This is the final edition of Why Love the 90’s?
I decided to ask T.J. what he felt was the most underrated piece of media to come out of the ’90s. It seemed like a good question to end on.
My first instinct was to write about the 1998 teen comedy Can’t Hardly Wait. Frankie made a good point saying it wasn’t really underrated and thinking about it, he’s right.
I really do feel like it’s one of the movies that epitomizes the decade. It had a ridiculously 90s cast with Jennifer Love Hewitt and Ethan Embry at the top with Seth Green, Donald Faison. Jaime Pressley, Selma Blair and even the lovely and talented Melissa Joan Hart.
The soundtrack featured songs from Smash Mouth, Eve 6, Creed, Busta Rhymes and Barry Manilow…um, scratch Manilow, but you get the picture. It’s one of my favorite teen comedies and a huge part of that is because it feels so 90s. Since my high praise means that I’m probably overrating the movie then I thought that I would move on, dig deep, and come up with an underrated part of the decade that was.
And so, after going through my mind, putting my obvious favorites Saved by the Bell, Boy Meets World and Full House in the corner of my head, it all of a sudden hit me.
In my very humble opinion, after much thought, Recess is one of the most underrated TV shows of the 90s. For those who don’t remember, the cartoon series was part of Disney’s “One Saturday Morning.” It was a block of kids shows that was meant to be different from the Saturday morning blocks on other networks. Here’s the intro, meant to establish Saturdays and their programming as, “Five hours of Summer, once a week.” What’s better than that as a kid?
The programming started in the fall of 1997. That would make me 11-years-old and kind of in the middle of trying to move on from kids shows to be cool, (looking back, I wasn’t that cool anyway.) But I had to watch One Saturday Morning shows because they weren’t so bad for what they were. Disney, for example, took over the legendary Nicktoon Doug, taking Doug, Skeeter, Patty, Roger and the rest from middle to high school. To me, it lacked the charm that the original Doug had and went further outside the box than it really had to. The one show that did stick out to me, to this day, was Recess.
This show hits close to home because of my own fond memories of recess in school. Where else is it socially acceptable to just run around aimlessly? Kickball, four square, basketball were my favorites. It was a chance to yell, laugh and be plain old silly after a few hours stuck inside a classroom learning how to add fractions or diagramming sentences. I was in sixth grade at the time the Recess started up so I was kind of winding down on the original enjoyment of the mid-day break. It was more about being cool in front of girls than running around without a care in the world.
So, the show focused on a group of six fourth graders at Third Street Elementary School. T.J Detweiler was the plotting leader, Spinelli was the tough tomboy, Vince was the jock, Gretchen Grundler was the genius, Mikey was huge, imposing, but kind at heart, and Gus was the military kid who had his share of bad luck. We got to see their lives inside the classroom and even outside of school at home, but there was nothing like the world of the school playground, especially at Third Street.
What I really liked about the show was the depiction of the school yard as its own little society. The students had their own power structure, class system and, much like real life, unwritten rules that should not be broken. They even had their own royalty in King Bob, the sixth grader who ruled the school, hockey stick in hand, and demanded the ultimate respect from the students and made rulings from the throne. He had a decent relationship with TJ, which helped him and the gang get through some aspects of this world, but not all of it.
They had to deal with Miss Finster, the brooding teacher who monitored Recess and lunch everyday. She relied heavily on Randall , the the kiss-up student who would rat on the kids, to get her inside information to bust up some of TJs plots. Finster answered to Mr. Prickley, the principal who did what he wanted…until faced with Superintendent Skinner. You had the popular, pretty, preppy girls called the Ashleys, all with that first name, who had their own domain where they could brush their hair and talk about how beautiful they were. We later found out that tough girl Spinelli’s first name was Ashley. She had to live with that and decide if she wanted to be that kind of Ashley or stay true to herself and threaten to beat people up. There was upside down girl, who lived up(side) to her name by hanging from a bar upside down. There was even Hustler Kid, who got kids what they needed, while also hustling them when need be.
I loved the underground economy, the kickball games, the social interactions and how “adult” these fourth graders were at times. I loved the randomness of Mikey, the gentle giant with a soft voice, singing sounding exactly like Robert Goulet. (The great Goulet lent his voice to the show.)
It was a charming little show with great, not so corny and childish, dialogue. Again, I was enamored with the society the kids created for themselves and watching how TJ, Vince, Spinelli, Gretchen, Mikey and Gus had to get through it. The show was popular during its run from 1997-2001, so much so that it led to a major motion picture, Recess: School’s Out which depicted our six friends during the summer, somehow defeating a terrorist group.
I think the show is underrated in the fact that it doesn’t get as much nostalgic play from millenials like the Nicktoons of Doug, Rugrats, Rocko’s Modern Life, Ren and Stimpy do. It doesn’t get the cartoon adult cred that The Simpsons, King of the Hill, or Family Guy gets. It was a Saturday morning cartoon that actually turned into a major motion picture, which is remarkable. It is the type of Saturday morning show that I feel like doesn’t exist much today anymore. Recess’ charm and cleverness helped tell stories of the playground that many of us were familiar with, but with adult ideas of society and social structures that made this show way smarter than it could have been otherwise.
As for me, well…
I know it’s kind of foolish to call Eddie Murphy underrated.
