Where It's Due
In an essay about Brick, we get this:
In one of his classic Saturday Night Live short films from the mid-’70s, Albert Brooks did a mock-preview of NBC’s upcoming “Super Season” of exciting new replacement shows and specials. (“Even a super season has super failures! That’s why, at NBC, we’ve got super replacements!”) Among the many promising offerings, like Black Vet (a black Vietnam War veteran who’s also a small-town veterinarian) or the randy Three’s Company rip-off The Three Of Us, there’s a new production of Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman, performed entirely by children.
This is wrong. The Three Of Us is not a rip-off of Three's Company. The Brooks short film aired in the first season (1975-1976) of SNL, Three's Company debuted in 1977.
Perhaps you're thinking Three's Company ripped off Brooks. Actually, it was based on a British sitcom Man About The House, which premiered in 1973. This is starting to sound like a Three's Company plot, confusing, but not funny.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:12 AM
5 Comments:
I'm not a Three's Company fan. In fact, the only episode I liked was the one where two of the roommates accidentally got the wrong impression about what the other one was doing. This confusion led to a lot of paranoid worries about sexual shenanigans. I remember the wide-eyed shocked look on their faces when they thought their roommate was doing that raunchy deed!
But that was the only good one.
But perhaps the greatest sin was that my memory of Don Knotts is not of Barney Fyfe, the gang that couldn't shoot straight or even of the incredible Mr. Limpet, but of an aging swinger in polyester fake silk shirt with a big gold disco chain.
Really it cures me of my 70s nostalgia.
NEG
Oops, should really fact check before the fact, but
1.By "the gang that couldn't shoot straight," I am referring the Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) not the 1971 film based on the Jimmy Breslin and
2.Don Knotts had the disco look only in the 1984 season of 3C (maybe that was part of the joke--maybe not, seems a little subtle for them)
Albert Brooks was hilarious as the frustrated guy living with two women. That one minute promo was funnier than the entire run of Three's Company.
Well, maybe Albert Brooks was ripping off "Man About the House?"
Post a Comment
<< Home