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Uppercut

by Ryan N. Wilcox

Something's Rotten in the State of… Canada? If I were to tell you of a place called Elsinore, and of a person who would be in charge after the death of his father, only to be passed by when the widow married the uncle, you would likely think I was talking about William Shakespeare's Hamlet, and you would certainly be right. However, there is another movie that shares this plot. You'll never believe it when I tell you, either, as it took me hundreds of viewings and an epiphany one evening to realize that 1983's Strange Brew is the story of Hamlet… with beer. Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas made the characters Bob and Doug McKenzie famous while cast members of SCTV. Bob and Doug were two Canadian morons who sat around drinking beer and talking about a lot of nothing. They hit the big screen in 1983 with the movie Strange Brew, which is the story of Bob and Doug and their favorite brand of Beer, Elsinore. They go on a tour of the brewery one day and meet Pam Elsinore, the heiress who should've taken over the company when her father died. Instead, her father's brother, under the guidance of Max von Sydow (Brewmeister Smith), gets the brewery and all the fortunes that follow. Bob and Doug help Pam figure all this out and help to save the day. Bob and Doug take on the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are the two friends of Pam who are easily expendable to Brewmeister Smith, and with a forged note from Pam, he sends them off to die. Pam sees the ghost of her father who explains his death in a video game in the break room of the brewery. I'm telling you it's all there, and it's Hamlet. Sure there are several liberties taken with the plot. This is after all, Bob and Doug's movie. There was no Brewmeister Smith in Hamlet, nor were there death after death in Strange Brew, but it is a terrific homage to the Shakespearian play, and I feel like I'm part of a very small club who realizes this. I read the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in high school, and saw the movie a couple years later. At the time, I liked comparing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Bill and Ted, as the original pair of dumb heroes. Then I remembered Ellsinore, as the castle in Hamlet and as the brewery in Strange Brew, and it suddenly hit me. The more connections I made, the more I saw, and it amazed me at how sophisticated a movie this was. It reminded me of the things that made the old Warner Brothers cartoons so special, and that was the fact that they appeal to both children and adults. Come to think of it, Mel Blanc plays the voice of Bob and Doug's father (it's totally Yosemite Sam). Strange Brew suddenly takes on a whole new light. Sure, it's sophomoric and dumb, but knowing that it was so closely based on one of the greatest plays in literature blew me away. It was now something special. It was now one of those brilliant movies that isn't funny because it's just dumb, it's funny because it's that dumb on purpose. Much like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, everything is done on purpose. It wasn't something that they thought of as funny while editing it. It was carefully planned and ridiculous, and brilliant. Strange Brew is one of those movies that I like to watch every few years. It cracks me up every time at its idiocy, and it grabs my attention because I'm constantly watching it for other portions of the Hamlet story woven into it. For those of you familiar with the movie, watch it again with this new knowledge and I guarantee it'll make you appreciate the movie that much more. For those who haven't seen it, you can see a great comedy with two of the most popular comedians in the early eighties. You can see why Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis were so sought after all through those years, and you can pretty much use it for a book report on Hamlet if you really needed to.