I grew up addicted to media outlets — mainly MTV, punk rock and comedy television. And as a baby poseur prepubescent trying to find my niche, sketch comedy, be it in the edgier last half-hour of “Saturday Night Live” or Comedy Central/HBO’s “Kids in the Hall,” became a social necessity. But nothing could ever come close to the gut-busting blitzkrieg that was “Mr. Show with Bob and David.”
Not wanting to lose any sort of true fan-geek grit, I have been monitoring the progression of the “Mr. Show” feature film, “Run Ronnie Run” since the cusp of the millennium. After years of studio battles, film-festival screenings, insufficient funding and multiple versions created by director Troy Miller (“Dumb and Dumberer” and a few years’ worth of MTV Movie Awards), “Run Ronnie Run” has finally been released straight-to-video. And creators David Cross and Bob Odenkirk have tried their best to distance themselves from the project.
“Please stop wanting to see the movie, asking about it or online chatting about it,” pleads David Cross to the general public on the official Bob and David website, at www.bobanddavid.com. “Perhaps the sooner we put this national nightmare behind us, the sooner Bob and I can get working on our next project. Let’s kill ‘Run Ronnie Run’ once and for all.”
After seeing the film, Cross’ frustration is all the more understandable. “Run Ronnie Run” is not all that great. In fact, there are only five or six scenes where the genius Bob and David exuded throughout their four poorly time-slotted HBO seasons makes an appearance.
The story is simple to a fault, and its intoxicated Southerner antics could easily be lumped into the same blue-collar-chic crap-pile that “Joe Dirt” and monster-truck-tournament tank tops now inhabit.
Our hero, Ronnie Dobbs (Cross, “Ghost World”) has a talent for getting himself arrested. Terry Twillstein (Odenkirk, “The Cable Guy”), an infomercial salesman and inventor, finds Ronnie and creates a TV show around his talents, called “Ronnie Dobbs Gets Arrested.” The rest of the film deals with fame, love and reality TV in a predictable and mostly boring way.
Big-name guests stop by to pay their dues to Cross and Odenkirk, including Ben Stiller (who worked with Bob and David on the impeccable and short-lived “The Ben Stiller Show”), John Stamos, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Jeff Goldblum, Dave Foley, Gary Shandling, Tool, Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
The most entertaining sequences come literally out of nowhere, as “Run Ronnie Run” breaks out of narrative completely. Unfortunately, these moments only account for about 10 minutes of the film. During an imagined journey through cinematic censorship, Jack Black satirizes the “Mary Poppins” chimney-sweep scene with riotous vulgarity. And a montage of love scenes melts into a white R&B music video by Three Times One Minus One, where Cross sings falsetto, and Odenkirk adds an occasional “Damn.”
But apart from a few decent non-sequitur vignettes, “Run Ronnie Run” is for die-hard fans only. It’s never a good sign when the two guys who wrote and created the thing want nothing to do with it.
But where “Run Ronnie Run” fails with its disjointed post-production life and a weak plot, “Mr Show: The Complete Third Season” comes out kicking and punching and nailing dead-on social commentary like none other.
After first airing in 1995 on HBO, “Mr. Show” hit its stride in its third season. A schizophrenic attack on consumerism, news media and other mainstays of U.S. culture, Bob and David’s “Mr. Show” hit a note that the less intelligent and more structured sketch shows could never reach.
“Mr. Show” was nominated for multiple Emmy awards, but after four seasons the show left HBO in search of bigger projects. Unfortunately, those “bigger projects” turned out to be “Run Ronnie Run,” but the duo is currently working on its second film together, “Hooray for America — The Movie.”
Third-season highlights include a NASA project to blow up the moon for no reason and the hilarious Mustmayostardayonnaise commercial campaign that riffs on Apple’s epic 1984 advertisement. There’s also the immortal joy of “Druggachussettes,” a mock-’70s children’s television show following the adventures of an English boy and his magic pipe, completed with characters like the Pot Brownies (Girl Scout puppets in plant pots) and Prof. Ellis D. Trails.
With another skit we follow the heavy-metal band Titanicca as it visits a fan who, inspired by its song “Try Suicide,” jumped into a vat of acid up to his neck.
And, of course, there’s also the original Ronnie Dobbs skit, complete with Ronnie singing his heart out on an ode to getting arrested, “Y’all Are Brutalizing Me.” This is the cotton-candy stuffing of pure comedic genius.
“Run Ronnie Run”
Grade: C
“Mr. Show: The Complete Third Season”
Grade: A
