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The New "Vacation" Movie Also has a Fake Car
Sadly, the "2015 Tartan Prancer" misses the mark
The original 1983 version of Vacation wasn't a great movie, I get it. But at least the Wagon Queen Family Truckster gag was somewhat trenchant, skewering U.S. auto manufacturers of the time for having terrible design sense.
The new 2015 Vacation—centered around original son Rusty Griswold now grown and with a family of his own—comes out this week. It also features a faux car, but if this gag commercial for it is any indication, the scribes behind the newer movie appear to have missed the mark:
Is it me, or is that totally lame? The Wagon Queen's flaws were exaggerations of what one could actually see in American car showrooms at the time: Awful colors, poor proportions, horrific faux wood, excessive fill-in-the-blank. In contrast the "2015 Tartan Prancer" gag tries to be silly for the sake of being silly, adopting a Japanese minivan aesthetic while randomly targeting Albania (its supposed country of origin), nonsensically portraying its people as Tae-Kwon-Do-loving cigarette smokers, which in my eyes renders the bit overtly-manufactured and thus toothless.
After seeing this I then watched a video of the writers/directors discussing the faux car in hopes that there was something clever I'd missed:
Sadly, it seems that these guys have got nothing; there's no real commentary here. I don't mind when we Americans make fun of ourselves, because there's plenty to make fun of and we can certainly take it, but I think if you're going to use another country as a punchline—particularly one that doesn't even have an indigenous auto industry--there has to be a payoff built on something at least resembling truth.
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Comments
What are modern movie "rebooths" if not long form exercises in totally missing the original point?
Hahaha, good point.
The entire movie misses the mark. A comedy about a family but with such raunchy language, sexual innuendo and just plain bad taste. Who is the target audience for this horrible film supposed to be for? I wish I had the time back wasting it watching this trash.
I'm an Albanian, and i support this message.
They miss the mark entirely on the vehicle being a van instead of a crossover or SUV. Both of those segments have huge flaws that could easily be lampooned. Vans are too small of a segment for it to really strike a chord. The ridiculousness of the new car is far beyond the reasonably believable Family Truckster of yesteryear. I feel like they just wanted to make an ugly, dumb, ridiculous car as opposed to actually being a parody of something. Maybe there was nothing for them to properly make fun of, or perhaps they're just unaware.
I dunno Clay Davis, I feel like there were plenty of things they could've honed in on with current automotive trends, like the tendency to re-hash old muscle cars, for instance. I got the sense that the writers simply weren't "car guys" or didn't really take a look at the industry, and I thought that was a missed opportunity.
By the way, I loved you in "The Wire."
I agree; while the original car was a jab at the then-modern US auto industry for hawking the kinds of garbage that would signal that industry's decline in the US (and eventually lead to GM's bankruptcy) this vehicle lacks the satire and is absurd for absurdity's sake. That said, I found something strangely appealing about it. It took a while for me to put a finger on it--it appears to be based on the Toyota Previa, that was interesting in terms of packaging and it's vaguely egg-like shape.
Makes me wonder how the prop guys came up with it; you reckon they just wrapped a Previa in fiberglass?
I'd find a 'making of the Prancer' video interesting. It seems well-finished as a prop; durable enough to make it though filming and additional promotional tie-ins (like the Consumer Reports videos.) Maybe there were some good ideas here that just didn't translate in the finished product, or a studio mandate to go goofy with it.