WAKE N BAKE

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

My friends and I might just be culturally insensitive, but I’ve never met anyone who took polka seriously.  It’s always been a joke genre to me, in the same vein as comedians who play an instrument, or top 40 hits.  If the music is jaunty and features tuba and concertina, it sounds like I’m supposed to be pointing and laughing at something (or chugging a beer and eating bratwurst.)  And polka can get annoying after one verse.  But it’s much more tolerable when high, and even a bit funnier–especially when comedians are doing it.

Legend has it that there’s a one-hour TV movie starring John Candy and Eugene Levy called The Last Polka.  It exists on home video, but is quite the rarity.  A few VHS copies were released after it aired on HBO in 1985–but it was never reprinted for the DVD market.  The VHS version fetches at least twenty dollars on eBay, and commenters on IMDb wistfully long for access to this mockumentary gem.

Anyway, I found the film on Youtube, in its entirety.  No illegal downloading necessary.  (I mean, it’s probably illegal that somebody uploaded it, but it’s not illegal to watch it, right?  And if you’re too fancy to watch things on your computer, you can get an HDMI cable for, like, ten bucks.  Besides, I’m pretty sure that once the image makes it onto your actual television, it becomes completely legal.  I didn’t look it up.  Or care, ever.)

This flick will entertain anyone with an appetite for quirky comedy, but it will probably resonate most with fans of the show SCTV (Second City Television), the Canadian sketch-comedy series that ran from 1976 to 1984 featuring actors from comedy troupe The Second City.  The show itself was already an exercise in mock documentary style–it was formatted to resemble a (fake) local TV station in a non-descript North American city, and the “programming” consisted of local news, talk shows, game shows, advertisments, and anything else they could come up with.  (I’d like to imagine that they’re all the other programs that aired before and after the Wayne’s World time slot.)  Included in SCTV’s cast of recurring characters are the Shmenge Brothers, two prominent polka musicians from the fictional country Leutonia.  They perform hits such as “Cabbage Rolls and Coffee” and “Rhythm in my Lederhosen,” as well as plenty of covers.  A sampling of their antics from the television program:

Yosh and Stan Shmenge (Candy and Levy, respectively) have sold multiple platinum albums, hosted numerous television shows, and toured the world for 30 years playing the clarinet and concertina.  The Last Polka one-hour special traces the Shmenges’ career from their humble vaudeville beginnings in the old country up to tonight’s concert–which is rumored to mark their retirement.  We also meet managers, industry professionals, fans, and singers with whom they’ve collaborated, most notably Linsk Minyk (Rick Moranis) and the Lemon Twins (Catherine O’Hara, Mary Margaret O’Hara, and Robin Duke.  Yep, there’s three twins.)  During the concert, Linsk Minyk joins the brothers onstage for a Polkified pop medley, beginning with “On the Road Again.”  Moranis nails the singer’s narcissism and appalling lack of talent perfectly.  (I might also add that these polka parodies written by Russ Little predate Weird Al by a decade.)  The Lemon Twins, who hosted a show in the 60s called Polka Variety Hour, also work in some stage time with their old friends (much to the Shmenge wives’ chagrin.)

The Shmenge Brothers have not had a spotless career, though.  The film details their brush with licensing law when they defraud a certain King of Pop.  I’m sure ASCAP doesn’t look too kindly upon that sort of behavior, but the musical results are priceless.

The humor in this SCTV production is as about as far from over-the-top as you can get while still retaining a hint of the ludicrous.  The dialogue isn’t nearly as funny as the personas, sight gags, and especially the music–the first number they perform at the concert has more false endings than the end of a Rossini opera (oops, pardon me, I believe I’ve just dropped my culture somewhere around here.)  There’s also a pretty bomb tuba solo.  And it’s only 60 minutes, so it’s worth a watch in any event.  (Of course, if you’re anything like me when I get high, you’ll have to plan for the 20 minutes you’ll spend trying to find Leutonia on a map.)

Because a search for “fake map” yields this, and it is amazing.

Another big part of this movie’s fun is our ability to watch it in retrospect.  It’s always cool to see Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara before Waiting for Guffman, or Rick Moranis before Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (although Ghostbusters had already happened, so I guess the cat was already out of the bag on that one.)  It’s a bummer about John Candy, though.

But the best thing about The Last Polka is that it’s pretty unlikely that you’ve ever seen it.  And it’ll make you want to watch about a billion episodes of SCTV.  I can’t think of many better ways to get high and waste a day.