Seth MacFarlane
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He also makes a lot of funny references to great movies like “Star Wars” and “Raiders” as well as cheesy ’80s movies like “Flash Gordon” (a Universal Pictures release) even bringing in Sam Jones, Flash Gordon himself, for a hilarious party sequence.
It also is full of the show's rapid nonlinear asides and obscure pop-culture references, including Sam Jones of the B-movie "Flash Gordon" in a cameo similar to Mike Tyson's in "The Hangover."
MacFarlane, who directed and co-wrote the screenplay with "Family Guy" writers Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild, infuses "Ted" with a scattershot energy similar to what he brings to the small screen, with a handful of cutaway flashbacks, abundant pop culture references, an epic night of partying with "Flash Gordon" (1980) star Sam Jones and a hotel-room brawl presented with "Bourne"-like intensity.
The film also throws in lots of cameos (i.e., Ryan Reynolds !), pro-forma digs at current celebrities (Taylor Lautner) and such outmoded 1980 cultural references as " Flash Gordon " and an old jingle for Mounds and Almond Joy.
There's a heavy dose of '80s nostalgia that's capped off by repeated references to the 1980 camp classic Flash Gordon and features the star of that movie, Sam Jones, in costume (at age 58).
Fans of Family Guy will recognise other familiar faces and voices in supporting roles, along with MacFarlane's signature political incorrectness and constant pop-culture references (including a recurring jab at the 1980 shocker Flash Gordon).
Blazing Saddles (1974)
Directed by Mel Brooks
influenced A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)
Themes
The comedic western is a notoriously difficult nut to crack, with only a handful of directors ever pulling it off successfully (Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” which gets explicitly referenced here, are the notable exceptions), and MacFarlane seems both incredibly eager to join those rarified ranks and yet skittish about really maximizing the potential for the movie’s setting and concept.
Moving forward from that success, A Million Ways to Die in the West, a casual, sometimes vapid spoof on traditional and spaghetti westerns is not just reminiscent of Blazing Saddles, but seems to be a thematic copy, his attempt at flattering imitation.
And his new film is such an unapologetic homage to 1974's Blazing Saddles that Mel Brooks probably deserves to get a cut of the box-office receipts.
Mel Brooks' 1970s sagebrush spoof Blazing Saddles - clearly an inspiration for MacFarlane - shared a similarly sophomoric, scatalogical sensibility.
MacFarlane's obvious touchstone here is another Western comedy that was both crass and smartly provocative, Mel Brooks' 1974 Blazing Saddles.
Like every comic Western, A Million Ways To Die will inevitably be compared to Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles: in fact it's closer to the wiseguy tradition of Woody Allen and Bob Hope.
The Paleface (1948)
Directed by Norman Z. McLeod
influenced A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)
Music Characters Plot Themes
*** With a title inspired by the lurid pulp grandiosity of Spaghetti Westerns (“Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead” and “Django’s Cut-Price Corpses” are just two examples), a big-sky score by Joel McNeely that channels the Aaron Copland-esque themes of the Hollywood mainstream and a premise more or less lifted from Bob Hope’s “The Paleface,” writer-director-vilified-Oscar-host Seth MacFarlane’s follow-up to his huge hit “Ted” was judged a box-office disappointment when it was released theatrically in May, earning “just” $42 million compared to the $218 million snatched by the movie about the vulgar talking Teddy bear.
Albert may be spineless, but that is nothing new; it is more than sixty years since Bob Hope put a coward among the cowboys, in “The Paleface.”
The problem seems to be that he and co-writers Wellesley Wild and Alec Sulkin could not decide whether to do an over-the-top parody such as “Blazing Saddles” or a fish-out-of-water spoof such as Bob Hope’s “The Paleface.”
Now in a sense, all comic Westerns do this, whether we're talking about Bob Hope in "The Paleface" (1948) or Mel Brooks ' "Blazing Saddles."
The truth is he’s made the new Shakiest Gun in the West — Don Knotts’ 1968 rehash of Bob Hope’s The Paleface (1948) — except MacFarlane’s picture isn’t even up to the none-too-exacting standards of the Don Knotts movie.
