Car 54, Where Are You? (1994)
Directed by Bill Fishman
Written by Erik Tarloff, Ebbe Roe Smith, Peter McCarthy, Peter Crabbe
Starring David Johansen, John C. McGinley, Rosie O'Donnell, Fran Drescher, Nipsey Russell, Daniel Baldwin.
Release Date January 28th, 1994
Published January 29th, 1994
If you think the Hollywood of today is fearful of releasing musicals, considering that both Wonka and Mean Girls were seemingly released without telling anyone they were musicals, you should see how scared of musicals Hollywood execs were in the early 1990s. Hollywood was so afraid of musicals in the early 1990s that they made two of them and then refused to release them as musicals. Two movies, released within one week of each other in 1994, began life as musicals and arrived in theaters minus most of their musical numbers.
Naturally, that's not easy to do. In the case of the next movie I will be talking about for this series, I'll Do Anything, an entire film score written and performed by Prince, was scrapped after poor test screenings. This is deeply ironic as one of the songs was literally intended as the lament of a Hollywood movie producer character racked with angst over poor test screening scores. Hiring Prince to write and perform a film score is not cheap, scrapping it after paying him seems even more insane and expensive and yet that's what happened.
The other musical that became not a musical just before being released in theaters was the film adaptation of the short lived 1950s sitcom, Car 54 Where Are You. The original concept for Car 54 Where Are You was as a painfully modern musical and an edgy reboot for one of the most edge-free sitcoms of Boomer youth. Instead of following the travails of cop buddies Toody and Muldoon as they try and trick their wives into letting them go fishing instead of spending time with their family, we have Toody, as played by David Johansen, delivering a hip hop infused dream sequence where he boogies while being celebrated as a neighborhood hero.
This is one of two songs that producers felt they had to keep in Car 54 Where Are You. The other comes late in the film as Johansen jumps into sing a song that vaguely resembles his late 80s one-hit-wonder Hot, Hot Hot. All other songs have been excised, aside from a brief and deeply unfortunate scene where a pair of rappers encourage Jeremy Piven to attempt to beatbox. It's even more cringe-inducing than you imagine. Piven is a plot point character, a former mob account that Toody is assigned to keep safe. Naturally, our bumbling hero fumbles this task and the last act is trying to save Piven from a mobster played with dopey, broad, hamminess by Daniel Baldwin, the discount Baldwin brother.
John C. McGinley is wasted in Car 54 Where Are You. Though the original series centered on the long term friendship and partnership of Toody and Muldoon, the movie transforms Muldoon into a no-nonsense rookie officer who gives tickets for Jaywalking or Spitting on the sidewalk. And, in another in a lengthy series of regrettable and poorly aged scenes, he tries to shoot a child suspect in the back as the child flees after stealing a $5.00 sandwich from a deli. Muldoon misses shooting the child and is lucky that he only shoots a watermelon as he fired into a crowd of people on a New York street.
