Free Enterprise vs. Fanboys

This article focuses on two comedies centering on Star Trek and Star Wars fandom, respectively.

A short while back, I wrote an article comparing the documentaries Trekkies and The People vs. George Lucas. These movies looked at the appeal and devoted followings of Star Trek and Star Wars, the two most famous series in science fiction. I’m now going to compare and contrast two comedies which center on fans of these two beloved franchises.

Free Enterprise (1999)
The protagonists in this film are Mark (Eric McCormick) and Robert (Rafer Weigel), two lifelong Trekkers who are first introduced in their childhood years. Mark is first seen becoming so desperate to be let into the premiere screening of Star Trek: The Motion Picture that he races several blocks to the nearby bank in order to drag his mom to the theater, because they won’t let him in without an adult. Prior to this, though, Mark gets a vision of his idol William Shatner (played by Bill himself) who basically gives him encouragement.

At the other end of the country is the younger version of Robert (wearing a Trek shirt that’s torn, of course) in a fight with a bigger kid at his school. He, too, gets a vision of Shatner chatting it up with him. Bill even encourages Robert to kick some ass when Robert tells him that this fight started with the bully saying that Han Solo is cooler than Kirk. After Robert proceeds to hand the guy’s ass to him, he gives a modified version of Kirk’s “Risk is our business” speech from the episode “Return to Tomorrow”.

Years later, we see that Mark and Robert have met and are BFFs living in Los Angeles. Mark is trying to get his latest film idea off the ground, a slasher film called Brady Killer about (you guessed it) a guy who kills girls named Marcia, Jan, and Cindy. Robert, on the other hand, has just lost another job and his girlfriend Tricia (Jennifer Sommerfield) has left him after he decided to pawn his computer to buy various kinds of memorabilia instead of paying the rent.

The two are also bummed out because they’re both approaching the big three-O, which of course is old in Hollywood years. But they get quite the surprise one evening when they go to a bookstore and encounter Shatner himself (reading porn, no less). Although Bill is a bit weirded out by them (not that I blame him), he allows them to buy him a drink. At a restaurant, Bill gives them his own idea that he’s pushing: a musical version of Julius Caesar, with Shatner playing all the parts. It’s an original idea, I’ll grant him that.

This chance meeting allows both Mark and Robert to realize that their idol, despite his great onscreen presence, is just as human as they are. This also indirectly gives Robert the confidence to pursue a relationship with Claire (Audie England), whom he discovers is as pop culture-versed as he is after they meet in a comic book shop. At the same time, Robert and Mark give Bill the confidence to pursue restaurant owner Marlena (Deborah Van Valkenburg, and I’m sure those of us who frequent this site can tell where her character’s name comes from).

But Robert’s lack of a job (or rather, lack of discipline when it comes to keeping one) prompts him to constantly borrow money from Mark. This eventually leads to Robert’s relationship with Claire running into a rough patch when his unemployment status forces him out of his apartment. When she flat out tells him to live in the present and not the 24th Century, Robert’s response is, “I fucking hate the Next Generation!” And thank you, Star Trek: Generations, for giving him the ammo he needed for that line.

Fortunately, Robert becomes less of a dick thanks to encouragement from Bill, and makes up with Claire as he throws a birthday bash for Mark, allowing the latter to hook up with the green-painted girl on stage and for Shatner to impress the crowd with his singing. The movie ends with Robert and Mark making a movie about themselves (and amusingly, the guy who picked on Robert at the beginning is now played by a kid of lesser build). So I assume Robert eventually found another job, unless he added a few thousand more to what he owes Mark.

Fanboys (2005)
This film takes place in 1998. A group of friends—Windows (Jay Baruchel), Zoe (Kristen Bell), Hutch (Dan Folger), Eric (Sam Huntington), and Linus (Chris Marquette)—who love Star Wars want to see the upcoming Episode I – The Phantom Menace before anyone else, because Linus has been diagnosed with cancer. They get the bright idea to actually drive cross-country to Skywalker Ranch in order to see a print. To drive this point home further, we see our heroes have a Star Wars-painted van with a horn that sounds like Chewbacca growling.

