Here’s my commentary for the latest round of Sketchwar, which had the theme “Time Travel.”
Category: Analysis
In-depth analysis of our sketches, and others.
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RA’s critique of the week
Ken’s entry
I thought Ken started off the week on a solid note. It seems to me that for a fake movie trailer for an old TV show to be funny (not necessarily indicative of a good movie) it needs to have a stark tonal shift from the source material. The source material should also be something with which the audience is very familiar. E.g. NYPD Blue turned into a frathouse movie or Starsky and Hutch as a gay romcom.1 His Tarantino meets Tootie succeeded on both fronts, taking a well-known and recognizable little romp and flipping it on its head into a darkly comic shoot em up.
One area where I feel Ken didn’t succeed was including Tarantino’s heavy use of popculture references, both in dialog and in shot selection. We’re all working on short deadlines when we write these sketches, so I suspect another day or two would have made a big difference. Especially with a show like this, I think a few winks and nods toward George Clooney, or the difficulties the Different Strokes kids have had as adults would really kick this up a bit.
RA’s entry
I succeeded in what I set out to do, though I could also have used another day or two to polish. As I said above, but applying a tonal shift to a well known property, I get a lot of humor based on the audience’s inverted expectations. Added to that, the genre I picked – blaxploitation flicks – lends itself to parody. In a genre where many of the foundational entries were nearly self-parodic, it’s hard not to get some easy laughs. Like Ken’s, mine feels basically like a trailer, though we both wrote ours in mostly chronological order. A few more cuts, a little less narrative arc, and I think I’d have been closer to the feel of a trailer.
But more than pulling the scenes out of strict chronological order, I needed to watch a bunch of genre trailers and work on the dialog for the characters and especially the narrator. It’s vaguely close, but not right by any means. Watching those would also have given me a better idea for what to do with those spray painted titles, though I got pretty close with those.
Peter’s entry
I like Peter’s entry quite a lot, but I don’t find it very funny. Where it fails for me is taking a light actioner and turning it into an action-thriller. It just didn’t change enough to have any inherit humor, leaving it up to Peter to write a lot of funny bits. But because it’s now an action-thriller, there’s not much funny there.
Of all the entries, his feels the most like a modern movie trailer. It does suffer a bit from chronological scene ordering, but gets away with it better because the underlying film jumps around in time.
I’d definitely be interested in seeing this film – a strong antagonist for Sam is what QL always lacked – but I wouldn’t expect it to be a comedy based on this trailer.
David W’s entry
David admitted to having some trouble with this topic and it didn’t help that we changed it late in the week leading up to the battle so he only had a couple of days to work on it. This sketch feels very little like a trailer. It plays out more like the opening scene for the movie. It also doesn’t have a consistent tone. At times, I think this is going to be a light-thriller, like E.T., where nefarious forces find out about Ed and come looking for him. At other times, it feels like a straight up family comedy, in line with the original show. Because the sketch isn’t clear what it wants to be, I’m not clear how I should take it.
Criticisms aside, there are a few chuckles on display. It’s juvenile, but the poison gas bit is cute, as is the “now you’ve stepped in it” line. However, it’s these very chuckles that make this out to be a family comedy in the Beethoven age group.
Michael’s entry
Michael also wrote something that plays out more like a single scene from the movie than a traditional trailer. I think he manages to balance his two genres well, though. Keeping the voices of his characters true to the originals but moving them into a horror film works *because* of Wes Craven.2 His Scream series pushed the light horror genre into the mainstream, making a horror film where Woody’s making dumb comments about Occam’s Razor feel perfectly natural. The humor in this sketch comes from the character interactions and very little from the setting. It could as easily have been a Halloween episode of Cheers instead of the trailer for a film.
I think I would have liked this one a bit better if it had hewed to the conventions of trailers a bit more, at least by cutting together more scenes. Nonetheless, I think it’s a funny one.
