Plug in the shake machine, because Good Burger is the Greatest Movie EVER!
Click on the movie poster or the title above to download our review of the film,
featuring Rachel Pandich of Skin Crawling Comics and Sean “Hollywood” Hunting.
Review in a Nutshell: I’m a dude, he’s a dude, she’s a dude. We’re all dudes.
The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast 
Wow, Paul! I never even HEARD of this movie, let alone seen it….
Can’t wait to download your podcast.
It was aimed at a teeny bopper audience when I was just old enough to go see R-rated movies in the theater. Doesn’t really surprise me that you haven’t heard of it, Tim.
Thank you Rachel for speaking some good sense. Less Than Jake is great. Sean and Paul are just haters.
“It was aimed at a teeny bopper audience when I was just old enough to go see R-rated movies in the theater. Doesn’t really surprise me that you haven’t heard of it, Tim.”
I’ve heard of this, but never saw it. By that point in time, I was already out of high school and trying to cope with college which was a miserable experience. I had no time for Nickelodeon shenanigans. My time with the channel was mostly during the 1980’s and into the early 90’s, and never again. This was my Good Burger…
To answer your pal’s question, there were a few black kids on YCDTOTV as I remember seeing it, I noticed one early episode had a kid of Native American origins who got joked on for being one I think, but yeah, I guess Black representation wasn’t quite as big on Nick in the 80’s as it became in the 90’s through All That. Having to check, I see that show lasted 11 years on Nick so it obviously had it’s audience who remembered it well enough for Nick to repeat classic episodes as part of it’s TeenNick block “The 90’s Are All That” so at least they’re not letting it slip away too much, but they sure moved on content-wise. I’m sure today’s generation looks back on All That or those that came before and are either in shock or bust out laughing at the differences. Kids today would wish they were slimed I bet.
Paul’s comment on this film being a representation of America’s obsession for automobiles couldn’t be any further from the truth. Listening to that, I reminded myself of Spongebob Squarepants, both an idiot savant at his crappy job and also a driver’s ed. flunky trying desperately to get his driver’s license. Sinbad’s role in this movie sounds like the typical adult authority figure Nickelodeon had always characterized through promos and other shows they made throughout the 80’s and 90’s. These guys are always mistreated simply because they’re not cool, young and hip (tend to be in their 40’s and 50’s). They’ll want to do boring things like taxes, moving lawns or pinochle. I can see why he doesn’t get an honest break here. Good Burger’s also the start of the obnoxious nature of children I can’t stand nowadays, especially hearing of Kenan’s role in this film and how he doesn’t learn the lesson in the end. That just sounds typical.
Two more things, the Doug movie (actually titled “Doug’s 1st Movie”) was released by Disney, as they owned the rights to Doug after acquiring the animation studio that produced the show for Nickelodeon originally (Jumbo Pictures). That alone is a mess to cover, but there’s essentially two Doug cartoons because of it, Nickelodeon’s Doug and Disney’s Doug (first aired on ABC), sort of a Katzenjammer Kids thing going on here. You can do the movie if you want, I know I wasted good cash seeing that stinker on the big screen thinking it was a waste of celluloid for what was originally going to be a direct-to-video release.
And the last thing, Abe Vigoda is still with us (he turned 93 last Monday).
I’m sorry Sean (wait, not really) but I have never liked the Lori Beth skit she does. I figured it out at about age 10 or 11, that part of All That might have been the worst skit they had.
I will say this about All That, it has NOT aged well. My brother and I caught it on TV when were at a shoe store a couple of years ago, and we saw All That and were like “Oh yea, we haven’t seen this in a while.” It was 5 minutes before we had to walk away because it was just so painful to watch.This was a show I waited every week to watch back in the mid to late 90’s, and its again, one of those pieces of history that deserves to be stuck in that timeline and never really brought up again. I am not even sure if i can find the old Good Burger skits funny if you showed them to me today.
