Shark Bytes
It was a movie.An exellent movie from my homeland,Germany.I loved this show with Whoopie and Jean "Edith"Stapleton.The setup was perfect but the writers should have been tweaked(FIRED!and replaced.)and it must have been on NBC.They never give anything half a nanochance.Go rent the movie.You'll love it.It is sehr gut!
"Cult Films" are hard to define and even harder to predict. They attract large and loyal fans but not all cult films attract the SAME fans. "Baghdad Cafe" (the movie) is a terrific example of the hard-to-explain cult film. The big drawing card (for me) was offbeat but likable characters thrown together in a quasi-exotic locale. I could cite a dozen other cult films that grabbed me the same way. The movie had so many things perfectly "right", while the TV show (at least the 10 or 12 minutes I watched of the first episode) was totally "wrong". If you've spent any time in the Mojave Desert, if you've seen German tourists swarming over that place year after year, if you liked the TV show "Route 66", if you've ever been to the Sidewinder Cafe in Newberry Springs, if you can recite from memory the first line of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", if you've ever been a long-haul truck driver or even wanted to be an owner-operator, if you've seen "sun dogs" yourself, if you liked the movie "Vanishing Point" . . . you'll probably love "Baghdad Cafe" (the movie) and for all those same reasons you would have hated the crapfest of the same name that they served up on TV.
The biggest problem with this show was immediately apparent: the ubiquitous sitcom laugh-track. The movie was excellent in portraying the cafe as being in the middle of the desert, and the theme song was superb in communicating the isolation. The laugh track served only to make me feel like I was on a TV soundstage rather than conveying the feeling that I was visiting a handful of interesting and quirky characters way out in the middle of nowhere.
I agree that Jean Stapleton tried WAY TOO HARD not be Edith and that the usual wonderful Whoopi STUNK in this crapfest. But I DISAGREE about the film--an acquired taste, to be sure, but the marvelous work by CCH Pounder (now on "The Shield") makes it worth a rental.
Day One! When I saw Whoopi's character grab her teenage daughter ("Debra?") by her ponytail and start jerking her head back and forth for some offense (I can't remember what), I knew this was shark bait. Apparently, the scriptwriters never saw the PSA from the late '70's/early '80s' which said "There's no excuse for child abuse." This cafe should have been condemned. At any rate, Whoopi is better in the movies (SISTER ACT, her role in GHOST, etc.) and if you want to see Jean Stapleton in a good non-Edith Bunker role, check out ELEANOR: FIRST LADY OF THE WORLD. It's a made-for-TV movie about the life Eleanor Roosevelt, with Stapleton playing the title character. She was nominated for an Emmy, and rightly so. PEACE!
The tv series 'Baghdad Cafe' truly sucked, but I want to respond to the poster who theorised about some 'network execs' coming up with the premise of this show. For once, tv doesn't deserve all the blame. The tv series 'Baghdad Cafe' was a fairly accurate adaptation of a film of the same name, by a German director, with a German-American cast. (The character played by Whoopi Goldberg in the tv series was played in the film by an African-American actress with the peculiar name CCH Pounder. No periods or full stops between the letters, just CCH. I wonder if she's related to JMJ Bulloch.) The movie 'Baghdad Cafe' was only slightly less godawful than the tv show, but for some reason the movie has a cult following. I'm positive that this was the single biggest reason why the tv series ever saw daylight. This wasn't a case of some tv producer cooking up a stupid idea. In this case, some tv producer saw a terrible movie and thought it might make a tv series. Strictly in terms of fidelity to its original (bad) source material, the tv series 'Baghdad Cafe' was pretty good. On every other level, it stank. There ought to be a category for tv shows that never got a chance to Jump the Shark because they were so god awful that the shark never came anywhere near them. 'Baghdad Cafe' is one such show.
I wonder if this was pitched to network execs something like this?: ' America loved Jean Stapleton as Edith Bunker and Whoopi Goldberg's the hottest comedienne since Joan Rivers so lets throw together in a diner in the desert with lots of wacky cowboy characters and there'll be nonstop fun and laughs! Well, there WAS nonstop fun and laughs- as they never STARTED on this show. I know this was supposed to be about two fish out of water /opposites forming a bond (and based on a surprise sleeper hit movie of the same name) BUT Jean was almost zombie-like stiff ( trying WAY too hard NOT to be Edith Bunker) while Whoopi was over the top ! Considering that this was *supposed* to be about opposites becoming friends- the two of them went together like chalk-and-cheese and had absolutely ZERO chemistry!
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