Austin Powers Cameos Jumped The Shark With The Osbournes
The three Austin Powers movies, released from 1997 to 2002, are a seemingly forgotten pop culture curio that perhaps requires some context. This might be an entertainment franchise that is, in 2023, sliding gently into memory, a huge blockbuster relegated to trivia cards and stories.
In the late 1990s, a wave of what might be called "ironic nostalgia" swept across the youth landscape. It was a time when postwar lounge music and 1940s swing could be heard on mainstream radio stations alongside the day's hip-hop and grunge records. Squirrel Nut Zippers and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy had hits. Doug Liman's 1996 film "Swingers" fetishized long-gone 1960s cocktail culture, and the films of Quentin Tarantino heavily quote exploitation cinema of the 1970s. Some of these homages were affectionate, many weren't.
Into the middle of this came Jay Roach's "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery," a James Bond spoof written by and starring Mike Myers. The "Austin Powers" movies presented an exaggerated version of early Bond flicks, but with its title hero cryogenically frozen and revived in the 1990s when social mores had altered considerably. The first film wasn't initially a hit but gained an enormous audience once it hit home video. After that, the film earned a great deal of cultural traction, and eventually, a sequel was made. In 1999, "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" was a huge, huge hit, making over $200 million on a $30 million budget.
The third film in the series, 2002's "Austin Powers in Goldmember," now confident in the series' power, was granted a $63 million budget and boasted an impressive litany of cameo appearances. Most baffling to audiences in 2023 will likely be the appearance of Ozzy Osbourne and his family.
A cameo from home
A little context on the Osbournes. Ozzy, the lead man of the metal band Black Sabbath, had become notorious for his on-stage shenanigans, including a well-publicized event in 1982 when he — without really understanding that he was holding a real animal — bit the head off of a bat live on stage. Ozzy's stage persona was threatening and demonic, and he was often seen with wild eyes and a big grimace on his face. Also in 1982, Ozzy married his wife Sharon, and by 2002, they had three teenage kids named Aimee, Jack, and Kelly. MTV, seeing that Ozzy was a family man, figured audiences might be entertained seeing the shock rocker in a domestic situation and launched "The Osbournes," a reality TV show that merely followed Ozzy, Sharon, Jack, and Kelly around with cameras and made note of their propensity for profanity and off-kilter personalities.
"The Osbournes" only aired from 2002 to 2005, but it took hold of the popular consciousness in a big way. In the early 2000s, a lot of reality TV was not-so-subtly based in schadenfreude, and audiences regularly tuned in to laugh with — but also to laugh at — the Osbourne family. Ozzy (for the second time) and his wife and kids (for the first time) all became celebrities.
Striking while the iron was hot, the makers of "Goldmember" managed to snag the Osbournes for a cameo. Even at the time, the cameo felt like pandering, the filmmakers clearly trying to bank in on a hot trendy TV show rather than write quality comedy. It's an early example of "comedy of recognition," a tactic that hopes to elicit laughs merely by presenting a specific reference out of context. The Friedberg/Seltzer comedies of the 2000s used this tactic ad nauseum.
The boob joke
The Osbournes' joke wasn't even particularly funny. The "Austin Powers" films were pointedly ribald, using a great deal of sophomoric sexual innuendo and potty humor. The film would use cleverly obscured subtitles to make it look like someone might be cussing, or editing to put naughty words in characters' mouths.
Case in point: the villain of "Goldmember," Dr. Evil, uses his evil powers to shoot down a satellite. The satellite, to elicit titters, resembles a pair of breasts. This will lead to random strangers gazing up at the heavens and remarking "Hey! That looks like..." and then interrupted by an edit. The next scene would begin with a fruit vendor shouting "Melons! Melons for sale!" The naughty word was immediately turned into something innocuous. It is jejune by design, of course. "The Spy Who Shagged Me" employed a similar gag with a phallic rocket ship.
During the breast-shaped satellite sequence, the camera cut to the Osbournes sitting on a couch, with Ozzy yelling "Boobs!" as his punchline. The people who made the Austin Powers movies are boobs, the family then agrees. They cuss a lot, with their plentiful f-bombs bleeped out as they would be on their MTV show. After a brief moment of banter, the film resumes.
While the first "Austin Powers" film was often crass, there was at least a commentary: behavior considered "playful" and "sexy" in the 1960s would, by the 1990s, be understood as sexual harassment. Venerating early James Bond was to condone his bad behavior. By "Goldmember," the commentary was gone, and only the crassness remained. Additionally, the series was getting too big for its britches, using its money for immediately-dated pop references.
Ozzy may be a metal god, but a (scripted) comedy star he was not.