After all, he was one of the biggest stars on the planet on a couple of occasions, and is still the second highest grossing actor in America (behind Tom Hanks). During the ’80s, especially, Murphy was ablaze, following a legendary run on Saturday Night Live with a string of motion picture successes including 48 Hrs. (made while he was still on SNL), Trading Places and Beverly Hills Cop. Sure, there were a couple of flops–Best Defense and The Golden Child–but they couldn’t derail his momentum through the ’80s. At least, until Harlem Nights.
Murphy’s 1989 directorial debut was meant to pay tribute to his heroes, Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx. To that effect, he cast them in lead roles. But it was a critical bomb, and while it was moderately successful at the box office, the take wasn’t nearly on the level of his other hits. His output through the following decade was pretty uneven; for every Boomerang, there was Another 48 Hrs. Nestled between flops was The Distinguished Gentleman, a solid, if workmanlike effort that, in hindsight, feels closer to the Eddie Murphy of old than most of his films since.
The Distinguished Gentleman saw Murphy playing the type of fast-talking huckster he could do in his sleep by then. He starred as Thomas Jefferson Johnson, a Florida con man who hatches a plot to run for Congress after learning that (a) congressmen have it pretty sweet and (b) he has practically the same name as his recently deceased representative. Once Thomas gets wins, he quickly learns that Washington, D.C. is an entire city of con men.
The premise is a no-brainer and the execution is solidly down the middle, but what really gets it going is the talent involved. Eddie Murphy is as good as you’d expect, though not quite as inspired as in his best movies. The supporting cast is filled with reliable screen vets, from Sheryl Lee Ralph as his cousin and chief accomplice to the late, wonderful Lane Smith as a crooked senior congressman. Victoria Rowell co-stars as his love interest and Charles S. Dutton ably scrubs in as her uncle, a minister and congressman with a “Roc”-solid moral fiber (get it?), while Joe Don Baker, Noble Willingham, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers star Kevin McCarthy play seedy lobbyists. James Garner even has a small role as the congressman Thomas seeks to succeed, and Chi McBride and Murphy Brown‘s Grant Shaud fill out the cast (plus a cameo from Murphy’s Harlem Nights co-star Della Reese).
It’s a great pleasure to watch these pros work, and the result is a film that sees even the flimsiest jokes land with reasonable impact. The campaign sequence is a lot of fun to watch, as Thomas and crew unleash every trick in their arsenal to make sure he wins the race without anyone seeing or speaking to him. Credit also goes to director Jonathan Lynn, fresh from My Cousin Vinny, for helming a surprisingly astute (if visually flat and at times sluggish) picture.
I wrote about this movie here before, but at the time, I was a little less complimentary toward it. But I’ve seen it enough times to realize it’s a favorite of mine, even if critical and popular opinion at the time were against it.
Eddie Murphy followed The Distinguished Gentleman with the ill-advised and fairly rotten Beverly Hills Cop III, and then the catastrophic Vampire in Brooklyn. Many thought such a double-shot would end his career, but he rebounded with The Nutty Professor, a remake of the Jerry Lewis farce that showed a re-energized Eddie Murphy throwing himself into seven different characters with the sort of wild abandon he’d arguably been missing since Coming to America. He followed it up with the uninspired actioner Metro, the misguided Holy Man, and Dr. Doolittle, the latter of which made a lot of money and re-established him as a family film star. At the end of the ’90s, he teamed up with Steve Martin for the first time to play an action star in the showbiz satire Bowfinger.
Bowfinger was another modest success, and a critical favorite, but it doesn’t get talked about nearly as much as The Nutty Professor or Shrek. Steve Martin’s script, as directed by Frank Oz, is kind of uneven as far as tone, unsure of whether it’s a cynical attack on Hollywood heroes and wannabes or a loving ode to the dreamers and losers of Los Angeles. Most of the time, it tries really hard at both. To his credit, Martin seems to be pretty sympathetic toward his characters, even Eddie Murphy’s loud, ignorant, self-absorbed and possibly psychotic Kit Ramsey.
Ramsey is the world’s biggest action star in search of a script that will give him the catchphrase he’s been seeking. Martin’s Bobby Bowfinger is a down-on-his-luck director looking for his last shot at making it. When he receives his accountant’s script, he tries to sell Kit on starring in it, but is rebuffed. Instead of calling it quits, and afraid to disappoint his loyal, delusional crew, Bowfinger decides to shoot the script around Ramsey without the star’s knowledge. What he doesn’t know is that Kit Ramsey is dangerously paranoid.
Like The Distinguished Gentleman, Bowfinger also has a solid cast, anchored by Martin and featuring Heather Graham as a deceptively naive ingenue, Christine Baranski as a fading would-be star, Terence Stamp as the leader of an organization that suspiciously resembles the Church of Scientology, Robert Downey Jr. as a venal studio executive and Jamie Kennedy as Bowfinger’s crewman and confidant.
But it’s Murphy who takes the movie and runs away with it as Kit, and as Kit’s meek, innocent lookalike Jiff. As Kit, he’s all id, firing weapons indoors, screaming about someone trying to inhale his gonads, and always one step away from disrobing in front of the Laker Girls. Jiff, on the other hand, is nerdy, sweet, and terrifically awkward.
The two characters couldn’t be farther from each other, and Eddie Murphy plays both with an intelligence and verve that resembles his old self more closely than any of his post-Coming to America movies. I firmly believe it isn’t just Eddie Murphy’s last great comic performance, it’s also one of his best.
This brings our voyage through the ’90s to a close. We hope you enjoyed reading these columns as much as we enjoyed remembering these things and writing about them.
Now if you’ll excuse us, Saved by the Bell is on.
