The ageless Paul Rudd has been pulling the same prank on Conan O’Brien since 2004. He sets up a clip from whatever he’s there to promote, whether it’s a Marvel movie or his Netflix series Living With Yourself, only to show the scene from 1988’s Mac and Me where a wheelchair-bound boy goes flying off a cliff. It’s a good bit, but the “bad E.T. rip-off,” as Rudd called the McDonald’s commercial in the form of a theatrically-released movie (with a killer soundtrack), wasn’t his only choice to play for Conan.
While appearing on O’Brien’s podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, Rudd revealed that another scene he considered playing for the recurring joke is from Baby Geniuses, a family-friendly (?) comedy (?) that, indeed, makes you ask, how did this get made? Here’s how the Ant-Man and the Wasp star described the notorious 1999 box office flop, starring Kathleen Turner, Christopher Lloyd, and CGI-mouthed babies: “[Babies know] the secrets of the universe and can talk to one another before they turn two, where they forget it and as they start to talk, it goes away. Love the idea. Don’t love the movie.”
Rudd explained the specific scene:
“There’s a scene where a baby — I want to say they have this super baby in a lab, I don’t know — and he escapes. This team of thugs are trying to track him down, trying to get this baby, and then they cut to the baby fighting a group of men and it’s clearly a stunt little person just beating up these guys,” he explained. “I assume the budget was so low that there was this one maniacal laugh that the kid makes and every time in the movie, they just use the same laugh. You hear it a hundred times.” (Via)
Let’s watch it now.
Had to. Listen to the podcast episode here.
(Via Hollywood Reporter)
