Ten years ago today, Starsky & Hutch was released in theaters. It was a success, but not a signature movie for any of its stars or its director. Ben Stiller would have The Fockers, Dodgeball and Tropic Thunder, Wilson and Vaughn would have Wedding Crashers together, and Midnight in Paris and The Break-up separately. Todd Phillips would have The Hangover and will always be more remembered for Old School than Starsky.
However, when I began researching all the other TV shows turned into movies, I realized Starsky & Hutch is one of the most successful ones, both artistically and commercially. It’s not a classic, but it is an example of how to do this right, honor the original but bring something fresh to it. I think 21 Jump Street took it to the next level for sure, but could that have even happened without Starsky & Hutch ten years ago?
First, a bit of history on the TV to movie remake phenomenon. The ‘90s were the heyday for recasting a TV show with movie stars, leading to a few comedy hits like The Addams Family and Brady Bunch Movie. On the dramatic side, Mission: Impossible launched a franchise that continues today, and The Fugitive was an acclaimed hit, but there were many more forgotten TV remakes like Sgt. Bilko, Car 54 Where Are You?, McHale’s Navy, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Mod Squad, Inspector Gadget, My Favorite Martian, the disastrous Lost in Space, British-based The Avengers, and the bomb of all bombs, Wild Wild West. WWW made more than Starsky & Hutch for sure, but it also lost more.
The ‘90s were a sweet spot, when enough time had passed to revive an old show, but the name recognition still had value. Note that we are not talking about movies that continued from TV series with the original cast, like Star Trek, Sex and the City or now the upcoming Entourage movie. I’m also going to exclude live-action movies based on cartoons because that’s more of a novelty, and I can save it for the ten year anniversary of Speed Racer.
The ‘00s seemed to follow Addams and Brady’s lead and put a twist on the remakes. While the Addams and Brady movies remained comedies, they incorporated the characters’ now anachronistic comedy into the modern world. In the ‘00s, we’d see films change the genre of the show completely. Two Charlie’s Angels movies had adapted the chic detective show into hardcore action comedy (intentional comedy that is). Starsky & Hutch turned a cop drama into a cop comedy, with an emphasis on the schtick that permeates the genre a la 48 Hours and the later Lethal Weapon sequels.
Starsky & Hutch hedged their bets twice, first with the presold title, and again by using four movie stars with built-in fan bases. If anyone hadn’t heard of “Starsky & Hutch,” it was still a Ben Stiller/Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn movie. Snoop Dogg brought in his audience with a supporting role. That was still no guarantee though. 1998’s The Avengers and Lost in Space had A-listers, and Wild Wild West had the biggest star in the world in Will Smith.
Starsky & Hutch is not a parody, which Charlie’s Angels was. It’s a comedy, but it’s not a parody of the show or of cop movies or buddy movies. Like Rush Hour or Beverly Hills Cop are comedies about police officers, but not quite as extreme as Police Academy. This is a comedy starring cops. Starsky & Hutch does do “Starsky & Hutch,” only it emphasizes comedic situations rather than the show’s straight cop drama. This approach actually dates back to 1987‘s Dragnet, which was a hit though not fondly remembered.
“Starsky & Hutch” was a cop show starring David Soul as Ken Hutchinson and Paul Michael Glaser as Starsky, detective partners solving crimes, getting into car chases in their Ford Torino and wooing the ladies. The streetwise cops had a regular informant in the pimp Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas). The show ran from 1975-1979. It was already 25 years later when the Todd Phillips directed Starsky & Hutch hit the screen. Stiller played David Starsky and Wilson played Ken Hutchinson, with Snoop Dogg stealing the show as their Huggy Bear. The movie retained the 1970s setting, which paid off with flashy outfits, funny hair and mustaches, but not too many cheap jokes.
But, why did Starsky work when Wilson’s I-Spy with Eddie Murphy did not? For one, Stiller and Wilson were a proven duo in Zoolander, and some scenes together in The Royal Tenenbaums and Meet the Parents. Vaughn was coming off a comic resurgence in Phillips’ Old School and would continue to dominate in comedy, re-teaming with Wilson for Wedding Crashers. Ultimately, humor is subjective. I still don’t think Starsky & Hutch is particularly funny, but a revisit makes it clear to me how the film gave 2004 audiences what they wanted, for a month anyway. The film’s box office would dwindle by April, but it may just have been a lynchpin in the TV remake movie business we are still seeing today.
