Originally published July 9, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1338
It’s depressing not being a target audience. It’s disconcerting feeling one’s age. And it’s particularly uncomfortable when one feels that way when lots of other people are around, as was the case when I saw Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.
I went with Gwen, my fourteen-year-old, except I didn’t really. She actually went with several friends, and I was obliged to sit on the opposite side of the theater so that no one could remotely, possibly, think that by some incredible happenstance, she was with me. (This is as opposed to the times that she is at a convention with me, where she’s all-too-happy to bop around dealer’s rooms, bat her eyes at exhibitors, and say, “Hi, I’m Peter David’s daughter, can I get a discount?” Oh yeah, then she wants to associate me. Ah, well…)
With a film such as Shagged, it is imperative that one turn one’s mind off. Unfortunately, as eager as the assorted teenagers around me were to do so, I found I could not. Nor, as it turned out, could Gwen, nor could my eldest, Shana—at least, not completely. I suppose I should be proud. Instead I feel a bit sorry for them. Some of the things they, and I, tripped over throughout the film were:
(Warning: Spoilers for some aspects of Shagged. Right. As if a film that fans will see a hundred times is going to be harmed by discussion of story elements.)
1) How could Vanessa (Elizabeth Hurley) possibly have been a Fembot when she was clearly shown as having a mother the previous film? Was her mom a fembot, too?
2) The first film clearly established that Austin Powers (Mike Myers) was put into suspended animation until the year 1997. The sequel begins with a copyline that informs us we’re “later that night” in following up on Austin and Vanessa’s honeymoon. But Shagged is clearly established as being set in 1999. What happened to the intervening two years? That is one incredibly long honeymoon. “Oh behave!” indeed.
3) Mini-Me is ostensibly one eighth the size of Doctor Evil (also Myers). Mini-Me can be considered to be 32 inches (the height of the actor who plays him). Based on that, we have to conclude that Doctor Evil is around sixteen feet tall. Either that or, if we guess that Dr. Evil is no taller than six feet, that would mean that Mini-Me has to be about nine inches high, which he obviously is not.
4) If Austin, in best Dorothy of Oz style, didn’t really need his mojo to function as was claimed in the denouement—if, in short, it was all in his mind–then how could its theft thirty years previously have possibly affected him some thirty years later when he was in bed with Ivana Humpalot (3rd Rock‘s Kirsten Johnson, gone entirely too soon from the film)?
After all, if the need was purely psychological, he couldn’t have known that it was gone in the first place. For that matter, if it was indeed stolen in the late 60s, then it was gone by the time Austin thawed in the late 90s. Anything done to the Austin in the past must impact on the Austin of present day. That is to say, he should never have had his mojo at any point in the second film—or the first, for that matter.
And the most important question of all: Why would anyone in his right mind be concerned about such things when the film obviously isn’t?
I suppose the problem is that I felt as completely out of his proper time as Austin was. The things that I got the biggest kick out of went right past the kids seated near me. In fact, when I laughed out loud at them, they stared at me since they couldn’t quite grasp just what it was I found so amusing. In a way, I guess I should be upset. Austin Powers has made it impossible for any new viewers to take any of the early Bond films seriously. How could any kid just being introduced to Blofeld, for instance, possibly refrain from saying “Throw me a frickin’ bone here” when they see him stroking his cat.
Then again, how many kids are ever going to bother to seek the films out? Which is a shame, since it would make them better able to appreciate some of the absurdist angles that the film takes. It was depressing to be the only one laughing when Felicity emerged from the surf clad in a bathing suit identical to that worn by Ursula Andress in Dr. No.
Likewise, when Austin caught a reflection of an assassin in the eye of a dance partner, he used her as a human shield just as Bond did in Goldfinger—although in Bond’s case, she collapsed after a single bullet. For Austin, his makeshift buffer not only survived the first bullet, but withstood a full clip from a machine gun, a bazooka, and a fall of approximately twenty stories. Me, I thought that was funny as hëll, because I had the original point of reference in my head.
