A Young Dennis Quaid Starred In A Bizarre '80s Comedy Featuring A Beatles Member

The 1970s and 1980s were the golden age of the spoof. Mel Brooks was in peak send-up shape between 1974 and 1977 with the box office smashes "Blazing Saddles," "Young Frankenstein," and "High Anxiety," while David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (aka ZAZ) perfected the form with gag-a-second classics like "Kentucky Fried Movie," "Airplane!," "Police Squad!," and "Top Secret!" Of course, when studios noticed moviegoers had an appetite for such silliness, they also sought to cash in with decidedly lesser efforts like "The Big Bus," "Wholly Moses!," and "Spaceship" (aka "The Creature Wasn't Nice").

The trick to nailing the spoof has generally been to take a popular genre that's starting to verge on self-parody (like the Western or disaster movie) and amplify the most ridiculous tropes to an uproariously silly degree. The more humorless the genre, the better. Though there are big laughs to be found in the first three "Scary Movie" films, they're parodying a breed of slasher flick (i.e. "Scream") that's already in on the joke. When they're funny, it's mostly due to the Wayans' penchant for pushing a gag way too far.

This is why Martha Coolidge's "Johnny Dangerously" (a riff on 1930s and '40s gangster films) kills, but Carl Gottlieb's "Caveman" comes up short. The latter takes aim at prehistoric exploitation movies like "One Million Years B.C.," but these movies are silly in their own right, and there simply aren't enough of them to spoof. This doesn't mean "Caveman" is wholly devoid of merit. It contains a couple of hilarious set pieces while boasting the rare distinction of both starring Dennis Quaid and a former Beatle.

Carl Gottlieb had established himself as a top-tier sitcom writer in the 1970s via his work on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," "The Bob Newhart Show," and "All in the Family" when, having been cast to play the editor of the local Amity newspaper in "Jaws," he found himself rewriting the film's script on set at Steven Spielberg's behest. When you play a vital creative role in the crafting of a game-changing blockbuster, your services will be in demand. And when you go on to co-write a comedy blockbuster like "The Jerk," you can easily score a directing assignment if that's what you wanted to do.

Gottlieb decided to take a crack at helming a film and wound up making the oddball spoof "Caveman." Starring Ringo Starr and his actor wife Barbara Bach (best known at the time for playing Bond girl Anya Amasova in "The Spy Who Loved Me"), the movie was a PG stoner comedy that placed a lot of very funny people in ill-fitting loincloths. As far as the parody goes, the funniest bits in the movie involve a bumbling, stop-motion-animated Tyrannosaurus Rex that gets zonked by feasting on a mind-altering meal. This creature was built by special effects veteran Jim Danforth and animated by the great Randall W. Cook (who brought the Terror Dogs from "Ghostbusters" to life and won three Academy Awards as an integral part of Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" VFX team).

I was eight years old when "Caveman" hit the pay cable channels, so it holds a special place in my heart for its random scatalogical gags and the scene where Ringo and his clownish buddies (a tribe that includes such comedy stalwarts as Avery Schreiber and Jack Gilford) invent music. The stop-motion sequences are legitimately impressive and, oh yeah, this was many a young person's introduction to Shelley Long. Quaid was already a star to me because of his portrayal of Cutter member Mike in "Breaking Away," but he demonstrated a true facility for broad comedy in "Caveman." I wish he'd let his inner nerdball come out and play again.