The following is a draft post that would accompany the publishing of the restored special...
Escape From It’s a Wonderful Life, restored
After watching Gilbert, the wonderfully revealing biographical documentary on Gilbert Gottfried, I took a gander at his filmography. By 1996, he was at the peak of his Hollywood career. He'd done three Problem Child and Aladdin movies at this point. This easily made him the biggest name in a gem of a Christmas parody that's gone almost completely under the radar for the last decade.
Escape From It's a Wonderful Life is an abridged comedic redub of the Christmas classic, wherein George Bailey and his fellow citizens of Bedford Falls are well aware that they are living in a film. The only one sick of that fact is George, who wants desperately to do "anything" but perform It's A Wonderful Life again after 50 years of doing so. Everyone else tries to keep him on task.
The short is performed by writer Jay Martel and members of the Upright Citizen's Brigade. According to Martel who wrote briefly about it on his blog, this was UCB's first TV gig. Ian Roberts, Amy Poehler, Matt Walsh, and Matt Besser helped write and voiced the other characters.
Jay Martel on the teleplay:
My idea was to recut the holiday classic as a kind of Truman Show, in which George Bailey is trying to get out of doing the movie again.
Naturally, after learning about this film (which happens to be the very first for all UCB members listed above), I searched Google for a video link. This one offers part one, with a part three also available. The second part was taken down many years ago by Paramount. Another splits the whole thing into six unordered parts.
So I looked deeper. The source files (also splitting the special into three) can be found at this link at the Internet Archive, located thanks to a post on David Handelman's blog. I've converted these from Real Media files (a first for me since at least 2005), and stitched them together. The quality is limited to its original 320x240, but it's the best we can do until someone recuts it with footage from the remaster. The short never actually aired.
A full synopsis from Turner Classic Movies:
Frank Capra's classic film "It's a Wonderful Life" from 1946 is reworked and re-edited by Comedy Central, substituting a new audio track that changes the dialogue, music and story line. Comedians provide the voices of Jimmy Stewart and the rest of the characters. In this satirical version, the town of Bedford Falls relies on the revenue generated from their production of "It's a Wonderful Life," but George Bailey is interested in lucrative roles in action movies and goes to Mr. Potter, the executive producer, to be let out of his contract. George then wreaks havoc on the production by ad-libbing his lines, scoring cocaine at Mr. Gower's drug store and confessing to Mary that he is gay. He ultimately finds perspective on his situation through the divine intervention of Clarence, his Hollywood agent.
To date, there's only been one review left for it on Letterboxd. Otherwise, it hasn't been written about in years. The last (and really the first) great piece of writing about its creation was this editorial by Nathan Matisse for Wired in 2014. He interviewed Matisse who was, at the time, show-running Key & Peele.
It's here we learn why the special never aired:
Still, Escape remains an unaired experiment, and will likely never be part of the Christmas canon. It didn’t take a Potter-slumlord to sabotage things---only corporate bureaucracy. While Republic disagreed with Comedy Central’s copyright interpretation, Escape was never taken to court. First, the two sides discovered they were under the same umbrella—Viacom. "Papa Viacom may not want the kids suing each other,” a Comedy Central spokesperson told The New York Daily News at the time. “Comedy Central and Republic are talking ‘amicably.’” The film was put on ice at the eleventh hour, as evidenced by newspaper previews for a could’ve-been-December 18 airing.
I loved this. It shares a similar style of humor to that of Steve Oedekerk's martial art masterpiece, Kung Pow!: Enter The Fist. As a first credit for so many important members of today's comedy canon, it's an important piece of history. It's an easy recommendation for any comedy nut or for background noise during a holiday game night.
Potential names for the edit:
- Bailey Unleashed
- Escape from Bedford Falls
- Hell Out Of Bedford Cut
More Reading:
- Escape from Bedford Falls by Frank Rich for NYT (1996)