Game 138: The Beverly Hillbillies – Introduction

By Ilmari

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…

…this is what I found. PISSED score: 30

Oh boy, it appears I am getting a quality game on my hands… Feel free to give very high score guesses for this game.