A few days ago I re-watched (though not too closely) a film that my sibling Frisk and I both remembered from childhood. This is one of the ways we've been attempting to reconnect with who we used to be and we have a few movies lined up that we once saw together; now we can see them again, and with clearer perception (I hope.) JFK and The Truman Show, for example, are films that Frisk and experienced together.

This particular movie I'm about to mention isn't quite on the level of those. It's called The Big Bus and it's a big lumbering attempt to spoof the disaster-movie trend of 1970s American cinema, exemplified by movies like Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure and lesser examples like The Swarm and The Hindenburg. The humor is crude and tasteless—there's running jokes about cannibalism presumably making fun of the 1972 Andes disaster, and the villain is Jose Ferrer in an iron lung (hilarious! /s) in league with stereotypical Arabian oil-barons (a laugh riot!! /s). I suppose that Airplane! is also loaded with crude humor but somehow that movie works, while The Big Bus comes across as awkward and strained. Airplane! doesn't linger over its bad jokes, for one thing.

Also...The Big Bus seems to want to be a real action movie. Sure, the atomic bus itself is goofy, everyone on the bus (and everyone who wants to destroy the bus) is a comical stooge, and the very idea of an atomic bus capable of going 90 mph on ordinary roads is a ridiculous one. But the crisis ends up resolved in remarkably straightforward action-movie fashion. It's not a bad action-movie set piece but that's my point: it's almost conventional in how the suspense plays out. Airplane!, by contrast, loves interrupting its suspenseful moments with lapses into pure fantasy. "I want every available light poured onto that field!" becomes a shot of table lamps being dumped onto the tarmac. Stryker is able to stop the plane because suddenly it's got a brake and clutch pedal, just for one shot. Airplane! is deliriously ungrounded, whereas The Big Bus ends up feeling very ordinary somehow.

Frisk and I wanted to like The Big Bus, as I recall. We were driven towards cynicism at an early age and we sought out satires and spoofs. Action-movie heroism was a joke to us, once. Now, though, I'd rather watch something like Speed, and enjoy the heroism unironically.

~Chara

we've been cogitating about disaster movies a bit lately, and abruptly remembered this oddity, which both Frisk and I kinda remember watching on some TV rebroadcast in the 1980s. about the only way we caught any movies at all was through chopped-up TV reruns. anyway, The Big Bus is some kind of parody of overblown "disaster movies", movies like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure that tried to dramatize crises caused by faulty engineering and bad corporate management. disaster movies of this sort were never allowed to be very serious and the genre descended pretty quickly into self-parody and actual parody.

anyway...I guess I forgot that the titular "Big Bus" was named Coyote. that seems paradoxically appropriate, somehow. I remember basically nothing about the movie by the way except that there's a Big Bus in it, and it gets into melodramatic troubles, and it's played for laughs. I suppose Airplane! would do better at extracting comedy from the decay of the "disaster movie" genre. (I saw Airplane II first, though, again thanks to TV.)

~Chara