Review: Bruce Vilanch's 'It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time'

Bruce Vilanch is the scribe behind such widely reviled pop-cultural specimens as The Star Wars Holiday Special, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, and Can't Stop the Music, starring the Village People. That Vilanch didn't toss himself out of the nearest fifth floor window sometime in the early eighties could be a consequence of his mythical acceleration-powder intake or his equally legendary propensity for self-deprecation. 

Since Vilanch dispels the myth that he was some sort of incorrigible coke receptacle in his new book It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time, and goes above and beyond to remind us of his self-deprecating sense of humor, we can assume that the latter is responsible for him still being with us. One must surely need a prodigious ability to laugh at oneself to take a full-on wallow in their greatest failures for two hundred pages, which is basically what Vilanch does in It Seemed Like a Bad Idea. He takes us on a tour through the terrible variety shows, awful feature films, and crappy stage performances he wrote, mostly as an excuse to drop a lot of corny jokes one might expect from the guy who wrote that alien cooking show Chewbacca's wife loves to watch.

Granted, the stuff Vilanch surveys in this book stinks by any reasonable metric, but they're also busting at the seams with retro charm, much like Vilanch himself... at least when he's not playing the stereotype old-man comic by groaning about "the woke police" and "cancel culture" like some clown in the cabinet of a certain Village People super-fan so profoundly stupid that he doesn't even realize he's been blasting the gayest of gay anthems at his homophobic hate rallies. 

But if some of Vilanch's vilanching gets you rolling your eyes, it's all part of taking a trip to Vilanch country. At least he doesn't subject us to any wookiee porn. However, I would have liked a bit more background on The Star Wars Holiday Special and less of him doing his one-man Mystery Science Theater 3000 schtick while synopsizing their "plots." But as Vilanch himself says early in his book, if you remember the '70s, you weren't there, so that may account for that. Fortunately, he did recall a very priceless off-camera remark Bea Arthur dropped while filming The Star Wars Holiday Special that will likely make this book worth the price of admission for Bea Arthur super fans.

But that's what we have Steve Kozak's A Disturbance in the Force for, kids. Fortunately, when he treads over less traveled ground, like the Brady Bunch variety show, we get more background, which is just as satisfyingly bizarre as watching the Bradys sing "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing" with Rerun. I certainly feel complete now that I know that joining a Jesus cult kept Ann B. Davis from fully enjoying having Rip Taylor throw his wig at her.