What worked for the rest of the audience, on the other hand, didn’t remotely work for me. When Austin inadvertently drinks a stool sample (ruining forever the image of the “Got Milk?” ads, which might not be such a bad thing), it took the audience about five minutes to compose itself. I haven’t heard that much sustained laughter since Indiana Jones’ dad informed him the he knew Ilsa was a Nazi because “she talks in her sleep.” I just kind of sat there. I wasn’t grossed out by it, anymore than I was bothered by other gross-out points (such as the incredibly obese Scotsman) because I just felt kind of removed from it.
Oh my God, he’s drinking liquid crap! Well, no, it’s just some colored water or something.
Oh my God, Fat Bášŧárd is so gross! Well, no, it’s a massive rubber suit with crumbs.
It didn’t prompt any reaction from me other than rolling my eyes.
Although, I do freely admit that I find Doctor Evil much more entertaining than Austin himself. It’s probably because Austin is a send up of a very specific type of particular Brit spy (which was self-parody even in its heyday), whereas Doctor Evil (Blofeld-origins aside) is iconic, a take-off on virtually every mastermind/evil scientist/super villain whose plans would succeed if he would just put a gun to the hero’s head and pull the trigger—as the increasingly contemptuous Scott Evil is quick to point out. If there’s a third film, Scott has GOT to get more screen time.
The thing is, there’s all this talk now about how gross comedies are becoming these days. I found myself wishing I could de-age myself somehow and figure out whether my inability to “appreciate” them came from the concept that I was the wrong age, or whether the films just weren’t funny. Then I realized that, in a way, I could. So I tossed on my laserdisc of Animal House, which I saw when I was—if not just the right age—a lot closer to it than I am now.
Geez, what a gross film. What an utter celebration of mindlessness and juvenile attitudes. What a debauched and tasteless waste of celluloid. What a great movie.
I mean, really—is there any more glorious moment in film history than John Belushi’s Bluto, confronted by the snobbiness of the rival fraternity members declaring him to be a pig, asking, “See if you can guess what I am now?” Whereupon he shovels mashed potatoes into his mouth, engorging his cheeks, then slams his fists into the sides of his face, discharging the milky white contents over the snobby onlookers. “I’m a zit? Get it?” he announces, whereupon the all-too-short food fight breaks out.
I came to the horrific and very depressing realization that if Animal House was first released today, I would very probably not enjoy it at all. For that matter, if the film were remade, they’d probably have to jack the grossness level way up in order to pull in the desired audience.
Perhaps that’s part of what’s so frustrating for many older comic fans. Books that come out now are judged using adult standards or criteria formed by exposure to increasingly sophisticated entertainment. Meantime, we can re-read books that we enjoyed in our youth, stories that, if they were first published now, we know in our heart of hearts that we would say, “How stupid. How juvenile. How tortured is the logic, how crude is the artwork, how absurd are the plot twists that come out of left field.”
Books such as Tom Strong endeavor to recapture the charm of such bygone days, and many fans don’t know how to react to such a book, viewing it as sinful or wrongheaded or just plain stupid to try and “roll the clock back,” as it were. It’s as if any effort to produce a “retro” comic is suspect, or insincere, or viewed as a cold-hearted, calculated ploy to play on the youthful recollections of fans. It’s almost as if there’s a self-loathing involved for many fans, wanting to experience the same reactions that comics gave us in our youth, but resenting any attempts to produce comics that do so, and knowing in our hearts that even the comics we really did like as kids wouldn’t pass muster anymore.
What is the answer, I wonder? Only one really comes to mind:
“Oh, behave!”
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)
• 
Speaking of jokes that would only appeal to a certain generation, I wonder how many teenagers caught that the scene in the first film where Austin destroys the fem bots with his Mojo is a riff on the original Star Trek episode “I, Mudd” where Kirk and company do the same thing to a group of female androids using logic and absurdity instead of pelvic thrusting.
I don’t think it was just your age, PAD. I loved the first film and had all the same problems as you with the second film. One of the things that I loved about the first one is that it really did work as a Bond-style spy movie. The seduction of the enemy girl, the infiltration, almost everything worked, it just had jokes added. That really wasn’t true of the second one.
