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Can something bad really be good,

0:17

or are we just using bad to mean silly?

0:19

Where does a classic like Rocky Horror Picture

0:21

Show fit into this scheme? How do

0:24

you know whether your appearance in a Sharknado

0:26

movie bodes well or ill for

0:28

your career? Back in 2014, I

0:30

talked with co-hosts Stephen Thompson and

0:33

Glenn Weldon and our pal, writer

0:35

Chris Klemek, about what was then a two

0:37

part series of movies about sharks

0:40

and weather. Were we ever so young

0:42

that there were only two Sharknado movies? We were.

0:45

And from there, we went on to talk

0:47

about the idea of a thing that's so bad, it's

0:49

good. We're revisiting this discussion almost 10

0:52

years later because the question of questionable

0:54

pleasures is one that never goes out of

0:56

style. I'm Linda Holmes, and in this encore

0:59

episode of NPR's Pop Culture

1:01

Happy Hour from deep in the vault,

1:03

we're talking about things that are so

1:05

bad, they're

1:06

good.

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safe. Google Nest is a trademark of Google

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LLC. This past

2:07

week brought the continuation

2:09

of a major, very important cultural

2:12

and artistic phenomenon, Sharknado. When

2:14

Steven and I were talking about whether we were going to watch Sharknado 2,

2:17

he said, I didn't

2:19

see the first one. And

2:22

I said, you will probably be able to keep up

2:25

with Sharknado 2.

2:26

And she ended up being wrong. I was completely

2:28

confused. As I said when I

2:30

first reviewed the original Sharknado, this

2:33

discussion of this movie will contain spoilers

2:36

that will surprise you if you have not read the title

2:38

of the movie.

2:39

So

2:42

Sharknado, Sharknado

2:44

is about a tornado of sharks.

2:46

And Sharknado 2, because

2:49

Sharknado 1 was so successful, and

2:51

successful is in air quotes and scare quotes

2:53

and defined largely through social media

2:55

presence. Sharknado 2 featured lots of cameos.

2:58

You had your cameos Kelly Osborne, and your

3:00

Will Wheaton, and your Perez Hilton,

3:02

and your guy

3:05

from Shark Tank, Andy Dick, Richard

3:08

Kynes,

3:08

Downtown Julie Brown, Downtown Julie Brown.

3:10

They became, they became frankly very distracting.

3:12

Billy Ray Cyrus, Billy Ray Cyrus

3:14

who diagnosed Tara Reid with an achy-breaky

3:16

pancreas, I believe. Not really. These

3:19

things are supposed to give you that thrill of recognition

3:21

where it's like, I'm smart. I know who that

3:24

is. But what happens is there are so

3:26

many of them that you assume that anyone

3:28

who says anything is somebody,

3:31

and if I don't recognize them, I feel like a

3:33

dope. Yeah. I mean, Sharknado

3:35

made me feel stupid. Sharknado too

3:38

smart.

3:39

I think there is little doubt that

3:41

Sharknado 2, and let's face it, even

3:44

Sharknado 1, took advantage

3:46

of the sort of so bad it's good phenomenon,

3:48

which a lot of people enjoy by sitting around in a crowd,

3:50

whether it be a real crowd or a virtual crowd,

3:53

and talking about how stupid the movie is. I know that

3:55

that is what Steven and I did. It is

3:57

what I did on Twitter with the first one.

3:59

It is what I did when I watched Deadly Spa

4:02

on Lifetime. So

4:04

Deadly Spa. This is a good title.

4:07

It's about a spa, but it's Deadly. Deadly

4:09

Spa. I was going to say,

4:10

you were talking about Deadly Spa without saying

4:13

Deadly Spa. Anyway. Didn't even

4:15

know what you were talking about. So we were going to talk

4:17

about this So Bad It's Good. Are

4:19

you a believer, Glenn, in So Bad It's Good?