Dave’s entry
If I were ranking the sketches, Dave’s would have come in first by a large margin. Now, *technically* he cheated the topic a little bit. Entertainment Tonight isn’t exactly the type of TV show one would ever expect to see as a film, but it obeys the letter of the law. Beyond that, it is *funny*. By twisting the genre completely – turning ET into an All the President’s Men look into an Oscar conspiracy – Dave really pulled me in. At the same time I’m laughing, I’m thinking this might be a *good* movie. Silly, maybe, but he’s not taking it that way.
Dave’s also feels the most like a modern trailer. From the very opening to the final shot, the cuts scenes tell the story without *spoiling* the story. A really fine example of the form.
RA’s bonus entry
Ken and I had both been toying with second ideas during the week, his a full sketch and mine just a teaser. He actually posted his first, but I scheduled mine to run a few hours earlier so his would be top of the blog until the wrapup.
There isn’t much to mine, but I think I perfectly nailed what I was looking for. In fact, when Ken commented that he heard Danny Elfman playing while reading it, I knew I’d hit my target. This should feel like a cross between Tim Burton and Barry Sonnenfeld, and an Elfman score would fit it perfectly. What the movie is? I don’t know or care. But the teaser came to me fully formed.
I think it works because, well, there isn’t much there. The movie’s tone was hopefully obvious from the description of the camera work and the final weirdness of the maze spelling out the title of the movie. Once the tone wass set and the title delivered, my job was done.
Ken’s bonus entry
There is nothing not funny about a title mashup. This sketch works not because it defies genre conventions, but because it pairs two incompatible genres. The silliness of Chico and the Man dropped into the thriller world of Manimal succeeds on its fish out of water strength.3 The sketch feels like a trailer, and because it doesn’t attempt to go from film’s start to its end, it doesn’t even feel as chronologically bound as most of our other trailers this week.
In some ways, I think Ken’s bonus entry is better than his first entry.
1. See how a funny trailer can be a NOT funny movie. Each comedy idea has an ideal length, something the writers of SNL have *still* never learned. Week in and week out they stretch two-minute ideas into five-minute sketches. Likewise the atrocious S&H movie. Funny for a trailer, not two hours.
2. To a lesser extent it also works because of George Wendt and John Ratzenberger. I don’t know if Michael has ever seen House or House II: The Second Story,
but they were horror films from ’86 and ’87. The first starred William
Katt and Wendt. It was slightly light horror. The
second starred Arye Gross and featured Ratzenberger and was
*extremely* light horror. I actually recommend them both as easy-going
fun.
3. Yes, I know. Manimal is silly too, but it wasn’t *intended* to be silly. If we accept Manimal on its terms, it is a light actioner more in line with Knight Rider than a self-parody. With a modern SFX budget, I think a big screen Manimal could actually hit its target, making Chico’s presence very out of place and therefore funny. -
Peter’s Commentary on the ‘Cartoons’ Edition
I’m finally writing commentary for the last month or so of Sketchwar. The January 10th war had the theme of “Cartoons”.
I think “Cartoons” is the best war I’ve been in so far.
It wound up being one of the best topics, certainly. Mr. Porter (AKA “Coyote”) suggested “Looney Tunes”, I proposed generalizing it, and we were off and running. I loved that we all sat down and wrote cartoons. We could done something lame like having cartoonists talk about cartoons, or have a live-action scene that seems somehow cartoonish, but face it: if a reader comes to this war knowing the subject, they’re going to want cartoons, dammit.
And even though we all performed the same basic task, we each had our own takes on the material. As Mr. Porter said, “We’ve got a Hanna-Barbera, a Loony Tunes, and what I’m picturing as a Tex Avery. Good stuff.” So not only did we like cartoons enough to try writing them, we also knew enough about cartoons to aim for (and hit) very particular styles.
This time we had three entries: this one from Mr. Robertson, this one from Mr. Porter, and this one from me.