This retelling of the origin of Starsky and Hutch’s partnership begins on the bad guy, Reese Feldman (Vaughn). Feldman shoots one of his couriers on his yacht for disappointing him. Then we meet Starsky (Stiller), a by-the-books cop who loves being a cop. He’s a little overzealous but he’s happy to be on the force, even feels he’s well paid. Then we meet Hutch (Wilson), a carefree slacker who thinks he’s not paid enough. Still, he seems to bring an undercover bust to fruition.
You would think you’d recognize the formula of this mismatched duo. By these rules, Starsky should resent Hutch’s cavalier attitude and Hutch would try to get Starsky to loosen up a little. That’s not really what happens though. A little bit of lip service is paid to their bickering when they are forced to work together, but most of the movie features bits in which they complement each other, not conflict. The joke is simply: Hey, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson are cops. Watching Stiller look serious while chasing bad guys is the joke. He does overwrought calisthenics and makes serious faces, sort of like Zoolander. That’s funny enough. It’s not memorable ten years later but you can watch it for 101 minutes.
Feldman has a new form of cocaine that is undetectable to drug sniffing dogs. His old coke vs. new coke joke is an ‘80s reference, and a clever enough pun I guess. Not really clever, but punny. The man Feldman shot washes ashore and Starsky and Hutch are on the case. Crazy things do happen but they don’t violate the world of a ‘70s cop movie. Like Riggs may find himself barking like a dog or Dirty Harry may chase a remote controlled toy car, movie cops just happen get in crazy situations. The Starsky & Hutch movie just emphasizes the comedic side of them.
The comedy feels like bits Stiller and Wilson, or rather screenwriters Phillips, Scot Armstrong and John O’Brien, came up with, rather than funny conflicts that would occur between mismatched partners. Male nudity is usually considered funny. Playing dragon for an informant (Will Ferrell) is ridiculous, but the joke there is that Ferrell is funny and they’re going along with him. Going undercover as mimes kind of writes itself. Starsky accidentally takes the scentless cocaine thinking it’s sugar. 21 Jump Street did a similar scene where the heroes are on drugs and trying to pass, and it’s much more integral to the plot of being undercover cops.
The aforementioned set pieces are sort of generic comedy that anyone could play, not just Wilson and Stiller, and certainly not unique to Starsky and Hutch. One clever bit has Starsky intimidate a suspect with a fake Russian roulette trick, only Starsky doesn’t realize the bullet he pulled accidentally fell back into the chamber. It still doesn’t play Starsky and Hutch against each other. It’s more like they’re doing routines together, but not even good cop/bad cop. More like enthusiastic cop/embarrassed cop.
The film still knows it has to follow the reluctant partnership formula though, so late in the movie Captain Doby (Fred Williamson) reveals that Starsky requested a transfer away from Hutch. With no knowledge of this earlier in the film, we can’t really identify with Starsky’s frustration or Hutch’s feelings of betrayal. It’s more of an interruption to their Vaudeville show, which continues when Starsky and Hutch going undercover together. Starsky’s disguise is a character from “The Ben Stiller Show,” the Annoying Guy who goes, “Do it. Do it.” Not only did that write itself, it had literally already been written.
There is enough action in Starsky & Hutch to feel like a cop movie, though no really big set pieces. It speaks visually to cop movie clichés, like hiding behind a car in a gunfight and getting into fisticuffs in a bar because, well, it’s a bar. Their final stunt, jumping a car onto a boat, seems to be ripped off from Jackie Chan in First Strike, although Starsky and Hutch makes a joke out of it because they miss the target. Chan landed it.
Perhaps this was a way to correct the overblown approach of films like Wild Wild West. WWW had the comedy with WIll Smith and Kevin Kline, but tons of visual effects including the infamous big metal spider that nobody wanted to see. Starsky could have certainly had more fast and furious automobile action, but Phillips consciously decided to emphasize comedy, while paying homage to the film’s cop show origins. Stiller would continue to push the action side of comedies like Tropic Thunder and Night at the Museum, and Phillips would load the Hangover movies and Due Date with stunts.
Original Starsky and Hutch, Soul and Glasser, show up to officially pass the torch to their new counterparts. It’s a bit odd because the film is still set in the ‘70s and Soul and Glasser look like they look now, but it’s a nice way to include them and pay homage. Presumably, they are handing Stiller and Wilson the franchise which never came out of this film. Jason Bateman’s comeback does trace back to this movie. After his small role as Feldman’s henchman, Bateman would land “Arrested Development,” a critical darling that led to a decade and counting of roles, often leads, in major movies. It wasn’t even a funny role, but it got Bateman back in the game.
I don’t think it’s worth watching Starsky & Hutch again today, and ultimately nobody really asked for a sequel. They did go to see it ten years ago though, and I think its moderately successful $88 million gross gave it considerable influence on the TV adaptations that came out since. One year later, the Dukes of Hazzard movie would do about equal business to Starsky with an $80 million gross. I call “not it” on having to watch that again in 2015 but the action/comedy angle worked for the same moderate business. In 2008, Get Smart had a successful blend of the original series’ comedy with a modern day approach to spy action. The real benefactor though is 2012’s 21 Jump Street. Michael Bacall and Jonah Hill’s script actually did play up the buddy cop angle, where Tatum and HIll were quite mismatched and played to their strengths or weaknesses in each set piece. The comedic approach to the earnest ‘80s teen cop show proved so successful that it’s getting a sequel, 22 Jump Street.
The comedic approach doesn’t always work. As much as some critics enjoyed 2012’s Dark Shadows, audiences turned away from the comic take on a horror soap opera. Will Ferrell’s comedic, special effects ridden Land of the Lost may have fallen into the Wild Wild West trap. It actually made me laugh more than Starsky, and I remember Ferrell mouthing the words “Fuck you” to Chaka, but the tone there is a problem. It’s too edgy for kids, or at least for their parents to approve of, and too childish for grown-ups. A Dallas comedy to star John Travolta and Jennifer Lopez never got made, and instead that series came back to television with its original cast and a new generation.
Nothing in art is an exact science, and it takes a lot more than an initial premise to make a good movie, but it seems turning comedy into comedy remains the trickiest proposition. While Get Smart was a successful remake, it emphasized the spy action to go along with the comedy. 2005’s The Honeymooners tried to “urbanize” the sitcom classic with Cedric the Entertainer and Mike Epps. It could quite simply be that Cedric the Entertainer is not as funny as Jackie Gleason, and they watered down the edge the 1955 sitcom had. 2005‘s Bewitched didn’t seem to understand what a remake was in the first place and made a middling inside Hollywood meta movie about actors remaking “Bewitched” that only became a “Bewitched” movie in the third act. That must have been an attempt to follow the Brady Bunch model gone wrong.
Straight updates can still work. See the Mission: Impossible franchise previously mentioned, and 2003’s S.W.A.T. It would not work for 2010‘s The A-Team, turning the TV series into an overblown modern blockbuster complete with tanks falling from the sky. Neither today’s audiences nor fans of “The A-Team” wanted to see that but it seemed like a reasonable idea to do “The A-Team” on a Hollywood scale. 2006’s Miami Vice went even more serious than the original show, with its executive producer Michael Mann now at the helm, only updating the era for modern audiences. The ultra serious cop story has some defenders, but I also call “not it” when July 28, 2016 rolls around on Ten Years Later.
2013‘s The Lone Ranger and 2011’s The Green Hornet, being both radio and TV shows, were also problematic approaches. While both made some money, both were considered failures of budget and expectations. Interestingly both Ranger and Hornet emphasized the wrong character, Ranger making the actual Lone Ranger second fiddle to megastar Johnny Depp’s Tonto, and Hornet centering on Seth Rogen’s Britt Reid when Kato was always the interesting part of the duo. Yes, both Ranger and Hornet had comedy, but it was comic relief to bombastic action.
I would venture that the television “Starsky & Hutch” remains at the forefront of people’s minds when they hear the title, with perhaps a footnote of, “Remember when they made a Ben Stiller/Owen Wilson movie out of it?” Whereas I could conceive of a larger audience being aware of the “Charlie’s Angels” TV series (not counting the short-lived ABC remake of 2011) because of the hit movie, and its notorious sequel, that were made aimed at a young audience who wouldn’t have known “Charlie’s Angels” before. There’s more coming. Denzel Washington IS The Equalizer, Tom Lennon and Robert Ben Garant wrote a script for Baywatch, and Guy Ritchie is doing The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Well, those would all still be happening if Starsky & Hutch hadn’t come out ten years ago, but maybe they will be better because it did.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
