Uncle Buck

Hey, Do You Remember...?

Christopher Schrader

Tv & Film, Comedy

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2020

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Home Alone's meteoric success in the winter of 1990 took John Hughes by surprise. It also (for better or worse) set the latter half of his career down a slightly different path. So in some ways, 1989's Uncle Buck represents the end of an era.

On this episode, we examine how Hughes and his frequent collaborator John Candy straddle the line between the writer/director's golden age of output and the type of comedy that would define the next decade of his career.

Topics include: Hughes' original (and somewhat surprising) choice for the title role, the studio's even more unusual pick, how an abandoned high school was transformed into a mini-movie studio, why Candy's performance doesn't totally match what's on the page and how that's ultimately a good thing, the ways in which a more formulaic structure might have actually helped this story, why there was never an Uncle Buck 2 despite Hughes' interest, and much more!

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About The Show

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, do you remember Uncle Buck?
0:06.8	Hello and welcome, Hey, do you remember, 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.
0:31.7	I'm Chris.
0:32.6	I'm Donna.
0:33.5	And I'm Carlos.
0:34.6	And today we're revisiting Uncle Buck.
0:53.1	Yeah. And I'm Carlos. And today we're revisiting Uncle Buck. You know what's great about covering so many movies by the same filmmaker is that you wind up being able to take a step back and get this broader sense not only of their career, but sometimes of them as a person as well.
1:06.1	And with John Hughes, I think a lot of us are aware that the earlier movies tend to be better than some of the later ones.
1:12.7	But at this point, we've looked at examples of both.
1:15.2	And so what's now pretty clear is that there is a definitive turning point, a hard line between the first half of his career and the second.
1:24.6	That turning point is home alone, which came out the year after Uncle Buck. Now,
1:30.1	I realize that John Hughes didn't direct Home Alone, Chris Columbus did, but Hughes wrote and produced
1:35.6	it, and we're talking about the sum total of his output here. There's a 2015 article from the
1:41.9	Atlantic called How Home Alone Ruined John Hughes. And if you can get past that
1:47.9	dramatically clickbaited title, what it goes in depth about is the degree to which Hughes spent
1:54.0	the latter half of his career trying to repeat the success of Home Alone's winning formula.
2:00.2	Because Home Alone wasn't just the biggest
2:02.9	hit he'd been involved with at that point. It made like three times the amount of money as his
2:08.9	next most successful film. So on the heels of that, you get Dutch, Curly Sue, Beethoven, Dennis the Menace, Baby's Day Out, even career opportunities, which was right after Home Alone.
2:23.3	The protagonists are teenagers, but it's essentially Home Alone in a department store.
2:28.4	They're all largely rifts on the same basic formula.
2:32.4	And the hope is that maybe one of these nets as large a
	...

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