1.) This movie really exemplifies the differences in pacing between movies made in the 1960s and movies made now. If you asked most people what Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is about, they’d tell you “it’s about a family going on a fantastic adventure thanks to a magical car.”
This is not entirely wrong, but in a movie that runs two hours and twenty-five minutes (ASIDE: holy shit, this is a long movie) there is quite literally no adventure at all until the first hour is almost done, because the movie feels the need to introduce the car itself in its racing prime (the first five minutes, and man do they drag), Dick Van Dyke and family, explain why Dick Van Dyke is brilliant but poor, introduce multiple failed ideas by Dick Van Dyke to make money so he can buy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, finally let him succeed, then have him repair the car. Only then, at minute fifty-seven, does the movie that anybody actually remembers as “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” actually begin. This is a movie that was designed to have an intermission (it’s included on my DVD version of it) and shouldn’t have one and should be at least forty minutes shorter.
Another differences between movies made in the 1960s and now: we don’t have nearly as many comic mock-German performances these days.
2.) Another reason the movie should be shorter: the actors playing the children are singularly shrill and talentless. Whenever the movie focuses on anybody other than the children, it dances. When it focuses on Jeremy and Jemima (oh, yeesh) it drags. Plus, their characters are retards. When the Childcatcher (an idea that is singularly ludicrous but works because of it) shows up pretending to be a candy salesman, they fall for it despite that they just saw him not five minutes previous in the movie, threatening their death and everything, but hey, he promised treacle tarts! Watching this movie again, I suddenly remembered that at the age of ten I thought these kids were idiots. I strongly doubt I was alone in this regard.
3.) I’ve grown so used to Dick Van Dyke in elderly-doctor mode over the years that I’d forgotten what an absolutely brilliant physical comedian he was in his prime. When he impersonates the giant puppet in the “toys for the Baron” sequence, he does it perfectly – you can almost see the nonexistent strings holding him up, particularly in a couple of moments where I honestly can’t figure out how he managed to stay upright given how off-balance he was. It’s glorious to watch. And he’s just a solid comic actor, which people tend to overlook sometimes due to his dreadful Cockney accent in Mary Poppins. (Also, a fun fact: Lionel Jeffries, playing Dick Van Dyke’s father in the movie, is one year older than Van Dyke.)
4.) Benny Hill, as the Toymaker, moves with such frustrated energy it fascinates me – every step is a bounce, his walk is a tightly constrained run, his arm motions are thrusts and sweeps rather than easy movement. Watching him, it’s easy to think that he just wants the Yakety Sax to start up and have somebody in a gorilla suit chase him around the set.
5.) My god, if there was ever a movie demanding to be remade as a balls-out family fantasy adventure, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is that movie. Keep the car. Don’t bother to explain anything beyond handwaving of the vaguest sort possible. “It’s quantum, that’s how it works. Trust the quantum-ness.” Travel to a parallel Earth. Aliens! Childcatchers with spidery, robotic limbs! Baron and Baroness Bomburst being even more insane (if such a thing is possible – they’re pretty insane in the original, after all)! Chitty Chitty Bang Bang flying over distant horizons! Somehow, Uluru is involved! Hot damn it would be fantastic.
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You’d have to find a diector with an appropriate sense of the fantastic for a remake to work well.
Guillermo del Toro perhaps.
You also have to make a James Bond reference somewhere, given the novel was written by Ian Fleming and the original had Desmond Llewelyn in it.
Terry Gilliam should remake this movie. If God will allow it.
I saw this in its original theatrical run, when I was eight. I really liked it then, but watching it as a theoretical grownup, I see that it really has problems like you say. But when you start talking about going to outer space and all that crap, you lose me.
I doubt kids would go for it, though- it’s just too quaint and old fashioned. Hence the need for outer space, apparently, and quantum-ness, and then you might as well put in Bond references because it won’t be the same.
Dick Van Dyke is also, by accounts, a fairly good CGI animator.
Yeah, it surprised the hell out of me.
It also had Gert “Goldfinger” Frobe playing Bombast!
you can almost see the nonexistent strings holding him up, particularly in a couple of moments where I honestly can’t figure out how he managed to stay upright given how off-balance he was.
