With 'Cocaine Bear' poised to take advantage of a viral marketing campaign, it's worth looking back at a strange case of giving the internet what it wants.
I feel like it's worth mentioning the other weird things SOAP spawned:
-The official unofficial t-shirt made by Jeff Rowland, author of Wigu and guy that funded "webcomics," as seen here on Sam Jackson https://www.flickr.com/photos/topatoco/2203903221. The shirt is now long out of print and Rowland's webcomics are lost to the Internet.
Damn dude, you really tickled my brain with the Wigu reference. I used to read Rowland's comics every day and hey it turns out they're not lost, they're still right here!
That's actually great news! I had the old URL bookmarked from forever ago and just thought it died out (along with buying non-webcomic t-shirts after a decade).
I went to a midnight screening of Snakes on a Plane on opening day, which was possibly the best way to experience it. The audience was rowdy and fun. But despite having a good time, I left a bit disappointed, and I suspect you have nailed the why. But I’m still in for Cocaine Bear.
Great piece! I read between the lines of the articles covering the additional shooting and figured we would probably be getting a neither-here-nor-there consolidation of the cheap and lousy thriller they apparently set out to make and however much camp comedy and cgi bloodletting you can sweatily bang out in five days of filming while half the internet pounds at your door. But of COURSE I still went on opening day. It was still going to have snakes on a plane.
I’ve seen it just the once, and I can only remember four things from it. The first is the opening credit sequence, which I recall being seven hours of second unit footage documenting a man wearing a helmet riding a dirtbike around Hawaii while a Jack Johnson song plays on loop. It looks like something from one of those USA detective shows, which you can just watch for free at home.Two and three are unconcealed pickup shots: Jacksons big line, which is yelled in closeup, almost straight at the audience and yet to nobody in particular, and its opposite member, the woman’s naked torso in the bathroom with her head cropped out, which achieves a highly concentrated and rare level of gratuitousness without shocking, titillating, offending, or really inspiring any kind of reaction whatsoever. It’s too joylessly pro forma to even be mean-spirited. It would be wrong to say it’s in bad taste because it was placed there irrespective of any taste or sensibility at all, simply to satiate the kind of viewer that the cynical studio was anticipatorily pandering to. It constituted unmistakable evidence of what the filmmakers thought of their audience.
The fourth and final thing I remember is all the snakes that were on that plane. I give Snakes on a Plane 7/10.
Almost exactly the same for me! My brother and I went to a midnight showing at Seattle's Cinerama theater (RIP, maybe) on opening night, and thanks to the audience that remains one of my all-time favorite moviegoing experiences.
There were people dressed as pilots and flight attendants chasing each other across the stage, waving large rubber snakes at each other.
Someone split the audience in half down the middle and led us in a chant, with the left half screaming "Snakes!" and the right half screaming "Plane!"
That movie was not 1/10th as good or bad or ridiculous as it needed to be to live up to that pre-show activity.
And indeed, the audience was generally muted as we all filed out of the theater at 2am, motherfucking snakes be damned.
Like you, though, I look forward to Cocaine Bear.
(In retrospect I'm wondering if that's the last midnight showing I've seen.)
Sounds like a fabulous time! I’m honestly not sure that wasn’t my last midnight movie too. For a minute I thought it might have been a revival of The Warriors that I saw in NYC with a bunch of friends, but looking back through email I see that was November 2005. Hmm.
I saw Snakes On A Plane through a radio station preview ticket giveaway. Completely packed house that was hootin' and hollerin' before anything even appeared on the screen. The rowdiness died down about 20 minutes into the film, only resurging during the bathroom sex scene and then exploding into applause when Sam Jackson said his big line. There was a feeling that the crowd was trying to will the movie into being sillier and more campy, but the dullness of most of the film was letting us down.
If they took the exact same script, minus the obvious punch-ups, and played it as straight as, say, Executive Decision, we might have really wound up with something. That would be the 2006 version of this movie that people are talking about fondly in 2023.
The other meme-focused script addition I remember from around the same time is people being very excited that they got "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!" into X-Men 3.
I feel like it's worth mentioning the other weird things SOAP spawned:
-The official unofficial t-shirt made by Jeff Rowland, author of Wigu and guy that funded "webcomics," as seen here on Sam Jackson https://www.flickr.com/photos/topatoco/2203903221. The shirt is now long out of print and Rowland's webcomics are lost to the Internet.
