O’Brien wrote the script in 1991 with Robert Smigel, another SNL vet, who is otherwise best known for his character Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. The experiment stirred in me a surprising level of nostalgia for the type of silly comedy that just never gets made anymore. Decades later, over the course of four podcast episodes, O’Brien and the film’s other intended stars read aloud from the abandoned draft. When Schwarzenegger passed on the script, the project died. The venture hinged on the participation of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who would have played himself in the movie. For the Hans and Franz episodes, featuring the former SNL cast members Kevin Nealon and Dana Carvey, O’Brien reminisces about the script they’d co-written, which he considers a particularly absurd example of the micro-genre. On Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, the longtime talk-show host typically interviews other celebrities, often taking strolls down memory lane with his old comedy buddies. A few weeks ago, Conan O’Brien, who wrote for SNL from 1988 to 1991, devoted a few episodes of his podcast to pseudo-reviving one such project: Hans and Franz: The Girlyman Dilemma-“a title you probably couldn’t use today,” he concedes. But for comedy nerds, the more interesting failures are those that didn’t even make it to the screen-the ones lost in development hell on grounds of being excessively weird. None of the follow-ups succeeded on the level of Wayne’s World-its 1993 sequel, Wayne’s World 2, made less than half of what its predecessor did, and films such as It’s Pat and Stuart Saves His Family were notorious bombs that grossed less than $1 million at the domestic box office. Each project would take a sketch people recognized, stretch it to something resembling feature length, and pad the premise as much as possible with special guest stars, parody songs, or action sequences. The trend was decried as the latest example of Hollywood running out of original ideas, and the films, starting with Wayne’s World in 1992, hewed closely to SNL’s formula of recurring characters and loud catchphrases. In the 1990s, a new comedy scourge descended upon cinemas: movies based on Saturday Night Live sketches.
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