Sympathy for Kazaam: A Retrospective

BY ethan brehm if you were a kid in the ‘90s, kazaam was just another movie.

Today, it’s “that movie”; infamous for how much critics hated it; the poster child for marketing over moviemaking. The 1996 children’s film was obviously not much more than a vehicle for its star, Shaquille O’Neal. But back then, every kid watched Kazaam, imagining they had their own genie who could grant them wishes and make sweet rap videos with them. We were unaware of the genre clichés that it was simply copying and pasting for our enjoyment. We only saw it as a fun ride with some cool hip hop tunes. 12-year-old Max (Francis Capra) is on the run from a group of bullies when he winds up in an old abandoned building. Hiding under a pile of cardboard, he discovers a broken boom box that releases a genie named Kazaam (Shaq). Kazaam can grant wishes, but only material things like junk food and cars.

Max is always getting into trouble and currently having problems in school, likely due to his turbulent home life, where his mother (Ally Walker) just got engaged to her boyfriend, Travis (John Costelloe). Max’s parents broke up when he was 2 and he doesn’t know his father. Though after tracking him down, it turns out he’s a big time talent agent who specializes in pirated music.

The details are fuzzy and fairly inconsequential from here on out, but you can probably guess the remainder of the film has to do with Max’s decision of what his three wishes are going to be.

Never able to hang onto its story, we’re given several different plots at once, all competing for the same screen time. The setup is quick, but then director Paul Michael Glasser doesn’t know what he wants to do with the rest of the story. But the film never seems to be in a rush. Scenes continuously drag because of uninteresting banter.

The plot often has stipulations that set events in motion, yet there’s never any importance behind them. One example is how Max refuses to make his final wishes so that Kazaam will stick around longer and protect him from his bullies, but this payoff never even happens. His bullies never become part of the plot in any substantial way. It’s a throwaway line in order to justify why the movie isn’t over in 10 minutes, with the writers, Christian Ford and Roger Soffer, never holding themselves accountable for why this detail exists in the first place.

The duo toys with some interesting themes about materialism and fame, but never develops the characters properly for this to hit home effectively.

Though in an odd way, the film’s sloppiness sort of works in its favor in that it keeps us guessing where the plot can possibly go next. Since it technically doesn’t adhere to one clear or concise formula, making up its own ludicrous rules as it goes along, there’s a sort of unpredictability that almost works. As a kid, it totally works.

Stylistically, the folks behind the sets are geniuses. Max’s room and clubhouse make any 12-year-old salivate with envy. Our hero has a knack for building cool contraptions in his sick underground clubhouse which could only exist in the ‘90s. But still, these are just more examples of style versus substance. Although, viewing the movie with a nostalgic mindset that’s abandoned hope of all expectations of story quality, I’ll take it!

The movie’s soundtrack is deceptively stacked as we’re teased with some really great background music, featuring some heavy-hitters like Usher, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and Backstreet Boys, but also some under-the-radar ‘90s acts such as Shyheim, Subway, and Smart Guy alum Jason Weaver. Due to missteps in editing, we never get to hang onto any of these songs for long enough. However, we are graced with musical treasures like “We Ain’t Men, We Genie” for nearly 2 minutes.

Kazaam could have simply been a kids’ genie movie adorned with stylistic trimmings, but no. Kazaam had to star Shaq. The former NBA player-turned-actor is extremely charismatic, but Shaq, himself, can’t act.

He can be silly, but he can’t deliver dialogue. The only thing saving him is how distracted the audience is by how rapidly he moves his eyebrows up and down when he talks. His chemistry with Capra is fairly good, but unfortunately their relationship in the film is never built up enough for this to mean anything.

Held back by atrocious performances (there’s a reason you’ve never seen any of the main cast in anything else) and a script that lacks any sort of clarity, Kazaam is actually not nearly as bad as its reputation. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still not good. However, this infamous monstrosity just might be great in its own ridiculous way. Shaq may have made the film notorious, but he’s also probably the only reason why anyone’s still talking about it today. Everything about this movie feels like it shouldn’t work, but as nostalgia porn and guilty-pleasure entertainment, Kazaam hits the spot.

But back then, every kid watched Kazaam, imagining they had their own genie who could grant them wishes and make sweet rap videos with them.

Jambi from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse

Jeannie from

I Dream of Jeannie

Barbara Eden plays the title character in this ‘60s sitcom which helped popularize the genie trope. The series follows United States astronaut Tony Nelson after he discovers a genie in a bottle while being stranded on a deserted island. After bringing her home, Jeannie constantly wreaks havoc in Tony’s life by using her magic at all the wrong times. Hilarity ensues. “Wish? Did somebody say wish?” The floating blue head inside a jewel-encrusted box from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse was portrayed by John Paragon throughout the show’s run. Once per episode, Jambi would grant Pee-Wee a wish, which would range from food-related desires to making a tree grow faster to helping decide what to wish for (thus using his one wish in the process). The genie was an excellent level head (pun intended) to Pee-Wee’s manchild. Genie from Aladdin (1992)

No, and I mean absolutely no, list of genies would ever be complete without Robin Williams’ iconic portrayal of Aladdin’s blue confidant. Despite coming to blows with Disney over merchandising, the comedian has since become synonymous with the word “genie.” I mean, just type in “genie” on Google Images and see how he dominates the search results.

genies throughout movie history: genies throughout movie history:

Tales of genies have been around since the early days of motion pictures. Here are a few that have stood out over the years.

