Today’s comic was almost sacrilege in my house. Cami is a dyed-in-the-wool, hard core Mike Myers fan from way back. So I Married An Axe Murderer is one of her favorite movies.
I’m not without my loyalty to Myers. I’ve often enjoyed his work all the way back to his days on Saturday Night Live. Like everybody else, I was totally swept up in Austin Powers-mania, doing horrid impressions each summer a new movie was released.
But as time goes on, one begins to realize that Myers has consistently cannibalized his own work. Despite his great ability to introduce and engrain catchphrases and characters into the pop culture lexicon, he will often grab hold of a concept or a character and ride it into the ground. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to watch Shrek and hear the voice of Fat Bastard coming out of his mouth. You couldn’t do, like, a squeaky voice, or something?
Things get complicated in that respect when you learn that Myers originally recorded all his dialogue for Shrek WITHOUT the Scottish accent and later convinced the producers to let him re-recorded the character WITH the accent. This was done at great expense to the animators eventually costing the production millions of dollars to reanimate the main characters lips.
Most don’t know that Myers has a reputation for being difficult – an exacting perfectionist. That rumor gained steam during the pre-production of the failure Dieter project, which Myers walked off of due to what he thought was a sub-standard script. Both Universal Studios and producer Brian Grazer sued. Eventually it was settled out of court.
Things must be peachy-keen between all three players now considering Myers is their lead in the big screen adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat. I don’t know if I care to see it this weekend or not. Frankly, I still have a bad taste in my mouth from Jim Carrey’s outing in The Grinch, and most of the art direction crew on that film has returned for The Cat.
There’s something about the make up in these movies that just unnerves me. That funny snout apparatus on the actor
Working on my Mike Myers theory.
I'm trying to find the root of Myers repetitive shtick. For example, his work in Shrek is a retread of his character Fat Bastard in the Austin Powers movies which is an extrapolation of his Scottish father character from So I Married An Axe Murderer. All of these characters origins can be traced back to the "If it's not Scottish, it's crap!" skit from Myers days at Saturday Night Live.
In The Cat In The Hat. Myers is dusting off his old "New York" Jewish accent which was used to some effect when he played Steve Rubell in Studio 54.
Both Characters stem from Linda Richman from "Coffee Talk" on SNL - A character he's freely admited to modeling after his Jewish mother-in-law.
Using computers, I have predicted that this pattern will result in Myers' face caving in somewhere around 2007.
