Exploiting the Archives/Present: I Wanna Marry "Harry"/The Garbage Pail Kids Movie
Welcome to the latest entry in Exploiting the Archives, the column where I write about, and link to, various articles I’ve written for professional websites over the course of my twenty-one years writing about pop culture.
I created this column partially because it involves a lot less research and time and energy than writing, say, a Lukewarm Takes piece on 18 episodes of Vice Principals that, full disclosure, was not particularly well-read. Yet running this site and doing Nathan Rabin’s Happy Cast has exhausted me to the point where I oftentimes do not have the time or energy to churn out even a column designed specifically to let me coast on hard work I’ve done in the two decades before I realized my true destiny as an unemployable blogger/Juggalo self-publishing a typo-ridden personal website.
The twist is that the Prince Harry figure was, of course, not the royal whose recent wedding to Meghan Markle riveted the world but rather a lookalike anxiously and not very convincingly pretending to be Prince Harry for the sake of a nice paycheck, and, of course, a real shot at true love.
Funny because it's true! #DumbDonald
I Wanna Marry Harry has a reputation as the worst of the worst, as one of the tackiest, sleaziest and more embarrassing examples of a widely mocked and reviled genre defined by tackiness. The show didn’t just reflect poorly on the people who made it, and the people in it: it depicts all of humanity in a bad light as well, as well as reality shows, television and even heterosexual romance.
I’ve also decided that this will be a good place for me to also promote current pieces I’ve written for other websites so I am overjoyed to bring your attention to the latest column in The Zeroes, the super fun Rotten Tomatoes column where I write about movies that have received the dreaded Zero rating on the popular movie review aggregator.
I previously wrote about such nadirs of the cinematic arts as Ballistic: Ecks v Sever (where I came out strongly in favor of Ecks but against Sever), Jury Duty and The Ridiculous Six. In the latest entry, I wrote up the astonishingly terrible The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, a fascinatingly misguided attempt to cash in on the post-E.T/Gremlins creature feature that ran out of money before filming finished and cut corners in ways that made an already surreal mind-boggle look and feel like a terrible the world’s worst acid trip.
In the latest Sub-Cult entry, meanwhile, I write of my love for Mystery Team, the hilarious, overachieving Encyclopedia Brown riff that first convinced me that that Donald Glover guy had a future in the business.
Read! Enjoy! Comment! Subscribe! And, of course, consider kicking in even a dollar (it’s been a couple of days since the last pledge, TBH) over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace