Post
by GeorgeC » February 3rd, 2005, 12:24 am
The original Tommy is before my time, too,
but we've gotta understand that a lot of films made in the late 1960s and 1970s were "experimental films" meant to be enjoyed to stoned-out crowds. So if you're NOT a stoner or toker of any sort of illegal drug, of course you're not going to like these films!
(My own personal theory is that drugs just make you dumber. I've never bought into the nonsense of altered states of minds producing superior artistic output. If anything, most of what I've seen and read about drug-users is that their productivity and creativity are FAR LOWER than people who DON'T use drugs.)
Tons of these drug exploitation/drug humor films are crap. As bad as a lot of the wholesome amalgamated family-friendly TV and movies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were, they at least had some kind of plot and logic to them.
I really can't sit through a Cheech & Chong movie and even some of the original SNL (1975-1980) skits are pretty bad and meaningless today. We just don't see a lot of the really bad original SNL skits because Lorne Michaels and his editing teams have cut out a lot of the drug humor and skits that bombed badly. There were a couple of banned SNL episodes (pulled from syndication circulation by Michaels) that just got shown again on TV for the first time in nearly 30 years, and, boy, were they bad!
As it is, original SNL didn't play very long on E! Entertainment before it got yanked off the schedule. It just didn't get good ratings on E! and so 1990s/early 21st Century SNL got rotated back onto E! as soon as Comedy Central's exclusive deal to later SNL episodes expired.
It's sad to think that people prefer Chris Kattan, Will Ferrell, Horatio Sanz, and (especially the feckless) Jimmy Fallon to Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner, but that's how comedy tastes have changed.
I once went to a theater that was showing a revival of that movie. It showed an old trailer for it. Everyone in the audience laughed at it and shook their heads. I heard one guy say, "To think people thought that was COOL back then." 
