FIRST TIME AS COMEDY (2)

By: HILOBROW
March 17, 2024

Some years ago, HILOBROW friend Greg Rowland pointed out that the 1990 movie Dances With Wolves ought to be regarded as a sentimental remake of the 1970 revisionist Western Little Big Man. The series FIRST TIME AS COMEDY will offer additional examples of this recursive (and often, though not always middlebrow) syndrome.

WILD IN THE STREETS vs. PREZ

I’ve written more than once, here at HILOBROW, about my affection for Barry Shears’ 1968 youthsploitation movie Wild in the Streets — an American International Pictures quickie that conforms in every respect to AIP’s “ARKOFF formula”: Action, Revolution, Killing, Oratory, Fantasy, Fornication.

Although it’s set in the present day (Nixon is depicted losing the ’68 election), Wild in the Streets is a work of proleptic science fiction. The pop star Max Frost (James Dean manqué Christopher Jones), rallies his “troops” to get the voting age lowered, so that he can become president… only to send everyone over 35 to a re-education camp. This diktat very much includes his narcissistic mother Daphne, in a tour de force performance by Shelley Winters.

The reason I’ve watched this movie so often is because its depiction of Max’s ménage is so compelling. Max and his friends — Kevin Coughlin as a 15-year-old guitarist and business wizard; Diane Varsi as a feral, semi-nude acid-head; Richard Pryor as an anthropologist and militant — not only play music and live together, they’re a political strike force. The jokes, the wrestling, the horizontal postures: their tribal camaraderie is strong. They’re a living advertisement for Max’s utopian vision: an eroticized, non-repressive, egalitarian America. Which of course turns into a totalitarian dystopia.

A few years after the movie came out, the passage of the 26th Amendment (in 1971) actually did lower the minimum vote age to 18 nationwide.

Two years later, in 1973/1974 — the cusp, according to HILOBROW’s periodization, between the cultural “decades” of the Sixties (1964–1973) and Seventies (1974–1983) — DC Comics gave us Joe Simon and Jerry Grandenetti’s short-lived comic book Prez.

I guess this remake doesn’t exactly count as melodrama, since it’s so bizarre. But it’s certainly not satirical and ironic like Wild in the Streets. Despite the bonkers action, it’s sentimental and earnest.

Recruited by a shady political boss (Boss Smiley literally has a smiley face for a head) to run for the Senate, Prez Rickard campaigns on his own terms and is elected president. Prez selects Eagle Free, a young Native American, to be director of the FBI; his sister to be his chief of staff; and his mother — weird! — to be vice president.

The series was canceled after four glorious issues in which Prez battles a right-wing militia, demands strict gun control, brings peace to the Middle East, survives an assassination attempt, and encounters (why not?) evil chess players and a werewolf.

Honestly, I’d vote for Max or Prez for president right now….

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FIRST TIME AS COMEDY (2)

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