Not Necessarily All in the Right Order

I agree this principle seems wrong. I don’t think there’s a person currently living in the US who didn’t encounter Wagner and Mozart through Bugs Bunny before encountering the originals. In fact I think most people these days would find Spartacus pretty tedious unless they’ve encountered its treatment as parody or otherwise in subsequent media — at which point discovery of the original becomes interesting and layered.

Definitely watch “Don’t Look Back” and “The last Waltz” before “Spinal Tap”.

Chicken Run before The Great Escape is a definite no no.

Shaun of the Dead before Dawn of the Dead.

Although (to support jim’s point above) my kids laughed through many episodes of The Simpsons without watching The Godfather, Lord of the Flies, Twin Peaks, etc etc. Then they watched those films and laughed again.

Spaceballs should not be viewed until after seeing the original Star Wars trilogy and at least one or two episodes of the original Star Trek series.
A friend of mine made this mistake when he was about 13. The result was definitely confusion.
Oh, and The Godfather should be seen before any mafia movie made since. Very important.

I had already seen Kentucky Fried Movie a few times before I finally saw Enter the Dragon, which became an absolutely hilarious film as a result.

> Other nominations of films that must not be watched in the wrong order?

First watch _The Truman Show_, then _The Lives of Others_. (You’ll go nuts if you don’t watch them in that order.)

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Aloha ~~~ Ozzie Maland ~~~ San Diego

Does this post have anything to do with the Universal Studios being destroyed by fire as we speak?

Fail Safe before Dr. Strangelove.

And anway, you’re all wrong. I’M Spartacus.

Sullivan’s Travels before O Brother, Where Art Thou.

Les Biches before The Royal Tenenbaums.

I was going to recommend The Conformist in conjunction with something, too, but that seemed to be taking it a bit far.

Nah. Douglas Adams is OK, but Robert Sheckley is better. Funnier.

Don’t watch The Flintstones before watching The Honeymooners?

Nah. Douglas Adams is OK, but Robert Sheckley is better. Funnier.

What’s this? abb1 making sense? Amazing.

I am with #13. Certainly, “Casablanca” should not be seen before “A Night In Casablanca”.

Don’t watch Top Cat before you watch The Phil Silvers Show (one-upping tom hurka!)

Play It Again, Sam and Casablanca. (Which we watched, in the right order, as a double feature with the kids.)

That was for “q the enchanter”

27: Spaceballs was uninspiring, until the villain “Pizza the Hutt” appeared – that balanced the books.

Spaceballs should not be viewed at all – ever.

Nonsense. “Comb the desert,” alone is worth the price of admission.

Oh dear: I’ve watched Brian an endless number of times. But Spartacus? Nope.

I’m sure the jokes have been thoroughly missed on me.

Which films should you watch to make the Marx Brothers make sense, by the way?

Some blogger, I forget who, correctly pointed out that The Simpsons marks the end of the Western cultural tradition (i.e., from the Greeks through Hollywood) because it incorporates enough of that tradition that it leaves future generations with no compelling reason to go back to anything beyond The Simpsons itself. Sort of the way Justinian saw his law code as leaving no reason for lawyers and judges to look to any earlier sources of Roman law.

Everyone should see Star 80 before they first get laid.

I call it the sexual driver’s training film.

I don’t think there’s a person currently living in the US who didn’t encounter Wagner and Mozart through Bugs Bunny before encountering the originals.

This influence can lead in both directions — my wife can only think of Wagner with derision, while I saw most of the Ring Cycle with student $5 standing only tickets.
More generally, I think that insisting on a sequentially pure approach to culture or history is more of an impossibility than a mistake: both in the practical sense — do we really need to read Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho before Austen’s Sense and Sensibility? — and in pedagogical sense — learning and enthusiasm can run in both directions on these chains of reference and causation.

Ah, Fellini. Watch La Strada and especially Le Notti di Cabiria before any of his pop-surrealism. Marvel at Giulietta Masina.

I assume it’s a near-universal experience for anyone born after, say, 1970 to have absorbed countless derivatives before being exposed to the original, whether those derivatives are parodic or not. Like most people, I still find myself a little bit annoyed when I discover the hidden precedent for some film that impressed me when I first saw it, and I do find that a lack of direct exposure to the original diminishes the appreciation of a good parody. But both of these irritations are gradually fading, both in my own life and in the culture at large. Riffs on “The Seventh Seal” and “Citizen Kane” find audiences much wider than either of those films have. While the cultural purist in me still gets his panties in a twist when an audience gets a kick out of some homage whose antecedent they don’t recognize, the fact is that this is how culture has always operated: folklore and oral traditions accumulate in layers, and soon nobody knows what the original text was. In a culture that now produces more film content in a generation than anyone has time to see, it is inevitable that we will begin to operate more like an oral culture and less like a textual one. Subsequent generations will learn about great films mostly through folkloric reinterpretations that incorporate strands of them and bastardize them, just as oral cultures learn their mythologies through constantly-changing folktales instead of fixed sacred texts.