Also, the second one committed one of the great sequel sins. It took lines that were great in context in the first film and turned them into catch phrases. “Oh behave” make sense in the first movie because he was saying it to a married woman who was flirting with him. In the second film it felt forced. One of the things that really gives me hope for Avengers: Age of Ultron is that Whendon has commented on the need to make new moments instead of rehashing what worked in the first one. I’m so glad we won’t be seeing this:
Captain America: The toilet’s backed up. Anyone have a plunger?
Iron-Man: No, we don’t have a plunger, but we have a Hulk.
Captain America: The toilet’s backed up. Anyone have a plunger?
Iron-Man: No, we don’t have a plunger, but we have a Hulk.
Hawkeye: How do you think the toilet got backed up in the first place?
When I saw “Shagged” in the theater, I was the only one who laughed when Austin said the future was ruled by “dámņ dirty apes”. Everyone else looked at me like I was nuts.
I was seventeen.
Meanwhile, I’m sort of surprised Marvel never tried to reveal that Mary Jane was “a fembot all along”.
Oh they (basically) tried. At one point the Clone Saga was going to end with the revelation that MJ had been a clone all along. But I guess someone realised how close that was to Alicia/Lyja in Fantastic Four.
Just a thought. It’s been a long time since I saw the movie. I wasn’t impressed with it first time around and never saw the need to rewatch it. However, one of PADs original points is slightly flawed logic.
“3) Mini-Me is ostensibly one eighth the size of Doctor Evil (also Myers). Mini-Me can be considered to be 32 inches (the height of the actor who plays him). Based on that, we have to conclude that Doctor Evil is around sixteen feet tall. Either that or, if we guess that Dr. Evil is no taller than six feet, that would mean that Mini-Me has to be about nine inches high, which he obviously is not.”
The key word here is “Size” not “Height”. Something that is Half the Height, Half the Width and Half the Depth, is one Eighth the Size. So assuming Dr Evil to be 69 Inches (the height of the actor who plays him), then Mini-Me being 32 Inches would put him well within the “1/8” size. as he isn’t half the Width OR Depth, but he is less than half the Height.
Yeah, I worry where my brain goes sometimes.
I figured someone else would catch this – I mentioned it in the comments on the LJ RSS feed posting.
What i thought of immediately, too.
Reading this just now reminded me of how I spent a pretty good chunk of last night’s American Dad premiere thinking, “What’s with that coat Stan’s wearing?”–until the scene on the rooftop in the rain, at which point I went, “Oh, šhìŧ, it’s Blade Runner. He’s wearing Deckard’s coat. Okay…”
Peter David: Books such as Tom Strong endeavor to recapture the charm of such bygone days, and many fans don’t know how to react to such a book, viewing it as sinful or wrongheaded or just plain stupid to try and “roll the clock back,” as it were.
Luigi Novi: Did you actually encounter people expressing such reactions? Because I thought Tom Strong was great, and so were the first two Austin Powers films.
Two rebuttals regarding the original points:
1) Mini-Me, which was already mentioned above by Smiling Bandit, was intended to be 1/8th size in total volume and mass, not height. Being myself of the target age demo at the time of release (though not, apparently, the target mental/maturity demo, as I too found the film largely unfunny), I remember a lot of my friends commenting on the height discrepancy, and I – being substantially more bookish and analytical than the typical teen – had to explain it to them.
Those that bothered to ask questions of the movie, anyway. As noted, it was aimed at the decidedly less thoughtful, and most didn’t bother.
