Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Movies with Funny Chases

“Son, you got a panty on yore head.” – Hayseed in Pickup, Raising Arizona

Way back in 1998 IMDB first created message boards.  They didn’t look like they do today.  They were divided into “Men’s Room” and “Ladies Lounge” and the idea was to give each gender a place to discuss movies.  The real reason for the separation was likely the fact that Amazon had just bought IMDB and they wanted to link to gender-specific products in each message board.

I mention this because the very first post ever made in the Men’s Room was “What is the best car chase in movies?”  All the usual suspects were named.  Since then the same question has been asked several thousand more times (and that’s probably a conservative estimate.)

While I’m not ruling out doing a car chase category in the future, I figured I’d put a little different twist on the subject and recommend some movies that have funny chase scenes in them.

The movies I am going to write about involve a man looking for a bride, a mix up over some suitcases, a bickering husband and wife in a van, and a man just looking to pick up some Huggies.

As I post the reviews, I will come back and add links here for those posts:

Seven Chances (1925)
What's Up, Doc? (1972)
Raising Arizona (1987)
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)

On to the reviews…

8 comments:

  1. My favorite funny car chases is in the original version of The In-Laws.

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    1. I'm pretty sure I saw that many years ago when it came to broadcast TV when I was a kid. Unfortunately, I don't really remember anything about it now. I may have to check it out again.

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  2. Well, the mother of all car chases must be in The Blues Brothers.

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    1. Probably true. In this case, two of the four films I am going to write about are foot chases.

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  3. Any Benny Hill chase scene with Yakety Sax playing gets my vote.

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    1. I actually thought about looking for a video of that to embed at the bottom of the post, but I finally decided to skip it thinking not enough people would get the reference. Maybe I was wrong.

      I used to watch The Benny Hill Show on PBS when I was a teenager. I saw my first "naughty bits" that way. Even then it amused me that PBS would seemingly put on anything as long as it was British.

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  4. Pretty much the entire movie of The General with Buster Keaton is a chase scene.

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    1. You're right. There's also chases in Our Hospitality, College, and several others. I could have picked most any of them. I select this one because it was the one that made me create the category and it had a small tie to What's Up, Doc.

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