Skidoo! ...Skidoo! ...Somebody must have liked it. Don't know who.
Skidoo: the 1968 movie that catapulted so many big names of Hollywood right into a brick wall. Yes, I know it's got a movie poster that immediately reminds you of American Beauty, but The Most Beautiful Thing in the World is most definitely not in this film.
Meanwhile, I'm intrigued by the title: Skidoo.
THREE THINGS THE TITLE REMINDS ME OF IMMEDIATELY:
1) "The Elephant Show" on Nickelodeon, with that 'Skiddamarinkie-dinkie-dink' song they always closed on.
2) a decent brand of snowmobile.
3) the number 23.
Apparently though, none of those has much to do with this movie. I suppose it's possible that there were 23 enormous movie stars who got concussions and thus were tricked into signing up for this...but I'm fairly sure there are more of them than that. Or it's possible that Frankie Avalon is supposed to call to mind the beach and thus jetskis and thus things that kind of look like jetskis, such as snowmobiles...but jetskis hadn't been invented yet, so the chain dies there. Or it's possible that Jackie Gleason was supposed to be The Elephant...but he actually speaks, and he's definitely not 8 feet tall and plush, so I'm going to assume not.
So the title doesn't appear to have a purpose at all. Well, to be fair, Carol Channing sings a song called 'Skidoo' in the "climactic" boat confrontation with Groucho Marx and a bunch o' hippies, but the song doesn't actually let us in on the secret of what the hell skidoo is, so it just adds to the confusion of poster-film disconnect. If I had seen this movie in theaters after forming an opinion from the poster, I would have been completely bewildered and absolutely pissed.
THREE LIES THIS MOVIE POSTER TELLS:
1) Frank Gorshin, Burgess Meredith, Cesar Romero, Otto Preminger...It's an Adam-West Batman reunion! There's going to be either over-the-top shenanigans or kitschy camp all over!
2) Groucho Marx is playing God, the Lord of Creation, the role that would later be co-opted by Alanis Morissette.
3) At least one hot young woman is a focus of this movie.
The truth is depressing. Every actor plays against type, literally taking the opposite of their accustomed role and half-assedly playing that. God is not GOD, but instead a paranoiac Godfather figure whose only real display of power is ordering the death of the Barney-Rubble/Barney-Fife character in a carwash 15 minutes into the movie. And the focus of the movie was pudgy-to-fat guys in horizontal stripes. Both in prison, and on the "climactic" yacht. Wardrobe must have been at a loss when they needed new outfits for the yachtmen. It was probably because 90% of the costume budget went to Carol Channings and her Big-Bird-a-go-go outfit. Actually, that brings up another trio:
THREE STRIKES AGAINST THE MOVIE:
1) Carol Channing trying & failing to fill the role of sex symbol
2) Groucho Marx trying & succeeding to not be funny while making you beg for him to make a joke, any joke
3) The LSD trip in the middle was the most normal piece of the film.
Perhaps now's a good time to give a brief recap of the plot, since the title and poster screwed us all over.
Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing silently fight over the remote for a good ten minutes at the beginning. That's how they opened their film: a closeup of a channel-changing television for ten minutes. After a while, Jackie Gleason thinks some bad guys are outside, so he gets a gun and sneaks out there, only to discover his daughter's having a pseudo-English discussion with a hippie. Then the real mob shows up to get help from Jackie Gleason and there are suddenly
THREE THINGS YOU REALIZE THAT DON'T MAKE SENSE IN YOUR CONCEPT OF REALITY:
1) Frankie Avalon is a mob enforcer.
2) Jackie Gleason is a hitman.
3) Frankie Avalon has facial hair (eyeliner-pencil mustache).
Jackie Gleason heads off to kill a stool pigeon who's in jail, his daughter strips to her bra and panties so hippies can paint her, and Carol Channing dresses like Street-Corner Big Bird and invites all the hippies back to her place. Then Carol Channing decides to find out what happened to her husband, and so she tries to seduce Frankie Avalon for information. When that doesn't work (the seduction works, but not the flow of info), she tries to blackmail him into talking by threatening to stay there in her bra and tights until his moll du jour arrives.
Instead, her daughter shows up and kisses Frankie until she remembers her free-love-advocating sweetie is in the car outside. They all head off to talk to God (aka the Godfather) on his yacht.Meanwhile, in jail, Jackie Gleason writes a letter to his wife and licks the envelope. Unfortunately, the paper was soaked in LSD. One supposedly good trip later, there are
THREE THINGS THAT ARE SAID THAT BEAR REPEATING:
1) "She's got my ears! She's got my ears!"
2) "It's happened: he's lost his ego."
3) "Hey, maybe if I took some of that stuff, I wouldn't have to rape people no more!"
...I just fell asleep for 14 hours after writing that last part. I can only assume it was some sort of protective coma. My body is obviously trying to tell me that I'm doing permanent damage by doing an all-out recap. So instead, I'll have to settle on a quick set of sentences and hope I don't pass out on my keyboard again.
THREE SENTENCES TO FINISH OFF THE PRISON PLOT:
1) Jackie Gleason has his technological wonder of a draft-card-burner cellmate to cobble together a radio capable of talking to another inmate's television (and vice versa), thus defying all known physics.
2) The draft-card-burner pours all of his LSD-stationery into a prison kitchen mixer just before everybody in the prison (warden, guards, kitchen workers, switchboard operators, etc) eats the food that comes out of that mixer, thus defying all prison conventions, such as the guards eating different food than the inmates.
3) While everyone else is tripping, Jackie Gleason and the draft-card-burner steal a bunch of kitchen sacks (labeled with pictures of meat but lettuce pours out), sew them together, snag one canister of oxygen from the prison's ER during an operation, and sneak out to the yard in two garbage cans, where they assemble their collection into a full-size hot-air balloon and escape, thus defying all limitations of time, drug dosage, maximum capacity, and again...all known physics.
THREE SENTENCES TO FINISH OFF THE YACHT PLOT:
1) Groucho "God" Marx acts bored with the whole thing, especially the part where he perfunctorily starts unbuttoning Jackie Gleason's daughter's overcoat, as if sexually harrassing a young woman wasn't even good enough a motivation for him any more.
2) The hippie gets offered a drug-dealing job, gets molested by a rail-thin, 7-foot-tall black Amazon, and gets a cryptic phone call out to his hippie brethren, who figure out his meaning using logic straight from an Adam-West Batman Riddler episode ("What about X17? X...maybe that's 'used to be'! So 'used to be 17...' The old Pier 17! Let's go!").
3) The hippies go en masse to rescue their friends, and Carol Channing joins them, abandoning her Big Bird outfit for a pirate costume that includes a pirate captain's hat connected to a long blond wig, in which getup she sings the theme song in typical Carol Channing 'fashion' and in which she even manages to spread her legs and display the crease of her panties, thus causing the entire audience's eyes to ignite and fall out.
There. Done. Damnation, that was a bad movie. Bad in a way that makes even Adam West uncomfortable, and he was in "Legends of the Superheroes."