The Palace of the Arabian Nights

(1905)

The Thief of Bagdad (1940) The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) 1001 Arabian Nights (1959) The Brass Bottle

(1964)

The Thief of Baghdad (1978)

United Artists/The 7th Voyage of Sinbad/Columbia/1001 Arabian Nights/Columbia/The Brass Bottle/Universal/The Thief of Baghdad/NBC/The Outing/Moviestore Entertainment/DuckTales/Disney/Bernard and the Genie/BBC/Kazaam/Disney/Touchstone/Wishmaster/Lionsgate Genie of Agrabah from Once

Upon a Time

Giancarlo Esposito plays a Disneyesque genie with one of the more intriguing backstories you’ll come across. Discovered by Snow White’s father, the genie becomes his master but quickly falls in love with the Evil Queen (Snow White’s stepmother) and eventually winds up trapped inside of her magic mirror. The TV series always presents classic fairytales with a unique spin, with this particular storyline being one of its best.

Game Genie

Yes, this is literally just a cartridge that allows you to cheat in video games, but if you had one of these in the ‘90s, it was like you had an actual magic lamp. Marketed as a “video game enhancer,” Game Genie modified popular games to make them easier to beat or to simply give players a different experience, leading to a somewhat groundbreaking lawsuit by Nintendo for violation of copyright law, of which Nintendo lost.

The Outing (1987) Bernard and the Genie (1991)

DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990) Kazaam (1996)

Disney’s Live-Action Aladdin (2019)

Disney’s Aladdin

(1992)

Wishmaster (1997)

BY ETHAN BREHM it was no secret that author roald dahl despised

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory/Paramount Pictures/Roald Dahl

the 1971 film adaptation of his novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl, who wrote an early draft of the screenplay and was ultimately credited as the sole writer for marketing purposes (David Seltzer made major rewrites but went uncredited), essentially disowned the project, refusing for any more cinematic iterations to be made of the book, as well as its sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, as long as he was alive.

The movie itself, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, though a modest commercial success upon its theatrical release, earned millions of fans during its subsequent airings on television and has since become one of the most beloved movies in history. Now celebrating the 50th anniversary of its theatrical release, we look back at the one-of-a-kind production and honor its brilliance.

Unbridled chaos ensues once elusive candy maker, Willy Wonka, puts on a worldwide competition where five lucky winners will get a chance to step foot inside the closed gates of his famed chocolate factory, while also taking home a lifetime supply of chocolate (contract pending). Five golden tickets are sent out across the globe and literally everyone is buying up chocolate by the caseload.

Most people will notice that Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory does something unique in that it almost symmetrically divides itself into two parts—two films, in a sense—but each perfectly complimentary of the other.

The first half plays out as our hero, Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum), a poor kid who lives with his mother and four grandparents, hopes and dreams of getting one of the five golden tickets himself. As his classmates are purchasing dozens, if not hundreds of Wonka bars, Charlie’s family has only managed to scrape together enough money to buy him two. But after finding some coins in the street, he buys two more—the latter of which contains the fifth and final golden ticket.

Outside of Charlie’s story, this first half is filled with nonsequitur vignettes, all surrounding Wonkamania: a woman who must pay her husband’s kidnappers with a case of chocolate, or a scientist who invents a computer that will calculate where all five golden tickets can be found. Director Mel Stuart includes

these segments to smooth out the transitions between the main plot and the handful of news bulletins informing us about the tickets and/ or going on-location to meet with the other four winners. The first 45 minutes shows us a relatively grounded version of reality, but then Stuart transports us, along with Charlie, into a dreamland—the type that blends both the nightmarishly scary and the magically surreal.

By the halfway point, we meet Wonka himself, played by the iconic Gene Wilder, who takes us into his enchanting factory of sweets. Mercurial, disingenuous, patronizing, and a dab sadistic with randomlyscattered smirks, Wilder gives one of the greatest performances of all time and encapsulates every side of the titular candyman who’s so grounded in reason, and yet a believer in the implausible and absurd—still somehow making more sense than anybody else. From the moment we first see him limping with a cane, followed by a showman’s somersault, we must prepare ourselves for the unpredictable with Wonka, who never reveals his tell (Wilder himself said he would only play the part if he were allowed to do the cane bit).

