Ernest Scared Stupid

Hey, Do You Remember...?

Christopher Schrader

Tv & Film, Comedy

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2016

⏱️ 94 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With Halloween right around the corner, we figured it was a good time to scare ourselves stupid. Okay, okay... so maybe this one isn't quite as terrifying as it was when we were nine, but it's still an interesting halfway point in the long-running series of Ernest movies. On one side you've got the well-known, theatrically released titles we all remember. On the other, there's a bunch of straight-to-video entries you'd probably rather forget. As it turns out, the fallout from this installment played a pretty significant role in that shift. But before we discuss how this one came together and the consequences of its too-creepy-for-kids premise, we talk about the Ernest character in general. Although we all remember being completely enamored with him as kids, we were pretty shocked to realize that none of us had particularly clear memories of any of his movies, TV shows, or commercials.

Topics include: the six (!) other Ernest movies in development at the time that were ultimately abandoned in favor of this one, the unlikely comparison Carlos drew between these opening credits and some of HBO's late night programming, how similar the early moments are to Hocus Pocus, what in the world Eartha Kitt is doing in this movie and how all of this is sort of her fault, Chris' somewhat disturbing story about building haunted houses with his friends, how great all of the troll effects still look, the right way to talk to your plants, some big problems with the final showdown, and much much more!

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About The Show

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, do you remember Ernest Scared Stupid?
0:06.6	Hello and welcome to Hey Do You Remember, a show where we reminisce about a movie or TV series we grew up with, then take off the rose-tinted glasses to see how it holds up.
0:31.6	I'm Chris.
0:32.2	I'm Donna.
0:33.0	And I'm Carlos.
0:34.0	And today we're revisiting Ernest Scared Stupid.
0:53.4	Thank you. Carlos. And today we're revisiting Ernest Scared Stupid. Ernest Scared Stupid draws a hard line between the glory days of Jim Varney's Ernest P. Worrell persona
0:59.2	and the diminishing returns the property would generate moving forward. Case in point, most of you are probably familiar with the three Ernest movies that preceded this one, but can you name the five that came after it? Don't worry,
1:12.0	you're not missing much. I think even the most ardent fans would probably admit that this is the
1:16.5	last entry in the film series worth your while, but it was also inarguably the first nail in the coffin
1:22.0	for the franchise at large. While none of the previous theatrical releases had been terribly
1:26.9	popular with critics, they still had their fans, namely children.
1:31.3	So, when Ernest Scared Stupid proved to be a little too intense for its target demographic, that translated to a domestic gross that was a little over half of what the previous installment had brought in.
1:42.5	So it's no coincidence that this was the last
1:44.6	earnest movie distributed by Disney's Touchstone Pictures banner. It was, however, not the final
1:50.0	entry to get a theatrical release. That dubious distinction actually belongs to Ernest Rides
1:55.4	again, which was released two years later and marked the property shift into straight-to-video
2:00.1	territory. And in hindsight,
2:02.2	I'm sure one of the most frustrating aspects of this for everyone involved is that there were so
2:06.8	many other options on the table before they settled on this premise. See, back in 1990,
2:11.7	there were no less than six prospective earnest movies in development. One was a lost in space
2:17.0	style sci-fi adventure. There was
	...

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