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Is that the one with the banks committing SuperFraud?

Yes, the first one was where Grumps McGruff attempted to expose (among other things) ADA Jack McCoy's complicity in the conspiracy to commit superfraud against America.

"Officer McGruff, you were heard earlier accusing District Attorney McCoy of having quote 'superfraud friends' unquote. Can you elaborate further on this?"
"Yes, I can. I believe that I have come very close to exposing a conspiracy - for which Mister Rogers over there is a hired goon, perhaps even a henchman third-class - on the part of several elite officials within the government, attempting to commit superfraud against the public. When I got too close, they shut me down."
"And... what is superfraud?"
"A fraud so extreme it cannot be defined by real numbers. The mathematics are beyond me, but my understanding is that the aftermath of such a criminal act could potentially leave the government and the fine upstanding taxpayers of this municipality in a state of infinite bankruptcy."

Surlethe wrote:Mine is the 18-wheeler backwards chase. When you think about it, it's so contrived, but the way the movie sets it up so seamlessly, you don't even blink when they start after each other.

Haha, that was great, wasn't it? Can you believe they did the turn-over sequence in one shot? Admittedly it cost something like eight million to do so they couldn't afford to fuck it up, but given the complexity of the sequence it's pretty incredible.

Lonestar wrote:Is that the one with the banks committing SuperFraud?

In the director's cut it's more clear that the superfraud attempt was being backed by the Communist Party of Belgium. In the uncut scene when Grumps visits McCoy's office, you can see copies of Le Drapeau Rouge and De Roode Vaan on the coffee table. This is incidentally why McCoy demonstrates that he can speak French AND Dutch in the abbatoir chase.

Ford Prefect wrote:Can you believe they did the turn-over sequence in one shot?

I know! You know what bugs me? When Children of Men did a one-shot scene two thirds as long as this one, the critics were all, "cinematic genius this, cinematic genius that", but did they mention a damn thing when this movie came out? Noooo.

It's hard enough to find any reviews of the film at all. Ebert's legendary review has never been found.

I read it. Once. When I was six, in an old yellowed newspaper that my parents were about to use for kindling in the fireplace. Word has it he refuses to admit he ever wrote it.

Surlethe wrote:I read it. Once. When I was six, in an old yellowed newspaper that my parents were about to use for kindling in the fireplace. Word has it he refuses to admit he ever wrote it.

Wait... How old are you?

I thought you were younger than that. Grumps McGriff came out when I was a kid.

Well, don't forget the limited rerelease they did in cinemas, playing all the films back to back, though admittedly Ebert wrote his review on the original release. Christ, you'd think they'd do a proper DVD release of all of them. I have all the films on LaserDisk, but I don't have anything to play them on. I hear there was a DVD release of some kind in America, but naturally it wasn't released here.

I mean, I've got those reels, but I'm always worried about damaging them.

There wasn't a DVD release, that was just rumors and aborted projects. The DVDs will never be released. A lot of the details are buried under NDAs and sealed court documents, but the short of it is that the legal mess surrounding the Grumps McGruff franchise makes the Macross licensing situation look positively clear-cut. I think someone at the studio actually went to jail because of it.

You could probably do a whole movie about the making and aftermath of Grumps McGruff.

Uraniun235 wrote:There wasn't a DVD release, that was just rumors and aborted projects. The DVDs will never be released. A lot of the details are buried under NDAs and sealed court documents, but the short of it is that the legal mess surrounding the Grumps McGruff franchise makes the Macross licensing situation look positively clear-cut. I think someone at the studio actually went to jail because of it.

You could probably do a whole movie about the making and aftermath of Grumps McGruff.

The way I heard it, it wasn't just for the music licensing, but it was essentially the exact legal opposite of the mistake that made Night of the Living Dead public domain. Which is a shame, because the music redefined genre theory on its own. There's an extensive book on this in our uni library called: Genre Theory - Gruffing With The Audience, but due to, again, legal issues, it's illegal to read more than five paragraphs or to remember more than three.

Rye wrote: The way I heard it, it wasn't just for the music licensing, but it was essentially the exact legal opposite of the mistake that made Night of the Living Dead public domain. Which is a shame, because the music redefined genre theory on its own. There's an extensive book on this in our uni library called: Genre Theory - Gruffing With The Audience, but due to, again, legal issues, it's illegal to read more than five paragraphs or to remember more than three.

I've seen cross-references to this within our library system, but the book itself is kept well-hidden. Meanwhile, there is one aspect of the film series that is free from the legal entanglements (well, at least mostly free): the catering. I've counted at least two books on this in our library alone (one focusing solely on the use of turkey), along with a cross-reference that may be to a draft of the script. It, too, is kept well-hidden. There are stories about it, though. I heard from a page that they keep it in the deepest, gloomiest part of the law school, guarded at all times by a unit of students and professors masquerading as a class on tort law.

There actually is footage of McGruff II on DVD available legally but it's almost impossible to find. An Italian miniseries called L'ombrello Nero used bits of the rickshaw chase and the three aerial shots of Mumbai as stock footage (it's unclear how they got hold of it, but word is that there was a preliminary deal with the RAI to cut the first two films together into a serial for Italian-language markets, and when the deal fell through one reel got mislabelled and ended up in their library). The DVD was only released as a give-away in 2003 and all international eBay listings get pulled almost immediately technically because it can't be exported from Italy.

Saving for posterity, because I can.
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Uraniun235 wrote:There wasn't a DVD release, that was just rumors and aborted projects. The DVDs will never be released. A lot of the details are buried under NDAs and sealed court documents, but the short of it is that the legal mess surrounding the Grumps McGruff franchise makes the Macross licensing situation look positively clear-cut. I think someone at the studio actually went to jail because of it.

There's actually a chance that it may be released in Canada. As some of you may know, the 2nd movie was actually the first film of any sort ever to be shot on the IMAX format, and it was intended to be used for the world premier demonstration of IMAX at Expo '70 in Osaka. Due to a clause which was slipped into the contract by one of the IMAX corporation founders, IMAX retains ownership of the film and legally holds the distribution rights within Canada. However, this was uncovered years later and ever since then TPTB have been trying to bankrupt the IMAX corporation to prevent the release of the film, and unfortunately this has succeeded for the most part. IMAX has spent decades in financial limbo and has never been able to secure the financing required to put the film into release. It's hoped that with their recent partnership with Hollywood studios to release Batman Begins, the Star Wars prequels, and other such movies will finally allow them to overcome their financial difficulties and place the movie into distribution both in their IMAX theatres and on Blu-Ray disc.

Bounty wrote:There actually is footage of McGruff II on DVD available legally but it's almost impossible to find.

Though many don't know about or refuse to believe it, there does exist widely available footage from the director's cut of McGruff III. How this came to be is disputed, though it's said to involve a disgruntled foley artist and a lady of negotiable virtue in Thailand. I speak of course, of the famous tuk-tuk chase scene, which was digitally retouched & green screened to insert the actors for Ong Bak, which is a rather well known cult action movie. Almost everything else is original as the scene was filmed in Bangkok during the early 70's, but the director didn't feel it was in keeping with the general tone of the movie (he also felt it was a gratuitous self-indulgence since he wanted to one-up himself on the rickshaw chase from the second movie) so he substituted the bicycle chase as seen in the film festival release.

There's been a lot of dispute about the Ong Bak retouch. Everyone knows that Prachya Pinkaew is a huge Grumps fan, but it seems more likely that the tuk-tuk chase was a shot-for-shot recreation. There's some pacing stuff which makes it unlikely they just cut out the trainyard sequence.