For a at least some of those bits, I suspect either actual strings that were blue-screened out, or that they attached his feet to the floor. (As I recall, he did a similar bit as the bank owner in Mary Poppins, but without leaning quite as far.)
Okay, so let’s say they remake it.
Dick van Dyke’s character would likely go to. . . Eddie Murphy. The Baron and Baronness would, of course, also be played by Eddie Murphy, except we don’t really mock Germans like that anymore.
Instead of a German Baron and Baronness, we would have to substitute with some Saudi prince and his dozen wives. All played by Eddie Murphy.
Oh, and Chitty would have to either be either a Prius, or a fleet of swarming Segways. With the fleet of swarming Segways, we could also remake the last half of Bedknobs and Broomsticks in to the movie!
I really hope they don’t try to remake this, unless it’s directed by, oh, let’s say Christopher Nolan. Starring Tom Hanks. I think that could work.
Dick Van Dyke is easily one of the greatest comedic actors of all time. OK, of the film era. His physical comedy skills are exceeded only by the silent masters of that art (including, of course, Harpo in that list), and his sense of comic timing is impeccable. Sure, his cockney accent is bad, but at least it’s hilariously bad.
Please lord, don’t let anyone remake this. The kids are grindingly shrill I admit, but you know a remake will be a complete cock-up. I’ve already had to see oompa loompas rapping; I’d like to be spared further horrors.
Hence the need for outer space, apparently, and quantum-ness, and then you might as well put in Bond references because it won’t be the same.
Johnny, it’s about evoking a sense of wonder and discovery. Even in the late Sixties, you could do that by simply making things “foreign,” but that’s not going to work now because even if kids aren’t travelling themselves, they’re exposed to the concept of travelling and different cultures early. Kids today simply have a different qualifier for something being exotic and strange, and that’s what you have to appeal to. The original movie isn’t “quaint” because it’s old; it’s quaint because it assumes some concepts that are normal in 2008 to be fantastical, which they were in 1968.
And it’s worth pointing out that the original filmmakers of Chitty knew this, because the film is nothing like the book, wherein the car talks and helps the family fight gangsters.
Aardy: Bluescreen technology (which was then greenscreen, but I digress) wasn’t nearly so advanced at that time as to be able to block out individual elements on film, and the leans Van Dyke performs happen in the course of a dance routine where there’s no opportunity for him to fix his foot to anything. He’s doing them through sheer muscle power.
Other Fun Fact: Road Dahl was called into help edit the script, possibly to make it more silly & manic.
Other OTHER Fun Fact: Dahl had been working on the idea which he’d scribbled down as “A Magical Chocolate Factory, Run By A Lunatic”. In the Childcatcher, he found the perfect lunatic.
It turns out that what I have to say about remaking Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has already been said.
Chitty of Lost Children?
James Bond reference? Reference?
You mean like:
-a leading female character named “Truly Scrumptious”
-a car that can fly, float and has other, weird gadgets and gizmos
-a crazed bad guy with an obvious deformity (elongated nose)
What do you want, Dick Van Dyke with a walther?
Of course there’s James Bond references. The original story was written by Ian Fleming!!
Read the book people. Book and movie are 2 entirely different plots.
In the book Cracticus is married to a woman named Mimsie. There are NO evil royals and the story has them fighting gangsters thru France. Cracticus buys Chitty after selling inventions and the whistle candy.
It was in my intro to animation class, watching old episodes of the Dick van Dyke show that I learned just what an awesome actor DVD is, so maybe if I can stomach it, I’ll watch my mom’s copy of CCBB. I was never a huge fan of it as a kid, which was probably due to her enthusiasm for it.
As rife with possibilities a remake would be, you know they’d just make it star Brendan Fraser.
To keep the Ian Fleming connection intact, surely the Baron should be played by Daniel Craig.
… I’ll get my coat.
Well I saw the original theatrical run and loved it. i’ve lived in the shadow of this movie all my life. kids bought into this stuff back then, and the interval (just after chitty goes over the cliff) is my greatest cinema memory.
But a new version based on the ORIGINAL book would be amazing. Hugh Laurie as Mr Pott. The car is green in the original book. The adventures are wonderful good old fashioned romps and deserve rto be filmed – better even that Dahl’s mad script!