Seller's best?
I'd have to say i think this is in the top five of his best characters.
shareI like the movie, but he had so many that were better its hard to put this one in the top five. Though it is better than After The Fox, for sure. Or Whats New Pussycat. Dr. Strangelove wss on TCM today, as was The Mouse That Roared, bot better movies than Toklas. This one was so self-consciously straining to be hip and topical that it just misfired a lot.
shareYou have to remember it was 1968. Nobody knew what was hip. They were making up "hip" as they went. Alot that we thought was cool back then turned out, upon examination, to be merely pretentious. It's easy to look back and judge it as straining to be hip, but there were people that acted like that back then. It is a product of its time. And for all its "straining" has aged pretty well. You can buy those brownies in special bakeries nowadays.
shareAlso, the late sixties were moving so fast (I was 18 in 1968, so I know from firsthand experience) that stuff quickly became passe/old. (E.g., the tv series "Mod Squad" was initially seen as hip/cool, but eventually seemed like just another episodic police procedural that was trying too hard to be "with it".) In addition, popular TV and film were pretty cautious about portraying the counterculture or anything leading edge. I remember that we had some good laughs and a lot of groans over this film back then.
A lot of TV shows had that problem around this time: They were trying to appeal to a broad, middle-America audience but still seem "with it." I can think of myriad TV shows and more than a few films that had this awkwardness to them, including episodes of shows such as "Bewitched", "Gilligan's Island", etc. The treatments that succeeded best were those that managed to light-heartedly poke fun at themselves and the era without taking it too seriously. So this film actually handled it a bit better than other entertainment around this time.
It is better to be kind than to be clever or good looking. -- Derek
When you mentioned "other shows" of the era I was reminded of the Hippie episodes of Beverly Hillbillies where Jethro became a flower child. Granny told some policemen, who took her for a harmless, eccentric, little old lady, she was going to smoke some crawdads, "But first I gotta find me a little pot". Then they hauled her away.
I Dream of Genie had a "hippie" episode also.
Might be fun if one of those nostalgia stations like TVLand had a compilation of all those counterculture episodes on the same night.
Yes, it would be interesting, and maybe fun, to see them again as a retrospective. Maybe I'll suggest it to the various networks that carry these shows. Perhaps they could air them on 4/20 each year.
It is better to be kind than to be clever or good looking. -- Derek
I would love that! What a great idea!
You know what else would be so awesome? If they showed the episodes with the SAME COMMERCIALS as they showed!! How fun!! To watch a show in 1968 would have been -- Hula Hoops, Slinkies, Tab Diet Drink, Dippity Doo Hair gel, the new VW Beetle (we had one!!)
So many memories, all right there, like a Time Capsule! And isn't time to start digging up those Time Capsules we buried back then? Lol!