JoelSchlosberg

I'm also surprised by the implication that the radio shows are obscure. The Shadow is likely the most famous radio-based character (the Lone Ranger or the Green Hornet are the only real competition, and are more known via their TV shows, while the Shadow's radio presence overshadowed its pulps), and is also known for being voiced by Orson Welles. And the show was ubiquitous on collections of old time radio; any cassette or CD box set sampling multiple classic shows was guaranteed to have an episode.

In fact, the pulp magazines in which the Shadow and similar heroes like the Spider and Doc Savage appeared were called the "hero pulps" ... and reading them in hindsight of their inspiring superheroes, they do come off like superheroes that do the crime-fighting that superheroes do, but without superpowers -- strong in a "works out a lot" way but not to a supernatural (or super-serum) degree, and having to rely on their wits and gadgets like Batman. But the Shadow's mind-clouding powers come close to qualifying as a superpower in the modern sense. The Shadow's hat-and-red-scarf disguise is straight from the original pulp magazine covers: Almost every pulp cover had the Shadow in some variant of it. (The question then becomes, why did they get an actor who looks nothing like the pulp cover Shadow?)

Heck, even the Shadow's fellow radio hero, the Green Hornet, had a cool custom car!

As Carl Sagan pointed out, the slogan "I'd Walk a Mile For a Camel" sounds like it's referring to the product's addictiveness rather than its enjoyability. "I'd climb a mountain for a Llama" sounds like it's boasting, "our cigarettes are even more addictive!" Speaking of which, the billboard design is based almost exactly on an actual Camel billboard, including that weird blow up doll mouth:

In fact, I recall that being a staple of shipwreck stories. If a sailor was lost near the equator and had no idea where they were, they knew they were in the Southern Hemisphere if they could see the Southern Cross in the constellations, or that they were in the Northern Hemisphere if they could see Polaris. (With there being no single bright star near the South Pole to serve as the equivalent of Polaris.)

Or the other late-'90s movie of devilish machinations in New York City on the brink of the millennium, End of Days.

I thought it might be just me, but I found the music really umpleasant. It is not that the songs are terrible but the way they are used. The music relentlessly calls attention to itself in a gratingly distracting way, like it's constantly elbowing the viewer saying "I'm so cute! Aren't I?"

It is mentioned that SMG isn't in glasses to make her look less attractive by romcom standards, but why don't they use the other half of the cliche, having her hair up so she can let it down? When she says that her rival has better hair it is unclear not only why it's so much better, but what the difference is supposed to be, with both in the general "shoulder length straight" category (not to mention they both seem very much dated to the decade of The Rachel in retrospect). The most cliched "ugly hairstyle" is a bob, which would contrast as the opposite of a let-it-hang-down style. And was there a purpose in having SMG's hair be an unnatural color? The "red hair that cannot be confused with natural redhead hair" is very reminiscent of Rachael Leigh Cook's hair in Josie and the Pussycats, but that was all of a piece with its movie's satirical amped-up artificiality.

Nobody's mentioned how cheap the special effects were during the floating scene. Full body shots are conspicuously absent, and when Bartlett falls, it cuts away from him actually hitting the ground, with an off-screen crashing sound effect like something out of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Plus, as Wikipedia points out the movie has something of a theme of references to Fred Astaire, so it begs comparison to the scene in Royal Wedding where Astaire dances on the ceiling. A half-century of special effects earlier, that managed to show Astaire defying gravity without cuts or closeups: [media='']https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3PKmHombfU[/media]

One explanation for the crab beside the ones suggested: it's a witch's familiar, like Jiji in Kiki's Delivery Service. An animal hanging around in a movie updating witchcraft would be a natural spin on the concept. And it explains why the crab reflects the personality of a guy who's still walking around on his own, since in many accounts familiars have just such a psychic connection to their witches. While Jiji is more of a sidekick, he has a special connection to Kiki in that only she, and none of the other witches, is able to hear him talk. (I was also reminded of Fritz Leiber's science fiction novel Gather, Darkness!, which has familiars explained as telepathically-linked clones.) It should also be noted that the DVD's cast listing has the crab credited as itself.

When did the Internet decide that recasting Ernest after Jim Varney's passing was an acceptable idea? I remember when it was utterly indignant at the existence of these: [media=''] [/media]

Vow of chastity vs. April O'Neil (or Casey Jones for those so inclined)

The show's discussion of the "woman whose hotness is concealed by wearing glasses" trope begs the question of how eyeglasses exist in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. If they're not just for show, don't the lenses and frames have to be custom-manufactured, implying a fairly extensive functional technological system? How often do glasses get replaced as eyesight changes? Do they have a supply of glass to grind into new lenses? Or do those in need of eyeglasses head to an abandoned Pearle Vision outlet that didn't get pulverized in the nuclear war and grab whatever pair's the best fit?

Why does the Provisional Government call itself "provisional"? Wouldn't that offer an opening for a more self-confident government to win support? I could only be reminded of Carl Sagan's observation:

Why don't the frog mutants have actual frog powers that are actually functional, rather than just frog heads that for all practical purposes are odd-looking versions of human heads? Why don't they have intimidating jumping or tongue-extending abilities, like Toad from X-Men? The "three snakes" thing doesn't count if it's just as much a departure from one-snaked toads as one-snaked humans. The movie doesn't really use them as a visual metaphor for outsider status. If the frog heads are just going for random weirdness for its own sake... let's just say Forbidden Zone did it better.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles do not sing songs about tacos. [media=Pizza is awesome!] [/media]

If Sam Hell's "equipment" is so valuable, why do they (ahem) manhandle it so frequently with shocks from the codpiece as a routine disciplinary measure? If they want to induce pain in a bodily organ to keep him in line, why not choose, well, any other one? If they want a restraint that cannot be removed or wriggled out of, why not a Battlefield Earth-style collar? (Yes, this movie is making Battlefield Earth look well-reasoned in comparison.)

Could the frog mutants being seen as an unwanted species in a desert be a reference to cane toads as an invasive species in Australia? Hell Comes to Frogtown was neither made in nor set in Australia, and cane toads weren't mentioned in the Mad Max movies, but could this be a reference to the association established by Mad Max between post-apocalyptic movies and Australia?

Does anyone know what the TV edits for this movie were? As a broadcast channel, WPIX had plenty of editing for TV, in fact they had the very first TV edit I noticed (Dirty Harry, the getting the "and a hard-on" part silenced). There's pretty much no movie that can't be edited for TV, even ones like Scarface or whose very premise seems to obviate it. But how did they pull off this one?

On Facebook, Neal Fersko mentions that this movie was shown often on Saturday afternoons at NYC's WPIX TV station. I grew up with that channel (or as New Yorkers called it, "channel 11") and its penchant for showing cheesy action movies like Invasion USA on lazy afternoons. But I remember them being relatively coherent and normal motion pictures like Invasion USA (yup, this movie is even making Cannon's output look customary in comparison).

Turkish Hell Comes to Frogtown is... Hell Comes to Frogtown. But with a suitably bonkers VHS box:

With a straw.

In Film Quotations: 11,000 Lines Spoken on Screen, Arranged by Subject, and Indexed the immortal "swallow two Snow Balls and a Ding-Dong" line is described as a "deep thought" (and Valerie Perrine is considered "very chunky").

What about man boobs?