4:22

Well, can I drop a little historical context, don't you? I

4:24

was hoping you would. Sure. Where does this

4:26

phenomenon come from? It's not something that happened back

4:28

in the early part of the century. Nobody

4:30

was actually sitting around watching things and reveling in

4:32

how bad they were. In 1964, Susan

4:34

Sontag published an essay in partisan

4:37

review called Notes on Camp in which she

4:39

tried to, not define, because she refused

4:41

to define it. It's just a long

4:43

essay consisting of 58 numbered prose passages

4:46

of various length where she tries to approximate,

4:48

tries to get up to what camp is. Because

4:51

at the time, camp was something that gay

4:53

dudes did and the literary elite did, and

4:55

that was it. But that essay

4:57

became a literary sensation, and it filtered

5:00

down through the mass media

5:02

in a way. And it came to

5:04

be associated, even though the actual definition

5:07

of camp or the actual evocation of camp is

5:09

much more nuanced than this. What I started

5:11

to see when I was doing reading about the Batman television

5:13

series in magazines and newspapers

5:15

at the time is that this word camp was

5:18

all over the place in the mid-60s because of

5:20

this essay. And it was applied to

5:22

everything. But it became associated

5:25

as with the phenomenon of so bad it's good. And

5:27

in fact, in 1966, there was this

5:29

phenomenon where people watched old Batman

5:32

serials, and marathons and midnight shows, just

5:34

to make fun of them, which was a thing we didn't

5:37

use to do, and now all of a sudden we were doing. So

5:40

because that word was so out there in

5:42

the mainstream at the time, when the Batman

5:44

television series started, it became synonymous

5:47

with the concept of campy, even though I would argue,

5:49

and elsewhere I do, arguing that it doesn't really fit campiness. You

5:54

can't say that the Batman television series is so bad it's good,

5:57

because they dumped millions of dollars

5:59

into that. And what it was doing, it was doing very intentionally.

6:02

But the idea of So Bad It's Good is something

6:05

happens that is so bad that

6:07

you enjoy it, but we've talked about

6:09

this a little bit before. For you to enjoy something

6:11

bad, it can be anything, but it can't be

6:13

boring.

6:13

Yeah. I think that's right.

6:16

And things like Plan 9 From Outer Space just keeps

6:18

getting stupider and stupider and stupider, and

6:21

surprises you with its dump. And

6:24

things like Rocky Horror Picture Show. The reason it became

6:27

such a sensation is, A, the music's pretty

6:29

good, but B, it keeps taking

6:31

these weird turns and it gets weirder

6:33

and weirder. That gets sillier. Yeah.

6:35

But I was gonna ask about Rocky Horror, because

6:37

I wonder whether Rocky Horror is kind of a gateway

6:39

drug in the sense that it's so

6:41

bad it's good, but it's also... people

6:44

also legitimately kind of get into

6:46

it and think that the songs are fun

6:48

and it's...

6:49

Oh, God, yes. I mean, it's... Right.

6:52

You can't put on a costume ironically. I mean, you're still wearing it. Right.

6:55

I don't know if it's so bad it's good

6:58

as much as it is so ridiculous

7:00

that it's good, which is a different thing.

7:02

The sensation you get from it, watching it alone

7:04

versus watching it in that theater with everybody else. I

7:06

mean, it is part of... it's exactly what you're saying. It's part of this collective

7:08

experience. And watching

7:10

it alone, you just notice parts of drag,

7:13

as it were, so to speak. But

7:17

watching it together, it becomes this thing where

7:19

you make the film worse than it is. Which

7:22

of the humor of watching Rocky Horror is getting

7:24

fake angry about how terrible this movie is, even

7:26

though you're enjoying the hell out of it. Right. Yeah.

7:30

Yeah. My sister has watched

7:32

that movie hundreds of times and she wasn't watching it laughing

7:34

at it. She was dressing up as little now

7:36

and doing what people do. I

7:39

think one of the interesting things

7:42

about the Sharknado franchise, and

7:44

now Sharknado is a franchise, is

7:46

the notion of ownership

7:49

that often comes into the way bad

7:52

movies are embraced. That

7:54

cultishly bad movies are embraced

7:56

the way cultishly good movies are embraced.

7:58

And we talked very recently.

7:59

like in the San Diego panel, about what

8:02

happens when something that you and just a few

8:04

of your friends love suddenly become something that

8:07

everybody loves and you have to let go of it a little bit. I

8:09

think that happens with so bad it's good movies

8:11

too, where if you were one of the first people

8:13

to discover the movie The Room, The

8:16

Room being a famously terrible,

8:18

misbegotten movie that was

8:21

made with the utmost sincerity

8:23

and turned into this absolute train wreck,

8:27

The Room kind of trickled along entirely

8:29

by word of mouth and eventually got

8:31

these midnight screenings where people were laughing

8:34

at it and spouting dialogue along with

8:36

it and everything. Whereas a movie like Sharknado,

8:39

you don't have the original

8:42

ownership of that movie. You don't have

8:44

the original feeling like, I am

8:46

the only one laughing at this. Its

8:48

appeal is in the exact opposite

8:50

of that. But Sharknado, both Sharknado

8:52

movies are done with an intent to be

8:54

bad.

8:55

And an intent to be

8:57

social media phenomena.

