Blast From the Past: 11-08-05

Midnight Madness turns 25!

With the Walt Disney Company having released four of the five movies Quentin Tarantino has made, it's makes me wonder what they had against Midnight Madness in 1980.
With the success of National Lampoon's Animal House, every studio in Hollywood wanted to make the next teenage/college movie that had an edge. But not too much of an edge, with Disney.
Disney producer Ron Miller got the latest hotshot filmmakers in Hollywood, David Wechter and Michael Nankin, to make such a movie. Their result is a memorable but often flawed movie with many familiar faces, such as Michael J. Fox and Paul Reubens (formerly Pee Wee Herman.)
If you had HBO or the Disney Channel in the 80's, you probably saw this movie many, many times as it was must have been an FCC requirement to have it on at least every other day.
The plot involves twenty-four teenagers, divided in five teams, as they roam around the Los Angeles area looking for clues for the Great All-Nighter, a scanvenger hunt pieced together by a hippy looking grad student named Leon, who lives in the famous Hollywood Towers and has two pretty girls (Candy and Sunshine) as his assistant. The movie has many of L.A.'s landmarks, such as the Griffin Observatory, the Pabst Blue Ribbon factory, the Bona Venture Hotel, and LAX holding many of the clues. The overhead for such an set-up would be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions, but this is a movie that functions on reality.
Many of the characters are your stereotypical teenagers. There's Harold (Stephen Furst from Animal House) as the villian. He's from a rich family but obese and many references are made about his weight, the best has got to be Johnie's Fat Boy Burgers. There's Wesley (Eddie Deezen from Grease) as the debate coach who talks in a Donald Duck like voice. There's Lavitas (David Wilkin) as the jock. Maggie Roswell is Donna, the sorority. There's also the black guy, Marvin (David Damas), the quiet and creepy looking and Mexican, Blade (Sal Lopez) and the two morbidly obese fat twins, Peggy and Lulu (Betsy Lynn Thompson and Carol Gwynn Thompson) who giggle more than they talk, but have the obligatory watch-us-get-down on the disco dancefloor scene.
Yes, the movie is dated and cheesy. You roll your eyes after the third person has looked at a clue and screams, "I got it!" Michael J. Fox who plays the hero's brother Scott, called it an "inauspicious beginning." But the movie is more clean than any other teen movie made after Animal House. There's a gag about Venus' two moons that would have made Benny Hill laugh. However, the Disney movie didn't like the use of four letter curse words, (just "damn" and "hell"); the movies sexual innuedo (which wouldn't raise eyebrows with the FCC now) ;and scenes of the characters drinking alcoholic beverages. One scene involves a football player doing a cannonball jump into a vat of beer and getting drunk.
If anything else, Midnight Madness should be remember as the movie that help changed the tide with the stuck-up Disney. Before this, they were making those terrible teen movies with Kurt Russell and Cesar Romero (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and Now You See Me, Now You Don't.) Disney didn't even want their core audience to know they had made this movie. The Disney logo is missing from the beginning of the movie. The only reference to the company is a stragetically placed reference to Mickey Mouse.
With the exception of Michael J. Fox and Paul Reubens, who has a small role as a cowboy-dressed vendor at an arcade, many of the movie's actors never made a bigger movie again. Furst went on to act in St. Elsewhere before he would be killed off and we would find out it was just the daydreaming of an autistic boy with a snow globe. Roswell would be the voice of Maude Flanders on The Simpsons before she her character was killed off. The movie's hero Adam (David Naughton) would have his peak with An American Werewolf in London, before he is killed off at the end of that movie.
Debra Clinger who plays Adam love interest, Laura, appeared on several TV shows shortly after then never acted again. You don't get far in Hollywood when your name is a few letters off from Debra Winger.
Regardless, Midnight Madness is worth watching if you're still hungover from the latest I Love the 80's series on VH1.