Top Secret is a pretty good movie. Solidly fun, stuffed full of jokes, and breezy and silly in a way that seems to be lost to modern grand spoof movies. What probably keeps it from being one of the great spoof movies is that it’s impossible to answer the question: so what exactly is being spoofed? It’s a close parody of something that never existed, the … Elvis World War II espionage thriller? That doesn’t matter much. Maybe its genius comes from pulling together spoofs of a couple of genres and finding that they harmonize. Maybe its genius comes from just taking a goofy idea and spoofing it so relentlessly that we don’t care if there was ever an original.
A weird idea? Sure. But after all, how many people spoof silent movie melodramas by depicting women tied to railroad tracks, even though that never happened except in silent movie spoofs of melodramas? Something can have all the hallmarks of a spoof without actually being a parody of anything in particular.
And this brings me to the Bob And Ray Present The CBS Radio Network for the 14th of July, 1950. The episode is tagged as “The Grand Motel”, for the central sketch in it. It gives off the vibes of parodying some particular old-time radio soap opera but heck if I can say what. The most specific I can get is to One Man’s Family, but that’s just because I’ve heard a lot of that soap and it features a lot of cranky old man at its center. I’m attempting, again, to embed it, but if that doesn’t work the above link should let you download it. And if that doesn’t work you can try this Archive.org collection of Bob and Ray episodes, looking for the one tagged “590714TheGrandMotel”.
To the extent this is spoofing anything particular, it’s soap operas, of course. There used to be a lot of them. Many were surprisingly short, fifteen-minute installments mostly of people recapping where they were and advancing the story a little bit. Many blurred the line between drama and comedy, as we’d see it now. The Grand Motel feels just slightly outside what might be plausible for a real soap. It’s played with a ruthless integrity to its internal logic and the Bob and Ray sketch comedy motif of the world just not quite fitting together smoothly. Everyone in their sketch worlds is just a little bit out of place. If that amuses you at all, then the sketch will keep getting funnier.
Also, yes, look for surprise special guest Pat Boone. He’s there with advice for teenagers.
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