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| I’m sensing a disaster coming up |
I had only vaguely heard about the TV show, Beverly Hillbillies. The series premise is that an oil well is found on the lands of the poor and uneducated Clampett family – in the first episode, the discovery is made by a prospector of an oil company, but the title sequence of the later episodes shows the Clampett father trying to shoot a rabbit and the bullet making a hole in the ground with oil flowing from it. The Clampetts are then convinced to move to Beverly Hills, where all millionaires and movie stars live and where the Clampetts have a hard time adjusting to modern city life.
For the sake of this blog, I watched a couple of the first episodes of the series and, well… I found it one of those comedies where the jokes are evident mostly because of the laugh track. I won’t go into great detail why I did not find it funny, but let’s just say that the timing of the show and the acting styles are somewhat old fashioned to my taste. A bit theatrical, one might say. Don’t get me wrong, I love theatre – I am an avid amateur actor myself – but it just doesn’t look good on a television screen.
Most of the humour should come from Clampett’s not recognising all the wonders of modern civilisation. When watching, I was constantly having doubts whether even backwater Americans in the 1960s could be so ignorant. I mean, Clampett’s are not supposed to recognise electric ovens, refrigerators, telephone poles or even the concept of a million dollar. And while I can accept that the Clampetts might not have seen a helicopter in their life, surely they’d have heard that there are machines that let people fly (balloons, if not aeroplanes)? Apparently not, since they think the prospector is drunk, when he says he will fly, and when they finally do see him hanging from the helicopter, they think he has been captured by some flying beast.
Although I did not find the series that appealing, American audiences loved it and the show ran for a decade from 1962 to 1971. Later on, some of the original cast members of the show did a TV movie, Return of the Beverly Hillbillies in 1981, and a TV special, The Legend of the Beverly Hillbillies in 1993. In 1993 appeared also a Beverly Hillbillies movie set in contemporary times and with a whole new cast. In the words of Roger Ebert :
Imagine the dumbest half-hour sitcom you've ever seen, spin it out to 93 minutes by making it even more thin and shallow, and you have this movie. It's appalling. It's not even really a good version of whatever it was that made the TV series appealing. And it certainly doesn't add the kind of spin and quality we expect when we go to the movies. [...] Beverly Hillbillies seems to have been made with serene self-confidence, as if all the movie had to do was preserve the vacuous inanity of the original series.This apparent train wreck of a movie was then given to Capstone Software to turn into an adventure game. Checking the track record of that company in TAG…
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| …this is what I found. PISSED score: 30 |
25. I recall YouTube video reviews trashing it.
ReplyDelete20, the only time I've seen a Capstone game not get trashed completely was with Witchaven, and that American Tail game, apparently. This will not be an exception methinks.
ReplyDeleteJust skimmed it on YouTube, and I think it could be worse. I'll give it a 27.
ReplyDeleteThe graphics are decent enough, maybe not the best for the time but far from the worst. The music is repetitive, and it seems there's a lot of dialog. Who knows.
I'm gonna be bold. 13.
ReplyDeleteWhile the ignorance of the Clampetts is surely grossly exaggerated for comedy purposes, the dirt-poor conditions of rural farmers at that time (especially in the Appalachian Mountains) were not.
ReplyDeleteMy great-grandfather and at least one of his daughters worked at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during World War II, where they helped with the process of using cyclotrons to separate uranium for the atomic bomb. After the war, he bought the materials of a house that was being demolished, bought some farmland where he could re-erect it, and rebuilt the house - but without indoor plumbing. For many years they had to use an outhouse in the back yard. My grandparents took my mother to visit there sometimes when she was a young child, and she still remembers being frightened by goats that would cross the path between the main house and the outhouse.
So my great-grandfather helped to build the world's first nuclear weapon, and then decided to build himself a house without flush toilets. Poverty was (and is) a huge issue in rural Appalachia. Knowing that this sort of extreme poverty was very real is probably one reason the show resonated with people - though the Clampetts' material deprivation has clearly been exaggerated into an all-encompassing ignorance of anything they didn't used to own.
Thanks for the historical context! It makes me understand the appeal of the series better, but it does also make the jokes seem a bit cruel: backwater people are laughed at because of not being clever enough to buy new technology, when the real reason is that they are too poor to do so.
DeleteI honestly think it's more of the first -- they don't even know the technologies exist, so it doesn't matter if they could afford it or not.
DeleteEven now, it's a thing. When I was 18 and first went to college, after growing up in a rural area , I discovered so many things that I wasn't aware of or maybe only saw briefly on television. Sushi. Mass transit systems. Espresso drinks. Pizza delivery.
The hillbillies wouldn't have necessarily had TV, so there's a lot they would be ignorant of. I honestly don't think it was meant as a "let's make fun of the poor" show., no matter how it was ultimately received.
Ooh the comments are working again, put me down for 30, I'm feeling adventurous!
DeleteATMachine puts the context well, the community may have been dirt poor but they were still exposed to the modern world. Even if they had never seen a helicopter they would at least be able to deduce it is man made and while they may have been awe-struck by it they would be able to connect the dots. The writers were just looking for an excuse to make jokes about ignorant people, which ironically (holding thumbs I'm using ironically correctly here) just show their own ignorance of the realities of poor rural communities.
I think I've only ever seen a couple of screenshots of the game, and only one or two clips of the TV show.
ReplyDeleteI'll guess 24 since everyone seems to be going quite low
I will guess a 18.
ReplyDeleteRelated to the poverty of rural areas in the US, the 1930s Rural Electrification Act comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act So the thing about not knowing about electric refrigerators or ovens, like ATMachine said, surely exaggerated, but not actually quite as absurd as it might seem at first.
ReplyDelete69
ReplyDeleteI remember owning a copy of this game (well, a pirated copie, thank the Lord), fired it up once, played for five minutes, and never returning back. But of course, it is a Capstone game, the worst developers of adventure games of all time, so no surprises there. My score is 22
ReplyDelete21
ReplyDeleteThank you, Ilmari, for playing this game so I don't have to!
ReplyDelete15. The graphics and sound look decent, but everything else seems like a total chore to get through.
ReplyDeleteI'll guess 26 because why not.
ReplyDelete