Americathon
Los Angeles: Fotonovel Publications, 1979
192 pages (unpaginated), $2.75
_____
Yes, this is the worst Fotonovel™ ever. I saw snippets of the flop 1979 movie comedy Americathon on TV in ’81 and felt unimpressed; now I can experience the unimpressiveness in its entirety via the comic-booky Fotonovel™ format of full-color movie stills overlaid with captions, word balloons, and sound effects.
In that far-off year 1998, the United States has run out of fossil fuel, maybe because most citizens wear ugly striped jogging suits made from petroleum-based fabrics. Not only that, but “America’s wealthiest citizen,” a Native-American designer roller skate tycoon named Sam Birdwater, has given the dead-broke government thirty days to repay him $400 billion in loans or else he threatens “to foreclose.” So President Chet Roosevelt, a psychobabbling “graduate of primal grope therapy,” decides to raise the money by holding a month-long national TV telethon—the Americathon—and oh, the inanity that ensues. Actually, compared to the grade-school fartfests that comprise today’s movie comedies, this movie’s pathetic stabs at social and political satire seem almost endearing. (In a typical stab, and the closest this flick comes to scatological humor, ex-Queen Elizabeth shills on billboards for toilet paper.)
See? Would I lie about something like this?
The cast doing the stabbing includes John Ritter, Fred Willard, Harvey Korman, Zane Buzby as a Vietnamese “Puke Rock” star (who, at least in the book, doesn’t actually puke—sorry to disappoint anyone), and a young, seriously permed Jay Leno in a bit part as a man who participates in a mother/son boxing match for the telethon, and of course Mom knocks him out “with a kick to the family jewels”, because the movie would have sucked a little less otherwise, right?
Nor would I ever lie about Mr. Leno’s hair.
I’ll just return this Fotonovel™ to my collection of flop-based movie memorabilia, which includes a wordless Super Mario Bros. coloring book and an anatomically-incorrect doll of Madonna’s chanteuse character, Breathless Mahoney, from Dick Tracy. Flops have their allure, I guess.
February 26-March 2, 2001
(revised June 5-6, 2023)
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 