En route, Hutch, despite the fact that his pal has only months to live, decides that this is the perfect time to actually pick a fight with some Trekkers (one of whom is played by Seth Rogen) by going to Riverside, Iowa, the supposed future birthplace of Captain Kirk.

Other mishaps include our heroes accidentally finding themselves in a gay bar where, to our horror, we must learn that Hutch has only one testicle. To add to the fun, Windows realizes that his online girlfriend is really a ten-year-old girl. Her uncle is “Harry Knowles” (played by Ethan Suplee) and he understandably beats the crap out of Windows, but stops short of killing him after the gang impresses him with their Star Wars knowledge. This leads to “Harry” giving them a contact in Las Vegas who can get them into Skywalker Ranch.

Once in Vegas, the police arrest them for possession of peyote, which they were unknowingly given earlier at a bar. But Zoe, who had turned down their initial request to join the trip, travels to Vegas to bail them out before a judge (Billy Dee Williams) with the name Reinhold. At a hotel-casino, Hutch and Windows attempt to pick up some girls whose pimp (Rogen) proudly flaunts his Jar Jar Binks tattoo, saying how awesome the character will be, while Zoe has to drill it into Windows’ head that she’s fallen for him. Why, I’m not sure, but let’s move on.

Meanwhile, Eric and Linus meet their Vegas contact, who turns out to be… William Shatner (this guy’s everywhere!). After getting the info they need, the gang bolts when the Iowa Trekkers spot them.

During their escape, Linus is injured and taken to a hospital. The doctor (Carrie Fisher) informs him that, because of his illness, he should return home. But his devotion to Star Wars and his friends encourages everyone to press on.

They reach the famous ranch, and sure enough, it doesn’t take long for security to begin chasing them down. They even briefly hide out in a garbage compactor that looks like the one on the Death Star. Just as the gang is captured, the head of security gets a phone call from George Lucas saying that he’ll drop the charges if they prove they know their Star Wars stuff. And George, after hearing of Linus’s condition, allows only him to view a cut of Phantom Menace.

Afterward, Linus joins his friends outside the Ranch and does the respectable thing and doesn’t tell them how the film was and they happily head home. The movie concludes with Eric, Hutch, Windows, and Zoe (and the latter two are now hooked up, what a surprise, right?) about to see Episode I in a theater and toasting Linus’s memory.

Which is better?
Both films have great ideas. Free Enterprise talks about how one can still love what defined them in their youth while, as Shatner puts it, adding a little reality to their imaginations in order to be happy in life. Fanboys has a nice and even sweet idea about people who want their sick pal to see a long-anticipated movie before the rest of the world does.

Free Enterprise is definitely the better of the two. While Mark and Robert are annoying at times, the movie is funnier than Fanboys, probably because it makes better use of its premise. Mark and Robert are based on the film’s respective writer and director, Mark A. Altman and Robert Meyer Burnett, both of whom have gone on to produce Star Trek documentaries and special features over the years.

England is a nice and likable love interest, and Shatner steals the show by essentially poking fun at himself. There’s even a one-liner gag regarding Shatner’s less-than-ideal relationship with his Trek co-stars (although I must point out there’s absolutely no mention of Star Trek V). But one of the funniest moments in the film is when Robert’s ex-girlfriend Suzanne (Ellie Cornell) calls him out of the blue for the sole purpose of getting the answer to a Star Wars-related question for a crossword puzzle she’s working on.

In contrast, Fanboys basically pisses away its premise to become another stupid road trip/rom-com (although I must admit the Jar Jar tattoo gag cracked me up), complete with numerous reminders that our protagonists are virgins. To begin with, the Windows/Zoe hookup is the same stupid thing we’ve seen in countless other romantic comedies where a boy pines for a hot girl without realizing that his devoted friend, who’s a hot girl herself, is a better match for him. Heck, Zoe takes her shirt off for Windows at the beginning of the film and the dumb shit doesn’t even react. For every film that at least tries to do something interesting with this cliche, like Some Kind of Wonderful, we get a dozen like Fanboys that treat common sense as the enemy.