8:58

And that's the point that I was going to make, is that back in

9:01

the very early days of television with that

9:03

pity when I worked there, there was a woman

9:05

who worked there who I remember was talking

9:07

about the site once and said, it's a way of watching

9:10

television but not necessarily watching it the

9:12

way you want us to. And I think

9:14

that's very true. And I think that's what a lot

9:16

of that was when it was Dawson's Creek and Felicity

9:18

and stuff like that. You were watching it when

9:21

you were watching it and making fun of it and taking

9:23

it apart in sort of an atomic level. It was

9:26

not what was intended. And

9:28

what Stephen's saying, I think, is that when it's with the

9:30

room, it's not what was intended. And

9:32

the thing about Sharknado is it's exactly

9:34

what's intended. Well,

9:35

that's why I'm skeptical about it. I have not seen

9:37

Sharknado. But I mean, I'm still angry eight

9:39

years later about snakes on a plane not

9:42

being as funny as I wanted

9:44

it to be. Because I feel like that was kind of engineered

9:47

for ironic consumption in mockery too. And

9:49

like you need to have that the

9:52

sincerity that Stephen talked about in the case

9:54

of the room, the gulf between ambition

9:56

and execution has to be kind of cruelly

9:59

big for it to be a...

9:59

true too bad it's good. Well, and Glenn

10:02

mentioned Plan Nine from Outer Space. I mean, if you've seen,

10:04

I mean, I love the movie,

10:06

Edward. And so much of what that

10:08

movie is about is the beauty of

10:11

ambition, the beauty of sincerity,

10:14

the beauty of just trying

10:16

and of course falling wildly, madly

10:19

short. That movie is this lovely celebration of that.

10:21

The thing with the snakes on a plane and everything, it's

10:24

taking the thing that where it went from person

10:26

to person to person and just suddenly trying

10:29

to throw it out

10:29

there as something that everybody's going to enjoy

10:32

at once. It doesn't work. Roger

10:34

Corman churned out film after film after film

10:36

just to make money. He wasn't even a craftsman

10:38

per se. He was basically a teamster

10:41

of film, just churning, churning, churning. This

10:43

idea that we now, there are people who embrace certain

10:45

obvious films even though they were just made on the cheap. This

10:48

idea of loving schlock is

10:50

a thing we didn't used to do. There came a time, and I think

10:52

that's something to do with how much free time we have, how much leisure time

10:54

we have now, where to appreciate

10:57

something, it had to be good.

11:00

This idea that we're going to take it apart and revel

11:02

in how ineffectual it is.

11:05

You can see the boom mic. It's a different

11:07

sensibility. I would argue it came about

11:09

in the 60s when the fresh-eyed, fresh-scrub

11:12

crew cut kids of the 50s grew

11:14

up into the disaffected, snot-nosed, hippy-dippy

11:17

teenagers of the 60s. Well, like

11:19

everything you blame the show. Just

11:21

simple number of exposures to these things has

11:23

to be a factor too, where home

11:25

video or just where you have the opportunity to

11:27

see them more than once and then you start to notice

11:29

the imperfections. They

11:32

probably reasonably thought, no one's going to see this.

11:34

I think that's right too. Well, and you have to add to

11:36

that the whole Mystery Science Theater 3000 phenomenon,

11:40

which I think elevated the

11:42

notion of everybody get together

11:44

and laugh at how stupid this is. I

11:46

think Sharknado can be traced straight

11:49

back to that.

11:49

But the movies that they were doing on

11:51

Mystery Science Theater were not

11:53

movies that were originally made to be bad.

11:56

They were movies that were made to be B movies, but

11:58

they weren't made to be... this

12:00

is gonna be so terrible in most

12:03

cases. I'm sure there are exceptions. But

12:06

when I watched those, you could kinda

12:08

see what someone might once have thought

12:10

they were gonna pass that movie off as, like

12:13

a low-rent Conan the Barbarian. Sure,

12:15

yeah. But then it comes off

12:18

as this kind of absurd, super

12:20

absurd thing.

12:21

There are many, many instances of films they did on

12:23

Mystery Science Theater where the film itself was

12:26

boring and that's the thing that they- Right, that's when

12:28

it's deadly. That's when it's deadly, but that's also

12:30

why you're watching the show for the bots. You're

12:33

watching the show for the commentary. You are not watching

12:35

it for the movie in any case. And the

12:38

commentary becomes what the thing's about. Mm-hmm.

