naked Gun movies), and while the first one was incredibly funny, they really were stretching for material on the sequels.
But I still think "Airplane" was a classic, and today I'll still watch it, mostly because I can repeat all the lines of dialog.
Mark
Airplane! was a spoof of “Zero Hour”.
Amen to that, brother. Seth McFarlane is a 1 man wrecking crew of the Chritian American character. The under-30 crowd grew up watching his sewage and consider it the norm because they don't have anything else to compare with it. The world will be a better place when he departs it, but to quote Shakespeare's Mark Antony from Julius Caesar, "The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”
In McFarlane's case, his evil will continue to spread via syndication.
Yes. Leslie Nielsen was actually funny.