A-Z GUIDE TO MOVIES AND TV SHOWS PARODIED BY MAD, CRACKED, CRAZY, ETC. UP TO 1996. THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. SPOILERS AND OTHER NON-SEQUITURS, TOO. SOMETIMES THESE THINGS HAVE WORDS OR SITUATIONS WE DON'T USE ANYMORE. YOU KNOW, 'CAUSE THEY'RE OLD.
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Saturday, July 23, 2022
THE UNSTABLE GUY
THE CABLE GUY (1996)
dir: Ben Stiller
THE UNSTABLE GUY
Cracked #311, October 1996
w: Andy Simmons & Rob Weske
a: Frank Cummings
The premise of this was that Steven Kovacs (Matthew Broderick) moves into a new apartment after breaking up with his girlfriend, and after slipping his cable guy Chip Douglas (Jim Carrey) extra money to get pay channels, Chip decides Steven is now his friend for life. This spoof also parodies three other movies from that year that would eventually have been on cable, Eraser, Striptease, and Twister.
Eraser was an action film with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Chip takes Steven to a satellite dish out in the country that's apparently the master dish to all the cable of the world. Here it is a literal food dish, and they use it to make fat jokes about Louie Anderson. Striptease was a movie with Demi Moore about just that.
LaToya Jackson did infomercials for a psychic hotline.
Chip takes Steven to the Medieval Times chain restaurant where they end up jousting and Chip later shows up when Steven and his friends are playing basketball, inviting himself into the game and taking it too seriously, being violent and embarrassing Steven.
Chip tries to make things right as Steven tries to reconcile with his girlfriend Robin (Leslie Mann), hooking him up with a cable channel showing Sleepless in Seattle. Here it's Twister, a disaster movie about a tornado starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.
The cause of the tornado in Twister turns out to be The Mask, another Jim Carrey movie. In The Cable Guy, Chip has become friends with Robin separately, and when Steven and Robin go to see his parents, Robin has invited Chip along, and he hits it off with Steven's family, who all ignore Steven's claims that Chip is a psycho.
There's a suplot they don't use here where you see on TV throughout the movie—a trial of child star Sam Sweet (Ben Stiller) that mirrors the Menendez brothers trial that was going on then. Similar to a sketch Stiller would have done on his sketch comedy show a few years earlier. (His whole cast has bit parts in other scenes). Chip has kidnaped Robin and brought her to the master satellite and Steven goes to save her. At the same time, the world is fixated on their TVs watching the Sweet trials and at the exact moment everyone is about to hear the verdict, Chip plummets down and knocks the cable out everywhere.
In the Medieval Times scene, the dragon is from Dragonheart, another summer movie from that year. Simmons had already written a parody of it that ran in Cracked Monster Party.
In the Medieval Times scene, the dragon is from Dragonheart, another summer movie from that year. Simmons had already written a parody of it that ran in Cracked Monster Party.
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