Wonderchicken Industries
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Emptybottle.org
The original and much-beloved home of the Wonderchicken.
OutsideinKorea
Because somebody needs to counteract all the damn whining.
Wonderchicken-o-rama
Where it all comes together, whether you want it to or not.
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The Story
It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World is a glorious, shambolic madcap mess of a road movie, and as such, doesn’t really have all that much of a plot between the initial setup and the final denoument. It’s mostly about the way the characters interact, get themselves into and out of a wide variety of pickles, and the sheer pleasure of watching all those old-school comments mug for the camera, trying to fill up that giant Cinemascope screen. Here’s the setup for the story:
The movie opens high over the desert. A car is careening, nearly out of control, along the narrow highway. It swerves to avoid oncoming vehicles, barrelling around corners, raising puffs of desert dust when the tires leave the asphalt.
It’s only a matter of time until the driver loses control and the car sails off a cliff and crashes with a great clatter into a rocky decline. Four other vehicles, seeing the car go airborne, stop to help.
The dying man, Smiler Grogan the lovable criminal, who’s been thrown from his car and lays dying on the rocks, tells the drivers about $350,000 that he has hidden below a giant “W” in seaside Santa Rosita, some 200 miles away, and then after begging for foregiveness for his sins, kicks the bucket.
The four drivers and their respective passengers can’t decide on how to share out the future fortune, and the race to be the first to reach Santa Rosita begins.
After the initial fits and starts, the distrust starts to grow, and the race to the riches is well and truly on. One couple manages to rent a WW I biplane, while others compete in shifting alliances to overcome flat tires, unscrupulous passers-by, country folk, rivers and mountains, drunken millionaires, a British adventurer with a thing about bosoms, little girl’s bicycles, and a mother-in-law from hell and her imbecile hipster son. But while the folks travel in their roundabout way towards the goal, they are being monitored by a henpecked policeman dreaming of retirement. The wide swath they are cutting through the southern California desert is not going unnoticed.