Mr. Robertson did something cool with his sketch that you might not have noticed. By line four of the sketch, you think you know how it ends: Daphne and Velma reveal that they are lovers. Lots of sketches do this: there’s a setup, there’s a clear endpoint, and you spend three minutes bridging to that preordained conclusion. There’s no tension and there are no surprises — the plot is basically a clothesline you can string the jokes onto.
But Mr. Robertson gets to that conclusion, and he still has about a third of the sketch to go. We don’t expect it to expand out into “the entire mystery-solving thing is a scam”, and we certainly don’t expect “Shaggy has been spying on Daphne and Fred.”
That said, the whole thing needs to be about half the length. Mr. Robertson posted earlier about employing a looser style reminiscent of improv, but I don’t think it works here. The big problem with writing ‘loose’ sketch is that you run smack into audience expectations. The audience for an Apatow feature might expect loose improv-style comedy, but they expect a sketch to be a haiku. They want whatever happens is either funny or directly setting up something funny — anything else, however well-intentioned or brilliantly-observed, is going to feel like it doesn’t belong.
So: a good six-minute sketch with a better three-minute sketch somewhere in there.
Mr. Porter came through with a much more Tex-Avery-style cartoon.
And my god it’s a good premise. Elmer Fudd accepting an award for his research into Hammerspace is a great idea for a setting — it’s meta, but it’s meta like the original cartoons were, not meta in that godawful, too-cool-for-the-material style. And the mayhem that happens makes perfect sense for the cartooniverse.
That said, there are ways to improve the sketch.
I’d find a different (and faster) way into the material. I’d cut the opening news segment and just establish in the first shot that Fudd is at an award ceremony. Bugs can announce that Fudd has won for black holes. Fudd can extract his acceptance speech out of one such black hole.
Then you follow it up with anti-physics mayhem á la “Presto“
Then there’s my sketch, “Frank Defeats the Angel of Death”.
By this point, I have a straightforward workflow for Sketchwar. I get the topic on Saturday, and then I spend a few days freewriting, writing down lots of sluglines for what my sketch might be about. And as I’m doing this, I’m trying to find the one interesting thing that will get me from an idea to a completed sketch.
Every time I’ve written something decent for Sketchwar, there’s been that one aspect of the piece that’s seen me through it. For the history piece, it was Joey’s overenthusiastic voice. For the first-date piece, it was the image of a couple at a restaurant suddenly attacked by ninjas. There’s always that one little thing that makes you giggle like mad, and you write a whole sketch just as an excuse to include it.
In this case, I started thinking about cartoons. Then I started thinking about the great silent cartoons. And I thought about how those usually have simple objectives and really clear protagonists and antagonists. I figured I might have a cat as a protagonist.
Somehow from that I wrote down the title “Frank Defeats the Angel of Death” and, well, that’s the sketch I had to write. You can’t think of a title that cool and then go write something else.
All in all, I’m happy with what I wrote. I got the buildup going the way I wanted it — start with just the lobbed Christmas-tree ornaments, and then go from there. I got some good re-use out of the few elements in the room: tree, drink, fireplace.
The ending was a bit wobbly. I knew I had to have Frank accidentally topple the tree — I think that’s what everybody expects, no? — and having that happened as the party guests arrived was a good way to make the situation even worse.
I had a devil of a time figuring out where to go from there. In early outlines, I had the angel merely injured in the climactic battle, and then come back from the trash later on. I had Frank’s “explanation” fail utterly. I just never got a good ending out of it.
The first good step was incinerating the angel. (“Ah! I can re-use the fireplace!”) The second good step was throwing in the reversal — Frank is in desperate trouble, and then everybody feels sorry for him and gives him tuna. I don’t know if re-using the popcorn rope really works as a last beat, but I needed some kind of reincorporation.
That said, I think the whole thing could be funnier. I got a certain amount of humor out of Olive’s[1] yuppie yammering, but the scene itself is more “straightforward action” than I’d like.
All in all, though, I’m content with my cartoon. The next two I wrote? I’m less happy with those.
More later….
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[1] Note: I didn’t intentionally name-check Frank and Ollie with this, but I did notice it about halfway through writing.