The movie Leslie Nielsen always knew wasn’t funny: “There’s no real parody in there”
It may shock some younger film fans to learn that Leslie Nielsen was once taken quite seriously as a dramatic actor, with his performances in event films like Forbidden Planet and The Poseidon Adventure, could have earned him the moniker of ‘action star’ before the term ever became popularised.
However, his aptitude for deadpan humour and physical comedy was made apparent when he was asked to parody the types of disaster films he once starred in when he was cast in Airplane!, and thus the ‘80s saw Nielsen becoming one of the leading comedy icons of his generation.
While his performance as Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun trilogy would be what he’d become best known for, his other hits included Spy Hard, Mr Magoo, and Wrongfully Accused. Of course, comedy tends to be a harder genre to crack than any other, and even someone as talented as Nielsen was bound to have a few misfires, but even then, some of his films that were initially unsuccessful eventually earned more appreciation as cult classics.
While Dracula: Dead and Loving It was seen as a disappointment when compared to the other Mel Brooks parody films, Nielsen’s turn as the titular vampire was relatively well-received, and similarly, he was a critical part of the Scary Movie franchise as President Harris, a series that has been particularly popular with millennials.
However, even he couldn’t defend 2001: A Space Travesty, a science fiction spoof that took shots at the Stanley Kubrick masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, as he claimed, the film’s jokes weren’t adding anything particularly new.
“It’s a dumb and stupid comedy,” Nielsen declared frankly, “That was always the problem with having the working title as 2001: A Space Travesty, because it seems like we are going to parody 2001: A Space Odyssey, which we don’t. There is a sequence with a shuttle going up, but we have plenty of shuttles today, and it’s a comedy sequence. There’s no real parody in there that I can think of.”
Parody seems to work best in proximity, such that Dracula: Dead and Loving It was released only shortly after Francis Ford Coppola released Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Spy Hard debuted when the James Bond series was at the peak of its popularity, but 2001: A Space Odyssey was already over three decades old by the time that Space Travesty was released, meaning that many of the references to the Kubrick film passed over younger viewers entirely.
Moreover, as the actor mentioned, it wasn’t a strict parody of that one film as it also incorporated satire of other sci-fi properties, making it another case in which the film felt too late, as there had already been much better-received sci-fi spoofs in the forms of Galaxy Quest and Spaceballs, both of which seemed to have more affinity for the genre.
The worst thing that a comedy can be is not memorable, and 2001: A Space Travesty is a film that some of Nielsen’s biggest fans don’t even know exists, where the only good things ever said about it have been related to his performance, which shows that even if he knew that it wasn’t working, it didn’t mean that he didn’t try.