While there is a jab at Star Wars at the beginning of Free Enterprise, that film wisely stops there and gets on with its own story. Fanboys, though, seems to want to get most, if not all of its laughs out of how stupid Trekkers are. If jabs at Trek were that imperative to the script, instead of saying how stupid the line “Make it so!” is, why not say, since Voyager was still on the air in 1998, that Star Wars would never have such a stupid annoying character like Neelix, or make Hutch have closet fantasies about Seven of Nine?

Free Enterprise ends up succeeding because it brings feelings along with the laughs, while Fanboys seems content with stupid gags. And when a Trek fan can actually come up with better anti-Trek jokes than people who claim to hate the franchise, you know you’ve failed!

Tron (1982), part 6

This is the final installment of my review of Tron.

Before I get into the impact Tron has had on pop culture in the decades since its release, let’s discuss how the movie itself stands up.

Video game-based movies are usually received with not much enthusiasm by most audiences. The recent Rampage, while not exactly a bomb, has reinforced the notion that movies based on video games are almost uniformly awful. The poster child for this perception is perhaps the 2003 film House of the Dead, based on the awesome zombie shoot-’em-up series of the same name. That movie is rightfully regarded as one of the worst ever made and pretty much established Uwe Boll’s reputation as a sucky director.

Hence, it pleases me to say that Tron is on the other end of that spectrum. The beautiful irony of this statement is that the film wasn’t based on a specific video game or series of games. It simply latched onto what was becoming a popular pastime and remains so to this day. This allowed director Steven Lisberger and company to let their creative juices flow free when crafting the story.

Because Jeff Bridges’s Flynn is the main character in the story, some may think that the film’s title is misleading. Since it takes a bit of time before we meet the title character, I can understand that stance, but I can’t exactly say that the film lies to us à la Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This is because we learn early in the film that once Flynn, Alan, and Lora are catching onto what Dillinger and the MCP are doing, Tron is essential to helping rectify things. After all, Flynn hacking into Encom, which leads to the MCP zapping him with the laser, was for the purpose of getting access to Tron. It’s also Tron’s disc that shuts down both the MCP and Sark in the end. So while Flynn is the main hero, you can’t necessarily say Tron himself is shortchanged either. Looking back now, I find this dynamic a bit like Han giving Luke a hand when it came to blowing up Tarkin and his Death Star, with Star Wars told more through Han’s point of view.

Despite the hiccups I mentioned earlier, Tron is exciting from beginning to end. Like the aforementioned Blade Runner, the film’s production values are eye-poppingly unique and immediately give it a classic look. The discs are every bit as awesome as lightsabers and the lightcycles are as cool as the speeder bikes in the following year’s Return of the Jedi. The fact that everything looks computerized makes the viewer feel like they’re in another world just like Flynn. Ironically, a number of movies made in the years since would actually be criticized for looking like they were whipped up on a computer.

The cast is another plus, with pretty much every actor playing two roles (even the movie itself acknowledges this). Heck, I just figured out not too long ago that Ram and the nebbish who asks Alan for popcorn are played by the same guy.

Bridges was already an established star by 1982, so it’s not surprising that he carries the film with his effortless charisma. But Boxleitner matches him by delivering the goods as Alan and Tron, and the actor would go on to dazzle audiences with his awesomeness in TV shows like Scarecrow and Mrs. King and Babylon 5 (which co-starred Peter Jurasik, who played Crom). Barnard Hughes is appropriately fatherly as both Walter and Dumont, and likewise, Cindy Morgan proves both her characters aren’t just the token love interests (her idea to chat with Flynn ends up setting the trio’s plan into motion). I’d say it’s the coolness that Bridges, Boxleitner, and Morgan bring to the film that’s almost certainly the reason why the Flynn-Lora/Yori-Alan/Tron triangle is surprisingly painless, which definitely can’t be said for other such love triangles in movies.

David Warner’s villainous turn here, along with his earlier ones in Time After Time and Time Bandits, pretty much made him synonymous with movie-moustache twirling villains, even overshadowing the fact that he also memorably played nicer guys in The Omen and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

Like a number of its 1982 brethren, Tron was greeted with confusion by some upon its initial release. While computers and video games were both becoming more and more common by this point, they had yet to become second nature to many as they are in this day and age. As a result, the intricacies of the story and what the main characters do in it could have been seen by some as just so much tech talk (I won’t say technobabble, because Star Trek: Voyager is responsible for the headache-inducing overuse of that).