This film I think does hold up pretty well. This is my brothers personal favorite movie to this day,and he can quote the thing front and back if you let him, and hes 21. I find it interesting Paul that you watched this film with no prior knowledge to the skit its from and found it amusing. I will say this film is probably a “hipster” flick to people today, because last semester some girl showed it in our art studio as something to just have on as we worked on a project. I told her if she has ever seen the skits to it on All That. She had no clue on what I was talking about, and that to me was really sad.
Also, I saw Less Than Jake in concert once, in this big ska band show in Richmond VA back in 2007 where it was them, Street Light Manifesto and Reel Big Fish. My friend and I caught the last quarter of RBF, which I was just happy to see them since I have been a fan of their stuff since 1997 (well really when “Sell Out” made it to the east coast rock stations). I gotta say I did like their show, and they even put on a Price is Right set up where they did a giant pachiko machine that a fan from the crowd would drop the chip which landed on an album that they would play a few songs from. That was a pretty sweet show all around. Thanks Rachel for being another person that likes and knows Ska than I do.
My sole exposure to Less Than Jake was that the Japanese pro wrestling company “Toryumon” used to use a song by them for their opening credits. It is not until right now as I write that I see it was not an excerpts for a 30 second opening, but rather the entirety of the song. The title of the song was “Anchor,” a word which is never spoken at any point in the song which makes finding the song more trouble than it’s worth. There may have been a Less Than Jake song used when Toryumon changed its name to its English translation, Dragon Gate, but there’s no way I’ll be able to find it because of the above. Fortunately, they have upgraded from a band that doesn’t even have the decency to use the song’s name in the lyrics to the antithesis of that: JAM Project.
I would have been 14 years old when All That, and by extension the Good Burger sketches, started in 1994, and I really didn’t want to think I had “outgrown” Nickelodeon. I was the exact target audience for “Snick,” but almost everything *newly created for it* wasn’t anything I was remotely interested in. [This exempts things like Pete & Pete, Welcome Freshmen, Clarissa Explains It All etc that existed prior to the block which later got moved to it.]
I couldn’t tolerate All That or Roundhouse when I’d been watching The Kids in the Hall and (before the Internet killed it dead) Monty Python’s Flying Circus for years and years by then. Even prior Nickelodeon shows such as Turkey Television and the like were far more ludicrous. Two of the running gags on You Can’t Do That on Television involved torturing children to death and/or having them be executed by firing squad, but I’m supposed to accept “whoops, I got your fast food order wrong!” as being on the same level?!
And on it went: Are You Afraid of the Dark? felt watered-down after years of Tales of the Crypt, and the slew of Klasky Csupo cartoons and their derivatives were ugly even when I was 11. I didn’t “grow up” or “move on past this stuff.” THEY moved. I guess it worked; now that all the people who saw that stuff in their pre-teens are in their 20s, you hear way more about Good Burger than you do for say, the Hurry Up Machine.
Basically what I’m saying is that now that all the 90s kids are on the Internet, they’re my main factional foe because their fundamental wiring to perceive what is “good” is INFERIOR.
Ugh: “an excerpt” and “Tales FROM the Crypt.” I’m so used to being able to edit or revise posts. So that this post isn’t a total waste, I will go on record to say that Kenan’s cinematic apex was when he used his Sony PSP skills to land the titular plane in Snakes on a Plane. My respect for Kel has gone up substantially now that I see he was the voice of Dutch in Motorcity.
I was just about to enter high school when this came out, so I imagine I was a bit out of the demographic for it. I did watch All That and a few of the other shows on SNICK, but I was much more into the earlier shows than I was into what has become to be known as “Schneider’s Bakery.” I’ve never actually seen Good Burger — I’ve only been told of its legendary status as a post-modern film classic. After listening to the podcast, I’d like to keep it that way. I’m glad that Paul found some enjoyment in the film, but I can’t imagine I’ll ever actually sit down and watch it on purpose from beginning to end. That’d ruin the illusion, of course.