But Hope had a knack for comic timing in movies like “The Paleface” — sometimes that’s all he had — and Brooks pushed cultural as well as scatological boundaries in 1974’s “Blazing Saddles.”
He recalls it as a combination of An Officer and a Gentleman and Saturday Night Fever.
That specificity isn’t necessarily a flaw; just a reminder that Ted, like all of writer-director MacFarlane’s produce, traffics heavily in pop culture curios (he even goes so far as to spoof a scene from Flying High; itself already spoofing Saturday Night Fever ).
A disco flashback that seems to be referencing “Saturday Night Fever” is actually recreating the spoof of it in “Airplane!”
Like Family Guy, the film serves up cutaway digressions that are hilarious partly for being so unexpected; a flashback to John's first meeting Lori is cast in the form of homage to the Saturday Night Fever disco dance lampoon in Airplane!
It�s not enough to have a dumb Saturday Night Fever reference plugged into the center of one of the few scenes without the bear.
…doing a parody of John Travolta in"Saturday Night Fever" and while it earns points for nerve, nerve isn't everything in comedy.
Sam’s total lack of pop culture knowledge is also the butt of a lot of gags in the story, balancing out against the absolute flood of pop culture references throughout the rest of the material — including one rather brilliant Jurassic Park joke.
And while some of them hit (especially the Jurassic Park and Planes, Trains and Automobiles homages), the majority of them are mean-spirited, superfluous misses.
By the time he hits the third-act sequence that goes from Planes, Trains homage to Jurassic Park homage to Three Amigos homage in about five minutes flat, he’s stopped being a filmmaker; he’s the annoying guy from IT who just spouts movie quotes all day.
And while an early Breakfast Club spoof is lazy even by MacFarlane standards, a Jurassic Park parody plays smarter tribute to Spielberg’s blockbuster than anything in Jurassic World .
One moment left me smiling though and it involves a timely reference to Jurassic Park (thanks John Williams).
And you can’t help but grin at a stoner’s take on Jurassic Park, replete with John Williams’ inspirational original score.
Together, they're like fanboys who have refused to grow up, peppering scenes with references to Flash Gordon, Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Knight Rider plus pointed nods to Cheers, Airplane!
A flashback to the night John and Lori met, for instance, is a shot-for-shot (sound effects included) recall of a scene from 1980's monumental spoof movie "Airplane!"
A disco flashback that seems to be referencing “Saturday Night Fever” is actually recreating the spoof of it in “Airplane!”
Like Family Guy, the film serves up cutaway digressions that are hilarious partly for being so unexpected; a flashback to John's first meeting Lori is cast in the form of homage to the Saturday Night Fever disco dance lampoon in Airplane!
And mercifully, there's only one shot-for-shot movie reference: the bar scene from Airplane!
There's one scene in which Wahlberg does a parody of Robert Hays in "Airplane!"
Back to the Future (1985)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
influenced A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)
MacFarlane has a bevy of cameoing stars, their very presence aimed to elicit laughs, but again, what's a "Back to the Future" nod with Christopher Lloyd got to do with anything?
Most of the time, the humor works, such as a joke about how big Seyfried's eyes are or a nod to the "Back to the Future" films.
The many unbilled cameos, some of which are witless references to other, better movies (e.g., “Back to the Future” and “Django Unchained”), would work better if the good-natured performers had been given any decent material to work with, though it’s hard to imagine that even Shakespeare could have come up with anything that might save Gilbert Gottfried’s impersonation of Abe Lincoln.
But to be fair, not all the jokes are quite that crude; the occasional slipped-in movie reference – Back To The Future , Django Unchained – hits the spot and the pace rarely lets up.
There’s an excruciating Peter Griffin moment late in Million Ways where Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown shows up for absolutely no reason other than to high five the audience for having seen Back to the Future (“Bro, remember Pepsi??”).