-The Theme Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1wMyKQ6jUg
-Snakes on a TRAIN: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0843873/
-Chuck Dixon's two issue comic book adaptation: https://www.dc.com/comics/snakes-on-a-plane-2006/snakes-on-a-plane-1
Damn dude, you really tickled my brain with the Wigu reference. I used to read Rowland's comics every day and hey it turns out they're not lost, they're still right here!
https://www.wigucomics.com/
That's actually great news! I had the old URL bookmarked from forever ago and just thought it died out (along with buying non-webcomic t-shirts after a decade).
I went to a midnight screening of Snakes on a Plane on opening day, which was possibly the best way to experience it. The audience was rowdy and fun. But despite having a good time, I left a bit disappointed, and I suspect you have nailed the why. But I’m still in for Cocaine Bear.
Great piece! I read between the lines of the articles covering the additional shooting and figured we would probably be getting a neither-here-nor-there consolidation of the cheap and lousy thriller they apparently set out to make and however much camp comedy and cgi bloodletting you can sweatily bang out in five days of filming while half the internet pounds at your door. But of COURSE I still went on opening day. It was still going to have snakes on a plane.
I’ve seen it just the once, and I can only remember four things from it. The first is the opening credit sequence, which I recall being seven hours of second unit footage documenting a man wearing a helmet riding a dirtbike around Hawaii while a Jack Johnson song plays on loop. It looks like something from one of those USA detective shows, which you can just watch for free at home.Two and three are unconcealed pickup shots: Jacksons big line, which is yelled in closeup, almost straight at the audience and yet to nobody in particular, and its opposite member, the woman’s naked torso in the bathroom with her head cropped out, which achieves a highly concentrated and rare level of gratuitousness without shocking, titillating, offending, or really inspiring any kind of reaction whatsoever. It’s too joylessly pro forma to even be mean-spirited. It would be wrong to say it’s in bad taste because it was placed there irrespective of any taste or sensibility at all, simply to satiate the kind of viewer that the cynical studio was anticipatorily pandering to. It constituted unmistakable evidence of what the filmmakers thought of their audience.
The fourth and final thing I remember is all the snakes that were on that plane. I give Snakes on a Plane 7/10.
Almost exactly the same for me! My brother and I went to a midnight showing at Seattle's Cinerama theater (RIP, maybe) on opening night, and thanks to the audience that remains one of my all-time favorite moviegoing experiences.
There were people dressed as pilots and flight attendants chasing each other across the stage, waving large rubber snakes at each other.
Someone split the audience in half down the middle and led us in a chant, with the left half screaming "Snakes!" and the right half screaming "Plane!"
That movie was not 1/10th as good or bad or ridiculous as it needed to be to live up to that pre-show activity.
And indeed, the audience was generally muted as we all filed out of the theater at 2am, motherfucking snakes be damned.
Like you, though, I look forward to Cocaine Bear.
(In retrospect I'm wondering if that's the last midnight showing I've seen.)
Sounds like a fabulous time! I’m honestly not sure that wasn’t my last midnight movie too. For a minute I thought it might have been a revival of The Warriors that I saw in NYC with a bunch of friends, but looking back through email I see that was November 2005. Hmm.
(Or the American premiere of The Raid II at SXSW. But I think a lot of SXSW films feel like midnight movies in retrospect.)
I saw Snakes On A Plane through a radio station preview ticket giveaway. Completely packed house that was hootin' and hollerin' before anything even appeared on the screen. The rowdiness died down about 20 minutes into the film, only resurging during the bathroom sex scene and then exploding into applause when Sam Jackson said his big line. There was a feeling that the crowd was trying to will the movie into being sillier and more campy, but the dullness of most of the film was letting us down.
If they took the exact same script, minus the obvious punch-ups, and played it as straight as, say, Executive Decision, we might have really wound up with something. That would be the 2006 version of this movie that people are talking about fondly in 2023.
The other meme-focused script addition I remember from around the same time is people being very excited that they got "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!" into X-Men 3.
Boy, does that trailer give away the store. Makes the movie, itself, already feel superfluous.