However, computer science itself would advance greatly in the years since Tron. Many computer experts today have said that Tron influenced them to make their mark in the field. I’d say if the movie were to be released today, the characters would actually be viewed as amateurs in regards to their computer expertise.

Likewise, while the only video arcades around today are basically ones with a restaurant attached (like Dave & Buster’s), video games themselves are more prominent than ever. Within just a few short years of Tron‘s release, Nintendo would dethrone Atari as the go-to video game system for the home. Nintendo itself is still going strong thanks to its Wii system, while Sony and Microsoft are still making money with their PlayStation and X-Box systems, respectively.

Even the film’s production would go on to be viewed as the beginning of great strides in Disney’s animation department. While some of the effects were done in the more traditional manner (for instance, the glow on the characters’ armor was added in post-production in a lab in South Korea), the computerized animation methods used would continue to be developed by Disney in some of its later features such as The Rescuers Down Under and Beauty and the Beast. This work, in many ways, would culminate 13 years after Tron‘s release when Disney in collaboration with Pixar put out its classic movie Toy Story. Not surprisingly, Disney would end up purchasing Pixar 11 years later. Also, nearly every animated film since Toy Story has been animated in the same computerized manner.

Ironically, Tron wasn’t even nominated for the Visual Effects Oscar for 1982, although it did receive nominations for both Sound Design and Costume Design. Lisberger would later state that the Academy felt the movie was cheating, as its effects were done with computers rather than the old-fashioned way. This is another irony, in that we have this movie to thank for how special effects in movies are basically done now.

Appropriately, while the movie didn’t initially rake in the cash, it quickly gained a following thanks in large part to the arcade games that were adapted from the movie. The first, simply called Tron, has four stages. One of these, not surprisingly, is one in which the player must drive a lightcycle while avoiding the walls that opponent cycles generate. Interestingly, the player’s cycle is blue, while the bad guys have yellow ones. In another stage, the player is piloting a tank and must shoot adversaries three times each in order to win (although only one shot from them kills you, which is a bit unfair). A third stage requires shooting at the MCP in order to make an opening to enter the cone on top of it. The fourth stage involves shooting at grid bugs in order to enter a flashing circle (and, yes, you are timed).

The second video game, Discs of Tron, was seen in arcades a year later. In that game, the idea is to beat Sark by reenacting the disc match between him and Tron. Here, though, the player is given three discs to use.

Tron had other merchandising too, including action figures and naturally, video games for Atari. One of my favorite Tron toys was the lightcycle, made by Tomy, which could go pretty fast by inserting and then pulling out a cord from its rear wheel.

Add to this the growing video market, which saw most homes having at least one VCR by the end of the 1980s, and its not surprising that Tron would be embraced as a classic movie. This, in turn, would eventually lead to a sequel Tron: Legacy, released in 2010.

While it was a treat seeing Bridges and Boxleitner playing their roles again, the movie itself, like many sequels, didn’t provoke the awe of its predecessor. I also disliked that we didn’t see Lora/Yori in the film.

When Disney put out its classic movie Fantasia in 1940, it was hailed for the unique way in which it combined animation and music. When its sequel, Fantasia 2000, came out six decades later, that originality was lost because such a combination had basically become the norm. I’d say there’s a similar flaw to Tron: Legacy: the computer artistry that defined its predecessor’s place in film history had become so commonplace that a followup just seemed like it was repeating things and nothing more.

Despite this, the sequel made money, although there are currently no plans for a third Tron movie.

But Tron itself is seen today as a film that in many ways predicted the world we live in now. Not only do most people (including yours truly) use computers on a daily basis, but the internet itself can be seen as a virtual reality of sorts that people place themselves into (for good and for bad). I doubt even Lisberger could’ve predicted how prophetic his work would turn out to be. As a result, greenlighting Tron turned out to be one of the most important decisions in Disney’s long history.