Django Unchained (2012)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)
Plot Themes
The comedic western is a notoriously difficult nut to crack, with only a handful of directors ever pulling it off successfully (Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” which gets explicitly referenced here, are the notable exceptions), and MacFarlane seems both incredibly eager to join those rarified ranks and yet skittish about really maximizing the potential for the movie’s setting and concept.
The many unbilled cameos, some of which are witless references to other, better movies (e.g., “Back to the Future” and “Django Unchained”), would work better if the good-natured performers had been given any decent material to work with, though it’s hard to imagine that even Shakespeare could have come up with anything that might save Gilbert Gottfried’s impersonation of Abe Lincoln.
But to be fair, not all the jokes are quite that crude; the occasional slipped-in movie reference – Back To The Future , Django Unchained – hits the spot and the pace rarely lets up.
The one scene to feature a black actor revolves around the same game, but is an end-credits stinger featuring Jamie Foxx reprising his role from Django Unchained and deciding to take care of the game proprietor for his transgression.
As a writer (with Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild), MacFarlane concocts a flimsy burlesque story that draws on every offbeat oater from “Destry Rides Again” to “Cat Ballou” and “Django Unchained.”
When you’ve elected to cut your profits by pushing out the “PG-13” and below crowd to go for “Django Unchained” glory, I expected much more shock and awe.
But it’s flimsy and silly for this trio to break into a line dance at the law library in a feeble nod to The Breakfast Club.
Gross-out scenes such as this one feel like old-fashioned throwbacks to the raunchy post-" American Pie " era of the early naughts, while spoofs of "The Breakfast Club" and "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" are cute without being clever, repeating moments from those iconic '80s John Hughes classics without understanding how to properly parody them.
Scenes from “The Breakfast Club” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” are re-created just because.
Back to the Future Part III (1990)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
influenced A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)
Themes
Christopher Lloyd reprises his role as Doc Brown from Back to the Future Part III in a story set three years before Zemeckis’ comedy western, explaining away his time machine tinkering with an excuse from another instalment, “just a little weather experiment”.
An unflinching spoof that targets classic movie westerns of yore as well as life in the American West, circa 1882, "A Million Ways to Die in the West" is a spirited concoction that is one part "Blazing Saddles" and another part "Back to the Future Part III" as processed through the self-deprecating mind of Seth MacFarlane.
To make up, A Million Ways continually extrapolates on a small set of jokes: the use of cocaine as an ingredient in medicine (two instances); extended, Family Guy-style non-parodies (Back To The Future Part III, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, and Django Unchained ); Old West people getting stoned (two instances, plus a drug-trip sequence); the fact that nobody smiles in early photos (four instances); a shooting gallery with “runaway slave” targets (enough for one shot, but used for an entire scene and a mid-credits stinger); the idea of a “devoutly Christian” prostitute who only practices abstinence with her fiancé (more than 10 instances); the social significance of mustaches in 19th-century culture (more than 10 instances, plus a musical number).
The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968)
Directed by Alan Rafkin
influenced A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)
As a frontier sheep rancher named Albert, MacFarlane starts the movie with a nod to Don Knotts in “The Shakiest Gun in the West.”
Young Frankenstein (1974)
Directed by Mel Brooks
influenced A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014), Ted 2 (2015)
Themes
I still don't think that movie's any good, but it is Young Frankenstein compared to A Million Ways to Die in the West.
The filmmaker clearly hopes that his comic Western will be this generation's companion piece to Mel Brooks' 1974 classic Blazing Saddles, a picture so revered that it rests in the number 6 slot on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 funniest American movies of all time (the highest ranked of three Brooks flicks, with The Producers at number 11 and Young Frankenstein at number 13).
But Brooks was able to channel his insane energy and produce three masterpieces: "The Producers," "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein."
John Ford shot there 9 separate times, starting with 1939's Stagecoach.
Cat Ballou (1965)
Directed by Elliot Silverstein
influenced A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)
Plot Themes
Like the authentic setting, Theron's seriousness grounds "Million Ways to Die," allowing us to give a pass to MacFarlane when he awkwardly emulates Kid Shelleen's drunken horse rider from "Cat Ballou" (Lee Marvin did it better), and tries to achieve Brooksian racial commentary with dubious setups.
