WAKE N BAKE

In which Erin informs you of the best movies to blaze to

“Welcome to Good Burger, home of the Good Burger, can I take your order?”  That oft-repeated phrase from the sketch-comedy series All That, which aired on Nickelodeon beginning in the mid-nineties, holds a special place in the hearts of many a millennial.  For us, it’s not a question.  It’s an affirmation from our childhood days that we would repeat on the playground, a memento we’d share of the good times we had with our favorite babysitter.

Can’t stop me from thinking that this is the worst show ever.

The phrase comes from one of the most celebrated skits on All That, one that portrays the adventures of a dim-witted counter guy working at Good Burger, a burger joint.  A good one, probably.  Maybe, it was never really clarified.  All That is the most widely-known (only?) SNL analog for children, so I suppose it makes sense that the Nickelodeon show would continue Saturday Night’s tradition of repurposing sketches into movies.

Cherished childhood flicks usually make a great accompaniment to a fat bowl.  But Nickelodeon is in a class all its own, at least for yours truly.  The network’s programs, movies, and it’s briefly cool magazine, were the only things that have ever made me come close to experiencing a sort of divine comfort as a child.  Seriously, I worshipped that orange blob.  So much so that, upon starting Good Burger after I was properly stoned, the Nickelodeon logo that preceded the film was enough to fill me with a glorious nostalgia, a soothing breeze that stirred my innermost happiness fibers.  I recommend making a themed event out of the viewing and ordering some awesome burger combos and shakes to go with the movie, since all the “vapors” will probably make you mad hungry, anyway (statistically speaking).  You might even want to dig up an old VCR from your parents’ garage and plug in Nickelodeon’s orange VHS copy, if authenticity’s your thing.

Not that anyone else will understand.

For those of you who haven’t seen it…

Good Burger stars best-buds Kel Mitchell and Kenan Thompson (from All That and Kenan & Kel) as Ed and Dexter, respectively.  (Also gracing the cast are Sinbad, Abe Vigoda, Carmen Electra, and George Clinton.)  Ed is a happy-go-lucky idiot–which should inspire jealousy, since his condition allows him to find true happiness in his fast-food job (and to unironically rollerblade to work.)  Dexter is a high school student in debt for wrecking his teacher’s (played by Sinbad) car on the first day of summer vacation, forcing him to get a job.  He ends up at Good Burger, whose business is threatened by Mondo Burger’s impending grand opening.  Mondo Burger looks like a real-life rendering of something out of The Jetsons.  It’s impressive, imposing, and is run by an exacting totalitarian manager by the name of Kurt (Jan Schweiterman).  What’s worse, they make a burger that’s twice the size of their competitor’s.  For a while, it looks like Good Burger’s done for.  But one day, Dexter notices Ed casually adding his own sauce to his burger at lunch.  (Dexter asks, “You carry your own sauce?”  To which Ed replies, “Yeah, doesn’t everybody?”)  It turns out to be a pretty bangin’ sauce, seeing as its addition to the menu causes Good Burger’s business to outpace that of Mondo Burger’s.  In a move of corporate one-upsmanship, Mondo Burger begins engaging in some alternative food practices in an attempt to beef-up their patties, which are already grotesquely huge.

It still surprises me that it was so much easier back then to sneak small doses of social awareness into kids’ films (because Nickelodeon is an arm of the liberal media, or whatever.)  Apart from the throw-away joke Sinbad makes about not wanting to put a black man in jail when Dexter totals his car, there’s a downplayed yet unapologetic message to the film that’s assuredly political.  Mondo Burger represents greedy corporatism with no moral compunction between itself and their awful goals.  “When people find out you’re putting illegal stuff in their meat, you’re gonna find yourself in jail!”  (After which you’ll say to yourself, “Yeah, right.  And Monsanto laughed and laughed and laughed…  hey… the first three letters of Mondo Burger are the same as in Monsanto…  and they genetically engineer their food to boost production…”  But try not to think about these serious issues too hard when watching the film high.  Remember what happened when we tried to watch Fantastic Planet?)

Just like the program All That was introductory late-night for kids, I’ve kind of always seen Good Burger is a junior stoner-flick.  Not that the subject matter concerns drugs, or encourages kids to smoke in any way.  But its humor definitely taps into the sweet spot of herbally relaxed adults, as well as kids (medicated or otherwise.)  Ed exhibits both the care-free attitude and the propensity for hijinx that often show up in stoner protagonists.  And the jokes in Good Burger are often rooted in the rigid literalism that’s so popular among the elementary crowd: “I asked for a burger with nothing on it, and you gave me a bun!… I expected a meat patty!”  “A meat patty is something.”  It’s either that, or uncut absurdity, such as the lunch scene in which Ed shoves a grape in each nostril and proclaims, “Look!  I’m grape-nose boy.”  Easy enough to make kids laugh, but let’s see how the joke stands up to the hardened working adult.  Are you sober?  You probably won’t laugh.  Drunk?  You might chuckle.  Stoned?  Not only will you laugh at the horrible joke, you’ll laugh at yourself laughing.  (This is why I love marijuana–people say that it just makes you laugh at stupid stuff, but what they don’t realize is that it generates compound interest on all invested laughs.)

There were no pictures representing the opposite of this.

So does Good Burger=Good Movie?  Probably not.  (But it’s better than MacGruber, Tim.)  It’s slow, a little thin.  It got some pretty poor reviews that are difficult for me to disagree with.  But they were also written by a bunch of stupid adults who work for a living and watch the news.  Seriously.  They tell me that Good Burger sucks, but then they turn around and watch the news.  And honestly, there’s no way you can explain why Good Burger is funny to someone like that.  I mean, you just kind of had to be there.

Why are parents so stupid?

Special thanks to my mom for taking me to see Good Burger in the theaters in 1997.