There’s been a lot of hand-wringing and brow furrowing lately over the glut of television projects based on beloved movies from our youth that are now in development. Well, please consider this your reminder that this practice is far from new and, yes, it usually turns out terribly.
Above, please find the first three minutes and thirty seconds — an intro and the opening credits — of the TV version of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that NBC made back in 1990. It is, to be very clear, awful. And confusing. Awful and confusing. A few highlights:
- The show moved Ferris from Chicago to Malibu for unspecified reasons, although one can assume since it was paired with a fellow freshman sitcom titled Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, shipping teenagers west and putting them in giant houses was NBC’s modus operandi at the time.
- It kind of exists in the same world as the movie, but it also kind of doesn’t. Like, it starts with TV Ferris explaining that the movie was based on his life and then promptly using a chainsaw to decapitate a cardboard cutout of Matthew Broderick’s Movie Ferris, but then less than two minutes later he’s saying how Sloan is the new girl at school and they will fall in love once they actually meet. This despite the fact that Sloan features prominently in the movie, as his girlfriend, with whom he is presumably fairly well acquainted. My working theory is that someone — either TV Ferris or everyone associated with the show — was suffering from selective amnesia.
- TV Ferris, played by Charlie Schlatter, looks a little like a young Bradley Cooper, no?
- HEY! THAT’S JENNIFER ANISTON AS JEANNIE, FERRIS’S SISTER! I had totally forgotten she was in this, a scant four years and maybe a dozen hairstyles before rocketing to fame as Rachel on Friends. Also, I’m presuming the “she has a car … and a nose job” is a dig at late-80s, early-90s Jennifer Grey. I won’t stand for it.
- The dancing in the credits. Oh God, the dancing.
So anyway, like I said, awful and confusing, and a bad precedent for these kinds of reboots. The only good I see coming out of it, if history has taught us anything, is some “HAHAHA LOOK HOW STUPID 2014 WAS” content for some handsome TV writer in the mid-to-late 2030s. Small victories.
H/T TV Overmind