As a writer (with Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild), MacFarlane concocts a flimsy burlesque story that draws on every offbeat oater from “Destry Rides Again” to “Cat Ballou” and “Django Unchained.”
In the venerable tradition of Cat Ballou and Blazing Saddles, Seth MacFarlane’s comedy western boasts gags galore – some a lot cruder than others.
In an obvious nod to "The Silence of the Lambs," Ribisi is seen doing a sensual dance while watching the music video for Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now."For a summer comedy that name-drops the Adam Sandler vehicle " Jack and Jill " before destroying it in a single sentence, it's amazing how many of the same traps "Ted" falls into, starting with its one-joke premise.
The pop culture references, from Brandon Routh’s Superman to Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill, are generally spot-on.
In fact attentive viewers may be surprised to hear the cuddly waster mock Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill.
It’s not mere coincidence that when Ted, the eponymous teddy bear-come-to-life voiced by co-writer and director Seth MacFarlane, invites a bunch of hookers over for a fun evening, the movie he puts on is Adam Sandler’s “Jack and Jill.”
Early on in "Ted," the titular walking, talking teddy bear (voiced by director/co-writer Seth MacFarlane) watches "Jack and Jill" with four prostitutes at his side.
The bear exists in the universe of the movie for no other reason than the movie thinks it's funnier to have stale pop-culture riffs delivered from the mouth of an unconvincing CGI stuffed teddy bear—hey, guys, did you know that Jack and Jill is awful?
MacFarlane’s more like a time traveler — Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness or Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future Part III, which is actually referenced here — cracking wise about all the stupidity that surrounds him.
He recalls it as a combination of An Officer and a Gentleman and Saturday Night Fever.
High Noon (1952)
Directed by Fred Zinnemann
influenced A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)
Plot Themes Visuals
Basically the movie is structured into a series of "High Noon" face-offs featuring MacFarlane trying to talk his way out of them.
Maybe he’s trying to recapture the spirit of Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles,” but that movie was made in 1974, when everyone watching it had grown up with “Shane” and “True Grit” and “High Noon.”
From John Ford's patriotic visions to the allegorical dimensions of the Cold War-era "High Noon" and the Vietnam analogies of Clint Eastwood's best efforts, the Western has always offered meaty fodder for wresting with relevant attitudes.
In fact, his "Million Ways to Die in the West" plot could fuel any number of classic Westerns: A mild-mannered, recently jilted resident of the Western frontier (played by MacFarlane) gets caught up in a moment of poor judgment and commits to a "High Noon"-style showdown with his ex's dandy of a new beau (a mustachioed Neil Patrick Harris , characteristically hilarious).
A Million Ways to Die in the West establishes its classy and sophisticated comic strategy with an opening High Noon face-off between Albert and a disgruntled, trigger-happy cowpoke.
It also is full of the show's rapid nonlinear asides and obscure pop-culture references, including Sam Jones of the B-movie "Flash Gordon" in a cameo similar to Mike Tyson's in "The Hangover."
And when actor Sam Jones, star of the ridiculous 1980 movie Flash Gordon, appears at Ted’s, the party is as outrageous as anything in The Hangover.
TED is one in a long line of recent comedies (“The Hangover,” “Due Date,” the “Harold and Kumar” movies, nearly anything with Adam Sandler) which celebrate immaturity and aggressive stupidity.
The merrily rude humor of Family Guy slides right into feature films with nary a burp nor a fart in Ted, a raucously funny goof about a boozing, pot-smoking, foul-mouthed teddy bear who would be instant new best friends with The Hangover guys.
In terms of depravity and raunchiness, there's nothing in Ted that one-ups the material in The Hangover or Harold and Kumar - but that's plenty far out on the tightrope for a movie about a stuffed animal.
Blazing Saddles, released in 1974 — the same year as Foxy Brown — used the Western as a guise to attack racism.