One of my favorite people of all time, Norm MacDonald, somewhat famously embarrassed Courtney Thorne-Smith in this Conan interview back in the late 1990s. If you haven’t seen it, you absolutely should watch the whole thing, or if you have seen it a dozen times, like me, you will enjoy watching it again.
In spite of the specific mention of the movie “Chairman of the Board“, I never bothered finding out anything about it. Recently, however, I did, and it seems Norm’s wild guess about the quality of the movie was spot-on. It has the reputation of being one of the worst, least funny movies ever created, and from a budget of $10 million, its box office take was $181,233. Indeed, the most lengthy part of the movie’s Wikipedia entry is about the Norm MacDonald barbs.
i would never waste my time watching a movie that bad, but I had to at least check out the trailer. Please grit your teeth and take two minutes out of your life to watch this travesty;
Allow me to offer up the following specific criticisms of the above:
- The first scene is an obvious direct rip-off of the wake-up scene from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, complete with zany inventions.
- The main character’s love of crazy contraptions is, once again, a total rip-off of Pee Wee.
- There are a smattering of completely ridiculous sound effects, akin to those you would hear in a Warner Brothers cartoon from the early 1950s
- The setup of an older, sensible rich guy taking an interest in a goofy, young, poor fellow with a clever invention has been done so many times that “cliche” isn’t strong enough a word.
- The setup of the aforementioned older rich guy dropping dead and inexplicably leaving his vast fortune to his young protege has been done even more.
- And the tripe about a board of directors comprised of even older, whiter, grumpier guys who are aghast at some zany whippersnapper showing up to lead them would make a five year old boy roll his eyes with disgust.
- Letting a formerly staid, boring office cut loose (thanks to the fresh young blood) can be witnessed in the movie “9 to 5” and about five hundred other movies.
- And, finally, there seems to be an ongoing misunderstanding about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which is NOT the same as CPR. And neither of those procedures requires the applicant to dart their tongue about like a lizard before starting.
Suffice it to say that I’m not surprised that this was, as Norm predicted, “box office poison”. Incredibly, however, Carrot Top is sporting a net worth of $75 million or so these days, so I guess it didn’t exactly ruin his career.