Even after the film is over, there are some mysteries that remain splendidly unsolved: Did Wonka handpick his five winners? Likely

not, as he probably would have chosen better candidates (other than Charlie). However, it is safe to say that he studied them very carefully. As we see, he’s less concerned with showing the rooms where he actually makes his chocolate than he is in curating his factory tour so that each stop will properly bait its bratty victims according to their individual vices. Each kid’s fate is foreshadowed by his or her very specific idiosyncrasies, and it’s their naughtiness that leads to their demise. But not Charlie. Even when Charlie messes up, it’s Grandpa Joe (Jack Albertson) who tempts him into breaking the rules—not Charlie himself.

But then this begs the question: “What if he did pick Charlie?” After all, the winning bar that Charlie purchases was not actually picked out by the young boy, but by the owner of the local candy shop— perhaps in cahoots with Wonka, as the store and chocolate factory are in the very same town. It’s interesting to note that Wonka also seems objectively tempered and almost ambivalent when he first meets Charlie, compared to his enthusiasm when getting introduced to the others and their parents. Wonka later admits that this was all just a test, but for whom? Everyone or just Charlie?

Every actor here is perfect for

And yet our hero, having realized that with all the hullabaloo going on he had forgotten to actually stop and enjoy the chocolate itself, buys two bars with money he finds on the ground.

his or her role, nailing whatever’s required to bring these cartoonish characterizations to life, whether it’s Paris Themmen as the brash and annoying Mike Teevee or Julie Dawn Cole as the quintessential spoiled brat Veruca Salt, so much so that her name has become synonymous with the word. And then there’s Peter Ostrum as the earnest and meek Charlie Bucket, who’s thoughtful and kind, but never made to be saintly. He has his flaws too, and that’s the kind of careful detail that echoes throughout the rest of the film.

There’s also the music by songwriting duo Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley (arranged by Walter Scharf), who write one iconic number after the next. There are six melodies in total—six perfect melodies—each different, yet congruous; every single note catchy and wonderful, whether it be in the verse or the chorus; all of which feel like pop standards we’ve been hearing and singing for decades longer than they’ve been around for. Each of the classic and beautifully-whimsical melodies flows perfectly within the rest of the film’s atmosphere, from the set design to the costumes to all these quirky concepts in general. It’s all on the same page.

Each singing character only gets one song. Wonka’s “Pure Imagination” has become an anthem for dreamers, just as The Muppet Movie’s “Rainbow Connection” would do eight years later. Veruca’s “I Want it Now!” is the unsung hero of the film—a marvel in both songwriting and choreography—ending with its demanding diva ominously plummeting down a garbage chute just as the tune hits its climax, never to be seen or heard from again. What a bold way to end a musical number.

Stuart’s experience in documentary filmmaking helped him perfect the episodic, yet unified plot, which features a lean storyboard and a series of virtually flawless takes, balancing both the natural and exaggerated cadences of the actors. And just like a great documentary, the themes and motifs are locked in from start to finish, despite two very separate halves.

There is a scene towards the end of the first half that essentially summarizes the film. It’s right before Charlie gets his golden ticket, when everyone in the world thinks the contest is over thanks to a

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory/Paramount Pictures/Roald Dahl

FILMS BASED ON ROALD DAHL BOOKS

counterfeit fifth ticket. And yet our hero, having realized that with all the hullabaloo going on he had forgotten to actually stop and enjoy the chocolate itself, buys two bars with money he finds on the ground. In fact, the whole world has forgotten— obvious by the crowded candy shop at the beginning of the film, prior to the contest, juxtaposed with the empty one that Charlie steps foot inside after the chaos has died down. During the height of Wonkamania, the streets are flooded with uneaten Wonka bars, ripped open only to check for a golden ticket. But after it’s all over, without the excitement of the competition, the people of the world can no longer just appreciate the magic of something as heavenly as chocolate like they once did. The two bars that Charlie purchases, the latter of which ends up being the real fifth ticket, were bought simply because an underprivileged boy wanted to enjoy a luxury with no pressure of it being anything more.

Roald Dahl said he hated the film because of the shift in focus from Charlie to Willy Wonka. Although, I think he might be wrong. Mel Stuart always made sure that this was Charlie’s story, not Wonka’s. Just because Wilder’s candyman is more eccentric than our protagonist doesn’t mean the story’s focus has shifted. After all, it’s not anyone’s fault that Gene Wilder is such a strong personality that he makes an incredibly memorable character. Perhaps if Dahl had allowed for the adaptation of the sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, then he would’ve gotten his wish.

This film is very much about Charlie and his journey to seeing the forest for the trees, getting “everything he ever wanted”— earning it because of his pure heart, and not for anything else. He and Wonka require one another for this movie to work

Just like the chocolatier himself, Charlie is a sort of misguided dreamer, innocently hoping in a world filled with cynicism and selfishness, needing only a kindred spirit, regardless of their exterior differences, to make it all possible. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a fable about an honest child whose dream comes true simply because he wanted it more than anyone else. And now, 50 years later, the sweetness of the tale still resonates in the hearts of anyone who’s longed for their own world of pure imagination.