12:41

I will tell a story. I will ask this question by telling

12:43

a story. When I was at press tour

12:45

a couple weeks ago, I was watching this

12:47

panel for this true crime

12:49

show that they were doing on

12:52

investigation discovery, which is the discovery

12:55

offshoot that does kind of cheapo

12:57

true crime shows. It was gonna

12:59

have reenactments of crimes

13:03

where generally the idea seemed to be

13:05

that it would be a woman who

13:07

was taken in by a terrible guy

13:10

who then later

13:11

either killed her or something like that, reenacted

13:14

by this group of 80s and 90s actors

13:18

like Christopher Knight, I mean, he's

13:20

earlier than that, but Christopher Knight from

13:22

The Brady Bunch and one of the girls from

13:24

Baywatch and Kevin

13:27

Sorbo from Hercules. And

13:30

it was so cranked up cheesy.

13:33

The way it was shot and the way it was done. And

13:35

I thought, what is this? What

13:37

are they trying to do? And all

13:39

of a sudden I realized it is true

13:42

crime Sharknado. This is the

13:44

influence of Sharknado is what this

13:46

is, is they have now figured

13:48

out that anything that churns

13:50

out a lot of genre, the way that

13:53

sci-fi does with monster

13:55

movies. And I'm not sure all of

13:57

the sci-fi movies were originally designed.

14:00

solely to be terrible, they've certainly

14:02

embraced that now. But

14:04

anybody who's churning

14:06

out genre can decide to go in that direction

14:09

and say, now we're gonna make a version that's

14:11

just intentionally completely ridiculous.

14:14

So my question is, is Sharknado

14:17

going to take over all

14:19

of cheap ass television? I think you can.

14:22

Well, there's so much cheap ass television to

14:24

fill. I would guess you will be seeing a lot

14:26

of attempts to recreate Sharknado. What

14:28

I would piggyback on that question is there's

14:31

a very fine line between actors who

14:34

appear in Sharknado to

14:36

be like, hey, it's Billy Ray Cyrus. And

14:39

there are actors who are in Sharknado to

14:41

be acting in Sharknado. And

14:44

that is a very fine line. And I would imagine

14:47

people saying, I want to be in Sharknado.

14:50

But they think like, I'm going to go on. People are going

14:52

to say, hey, it's that guy, and I'm going to get my face bitten off by

14:54

a shark. But then like the worst

14:56

thing you can be is the star

14:58

of Sharknado. You don't want to be Ian Ziering. You

15:01

want to be Judah Friedlander. You

15:03

don't want to be Tara Reade. You

15:05

never want to be Tara Reade. Or

15:08

like Vivica A. Fox. Yeah, you don't want to

15:10

be Vivica A. Fox in that movie. No,

15:13

it's

15:14

true. If you are in Sharknado 2,

15:16

you want to be a cameo and

15:19

not an actor. I think

15:20

that's what I'm saying. And I just wonder.

15:22

You want to be killed quickly. The

15:24

more quickly you're eaten, the better you're doing.

15:26

I just wonder how many actors

15:29

don't realize that they're on one side

15:31

of that divide. Oh, sure. Absolutely.

15:34

Well, I mean, this is something that Chris touched on. I

15:37

mean, there is so much cynicism

15:39

in creating something like Sharknado. I agree.

15:41

That it is completely intentional. There is no sincere

15:44

effort there. But in this particular genre,

15:46

on this particular network, I mean, I don't know

15:48

if there's going to be a dream project that I've always

15:51

wanted to make this movie about a mutant

15:53

shark. Yeah,

15:53

well, the big money I've come to believe, the

15:55

truly big money, is something that can be appreciated

15:58

by some people as sincere.

15:59

but then has what I have referred to in the

16:02

past as an irony multiplier, which is

16:04

the additional people that you get who are watching it

16:06

ironically. Like I have a theory that

16:08

High School Musical had a gigantic irony

16:10

multiplier that there was a certain audience of people

16:12

who were watching it completely sincerely, but

16:14

then it gets another entire load of people who are watching

16:17

it ironically also that way, The Bachelorette.

16:19

I'm just saying. Irony multiplier

16:22

on The Bachelorette. Some people are like, I like

16:24

The Bachelorette. I just watch to see whether

16:26

they fall in love. And other people are

16:28

throwing popcorn and

16:29

making gender dynamic breakdowns.

16:32

That is the sweet spot. There was a completely age-related

16:35

version of that in the old Batman television series, exactly.

16:37

Kids watching it for serious, and everybody else, everybody

16:40

else watching it because it was funny.

16:41

I've even been paying a lot of attention to the old Batman series. Go figure,

16:44

go figure, yeah. Funniest thing, funniest thing. You should write

16:46

a book. Someone should. Well,

16:48

you should come and find us on Facebook

16:50

at facebook.com slash PCHH. That

16:53

brings us to the end of our show. This episode

16:55

was produced by Nick Fountain and Jessica

16:57

Reidy. And Hello, Come In provides

17:00

our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture

17:02

Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda

17:04

Holmes, and we'll see you all tomorrow.

17:13

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