2) As to Vanessa being a fembot, I just assumed she was a doppelganger of some sort, replacing the original Vanessa either prior to meeting Austin during the present-day events of the first movie, or (more likely, IMHO) some time between the plot resolution and the epilogue (i.e. between blowing up Evil’s lair and getting married). I actually always felt that Austin’s VERY brief mourning and subsequent nonchalant dismissal of her death/destruction was a rather brilliantly funny callback to James Bond’s similarly short-lived grief over the death of his wife, Teresa. True, in the books it’s a profound shock and Bond is an alcoholic, broken man, but in the films, the woman is barely ever mentioned again, and Bond continues his pattern of serial seduction in the next film. I was particularly reminded of “For Your Eyes Only,” where, within the first five minutes, Roger Moore lays flowers at Teresa’s grave and is immediately attacked by Blofeld (riding some super-speed wheelchair, if I recall correctly), who fails to kill the spy, fails to escape, and ends up getting pushed off a helicopter into a smokestack. Bond proceeds to spend the rest of the movie chasing some Greek heiress tail and never lends his dead wife a second thought. I thought it was hilarious how Austin complains to Basil that Vanessa was a fake, and Basil just remarks, “Yes, we knew all along,” and Austin gives him a funny look, and then they just shrug it off and never mention it again, much like Bond conveniently shrugged off . . . well, EVERY woman, but particularly the woman he married. Naturally, much as those described in the above article, none of my youthful contemporaries ever got the joke reference to ancient Bond lore either.
Amusingly, what always bothered me was not that Vanessa was a fembot . . . but that no one ever informed her “mother” that her “daughter” was dead, at least not that we the viewers ever saw. “Oh, your daughter was a droid duplicate assassin who tried to kill, and was subsequently destroyed by, Austin Powers. Oh, and your real daughter is probably long-since dead. Our condolences. Signed, MI6.” Just kinda bugged me.
Regarding the Fem-bot thing; I think you and PAD both missed the point:
It was an obvious retcon, intentionally so poorly conceived that it was a spoof of poorly made retcons. Re-watch the scene: Austin even looks at the camera as to say, “that makes no f-ckin sense, but what the hey, let’s run with it”. It’s a meta joke for the more intelligent members of the audience.
Which goes back to my thoughts about PAD’s original argument in his blog entry. I think Peter’s problem wasn’t that he was not part of the intended audience, but that he wasn’t part of the ACTUAL audience. Meyers and the other writers were clearly throwing in intelligent jokes aimed at fans of the original spy-era material. And when one looks at the trilogy as a whole, you can see that the movies are centered around a poignant theme of failed father-son relationships. Austin Powers was a love letter to Meyer’s own deceased father, who was fascinated with spy-era literature/cinema and had also introduced his son to comedy as a career. There was a lot more to these movies than liquid poop jokes, and if “you” (read: PAD or whomever felt too old to appreciate the films) had watched them with an audience in on the more intelligent humor, I would bet that you would have enjoyed them better. The audience that PAD viewed the film with does not sound like the best matched crowd for him. I probably would have felt the same way surrounded by a group of essentially kids.
I never really liked the AUSTIN POWERS movies — mainly because I found the Austin Powers character endlessly annoying. It felt like little more thay Myers mugging to the camera while acting like saying catchphrases with a British accent was the funniest thing ever.
Now if they had made DOCTOR EVIL the star, these would have been much more interesting. (And DESPICABLE ME would have been more fun had Gru been more like Dr. Evil and less like, well, he was.)
Spreaking of gags that a film’;s intended audience probably don’t get – how many people laughed at the “Stairway to Heaven” gag in the second “Bill & Ted” film?
I was at my friend Bill’s place and his GF’s kids were watching it on cable, and i happened to look over at just the right moment to see it, and when i laughed, Bill looked over and laughed … and Vickey and the kids stared at both of us like “What’s so funny?”
(Of course, Bill and i seem to have been the only ones among our acquaintance who noticed as soon as we saw it that one particular Spider-Man story was a homage to two different “Spirit” stories…)
Apolagies if this isn the wrong place for this message. Stayed up pretty late last night finishing your {recent} X Factor run, I just had to see how things worked out. I can say that I haven,t felt this way about the end of something since the end of Battlestar Galactica{modern}. It was emotionally satisfying but I feel a sense of loss that these charactors will never be the same without your writing. Best wishes for your recovery after recent events. I too cannot imagine a comicbook word without you. Web of Spiderman 7 possibly the best single Spidey story ever. Your insights into Spidey were amazing{ his needing guilt}.