That being said, I’m still pretty hung up on text, and I try to evangelize the originals whenever I can. But I know it’s a losing battle.

Watch High Noon before Blazing Saddles.

As both Ben Hur and the theory of laughing first (and then laughing again) have been mentioned above, I’ll nominate seeing the celluoid closet before Ben Hur or Rebecca. All of Celluoid Closet is great – parts are fun and parts tragic – but Gore Vidal reminiscing about not telling Charlton Heston what was going on in Ben Hur is classic and Susie Bright being outraged about the housekeeper going through the underwear drawer in Rebecca made me look at that film in a whole new -if also snide – way.
That Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine didn’t talk about their characters in The Children’s Hour comes closer to tragic, though.

A bit late to the thread, but Destry Rides Again is one of the primary sources for Blazing Saddles.

Bonfire of the Vanities before Hudson Hawk.

I grew up with a big unanswered question: why would anyone name a bear Yogi?

Don’t read this thread title before seeing Morecambe and Wise featuring special guest Andrew Preview.

I had my boy watch chien andalou before seeing Snow White. but he was a hardy lad

Here are some things that come to mind:

Jean de Florette before Manon of the Spring (too obvious?);

The Thin Blue Line before The Green Mile (for an earth-based framework in which to consider the issue of black men on death row in the south, plus, what a nice serendipity of titles!);

Taxi to the Dark Side before any episode of the television show 24 (I know, 24 is not technically a movie, but I can’t think of a movie that has advanced the view that torture is just one part of a well-rounded program of crime prevention in quite the way that 24 has);

The Gold Rush and City Lights before, oh, ANY modern romantic/physical comedy (it seems to me that the boxing scene in City Lights is overlooked as one of the most hilarious and perfectly choreographed bits of physical comedy ever put on film – absolutely priceless – after a dozen times seeing it, it still makes me laugh until I cry – sheer genius – in my humble opinion much funnier, orders of magnitude funnier than the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera which is often cited as one of the classic comedy scenes – have I used enough superlatives yet? (full disclosure: I have a tiny bit of experience with boxing));

Nanook of the North before March of the Penguins (maybe just my northern hemisphere bias showing?);

Little Big Man before Dances With Wolves (although, really, the latter should simply be avoided – I think it’s a terrible movie – these are contrasting visions of “white man goes native”, and I have a hard time believing that the parallel nature of the titles is purely accidental, inviting the unhappy comparison that arises by viewing in this order)

Amadeus before any of the other of the myriad “great composer” movies

Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, and perhaps the rest of the Kubrick oeuvre before Next (and I am NOT recommending seeing Next – I didn’t care for it – but there was a scene in which Dr. Strangelove was playing on a television in the background, something I found kind of clever and intriguing, plus a second scene (eyelids propped open while being forced to watch media) that seemed an obvious nod to A Clockwork Orange – I wonder if folks can identify other Kubrick references in Next?)

Any movie that the Coen brothers directed with the actors/actress John Goodman, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Nicholas Cage, Dan Hedaya, William H. Macy, Frances McDormand, and Tim Blake Nelson before any other movie with these actors/actresses (I think the Coen brothers movies managed to extract the most brilliant career performances from this group; I know, Cage did Leaving Las Vegas, but everything that is good about him was already there in Raising Arizona)

There is, of course, an enormous body of WWII movies, and though I can’t recommend a specific order, if someone is working their way through these, the standard triumphalist fare should probably be alternated with Slaughterhouse Five, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Catch 22, and Saving Private Ryan; some other antidotes to military glory movies that should be required to be interspersed in the viewing order include Breaker Morant, Gallipoli, M*A*S*H (which also should be seen before any episodes of the derivative and, I think, wildly inferior television series), Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and Full Metal Jacket.

I don’t have a recommended order for these two movies, but I do think they should be watched back to back: A Prairie Home Companion and The Devil Wears Prada. (I was simply stunned at the brilliance of Meryl Streep’s acting in these two extremely different contemporaneous roles – I think their contrast highlights her genius like nothing else).

See any other movie that you’re likely to watch that has actor Brad Dourif in it before you see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest because after OFOCN he WILL be Billy Bibbit. Actually, that’s an interesting thread in itself: which movie performances/roles do you find so compelling in some way that the role carries an indelible permanent association for you afterward? These must be a very mixed blessing for an actor/actress if there is any commonality in such experience – this would be closely related to the issue of typecasting. Here’s a few other possibilities for me: John Turturro as Bernie Bernbaum in Miller’s Crossing; Marisa Berensen as Lady Lyndon in Barry Lyndon; Keir Dullea as Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey; Christopher Walken as Nick in The Deer Hunter. Wow, that’s an interesting look under my hood – all of these are characters that in some fashion embody desperation. I wonder what that means? All right I’ve definitely drifted from the theme – time to end.