Satire in Film - Guide to Films

Excalibur. John Boorman, dir., co-script, producer. USA (sic): Warner (prod.) / Orion, Warner (dist.), 1981. Rospo Pallenberg, co-script with JB, from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur [published 1485]). 140 min. / USA, edited version: 119 min. Original music: Trevor Jones. Unoriginal music: Carl Orff (from Carmina Burana), Richard Wagner.

1. On Sir Thomas Malory's The Morte Darthur: "The Death of Arthur"—title variously spelled; characters' names variously spelled; some roles vary in different versions.

The Morte Darthur does not end with "The Death of King Arthur" (section VI in my source) but with "The Death of Launcelot and Guinevere" (section VII). The climax of the story is the death announced in the book's title, with the stories of Launcelot and Guinevere (and others) tied up fairly neatly in the concluding section, for the dénouement (i.e., final tying up of story lines). The overarching story is, after all, the Courtly Love of Launcelot and Guinevere and how this instance of Courtly Love involved a betrayal: not just the adultery necessary for Courtly Love, but the betrayal of Arthur as Lord and friend.

• How does Excalibur finish up the love triangle of Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot?

• How does Excalibur handle the love affair and adultery: Tragically, Romantically—a little of each? Is there any hint of a comic or satiric cuckolding?

In classic Courtly Romance, the adultery was a given: among the Courtly class, marriage was business, so romance had to be outside of marriage; since people of all classes usually married young if they could, Courtly romance was usually—at least in literature—adulterous. G. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales starts out with "The Knight's Tale," a cleaned up and mildly comic short Romance tale; it is answered by "The Miller's Tale"—a fabliau (a long, dirty joke, here in most excellent verse). "The Miller's Tale" takes the situation of old husband, young wife, young male collegiate border and makes it into a nasty, very funny satire centering on adultery; if we want the joke, we want the old husband to be cuckolded—and we get comic punishments for stupidity and pride, not adultery.

In Malory's version of The Death of Arthur, King Arthur mortally wounds Sir Mordred, his necessarily bastard son by his (half-)sister Morgan le Fey. (Contrast Launcelot's holy bastard, the Grail Knight, Sir Galahad.) And Arthur in turn is mortally (?) wounded by Mordred.

Arthur commands Sir Bedivere, "take thou Excalibur, my good sword, and go with it to yonder water side, and when thou comest there I charge thee throw my sword in that water, and come again and tell me what thou seest." Bedivere hides Excalibur instead and returns to Arthur. "'What saw thou there?' said the King," and Bedivere replies, "Sir […], I saw nothing but waves and winds"—which tips off Arthur that Bedivere disobeyed. Arthur again orders the sword thrown into the water, and this bit is repeated. «Magic» third time, Bedivere goes to the water, "bound the girdle about the hilts" of Excalibur, "and then he threw the sword into the water, as he might; and there came and arm and an hand above the water and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrive and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water."

• How is this business handled in Excalibur? Does Boorman's handling of the sequence avoid the possible laughter at a disembodied arm and hand catching a sword?

• Is Sir Bedivere the «sword knight» in Excalibur? If another knight, what, if anything, is the significance of the change?

Arthur has Bedivere carry him "to that water side," where Excalibur had been thrown. And when they were at the water side, even fast by the bank hoved a little barge with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods," and all wept and mourned "when they saw King Arthur. 'Now put me into the barge,' said the king." Which done, "that queen said, 'Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me? Alas, this wound on your head hath caught over-much cold.'" The barge is rowed off and Bedivere calls after it, demanding what would become of him with enemies all about. Arthur answers, "'Comfort thyself […] and do as thou mayest, for in me is no trust for to trust in; for I will into the vale of Avilion to heal me of my grievous wound: and if thou hear never more of me, pray for my soul.' But ever the queens and ladies wept and shrieked, that it was pity to hear." Bevidere also "wept and wailed" and went off into the forest, where he comes across "a chapel and an hermitage," where he finds a hermit "groveling on all four," and "a tomb that was newly graven." The hermit is the former Bishop of Canterbury, who doesn't know who's in the tomb "But this night, at midnight, here came a number of ladies, and brought hither a dead corpse, and prayed me to bury him," and paid well for him to do it. Bedivere concludes, the corpse "was my lord King Arthur," and swoons. Malory concludes this part:

Thus of Arthur I find never more written in books that be authorized, nor more of the very certainty of his death heard I never read, but thus was he led away in a ship wherein were three queens; the one was King Arthur's sister, Queen Morgan le Fay [or Fey]; the other was the Queen of Northgalis; the third was the Queen of the Waste Lands. Also there was Nimue, the chief lady of the lake, that had done much for King Arthur. More of the death of King Arthur could I never find, but that ladies brought him to his burials; and such one was buried there, that the hermit bare witness that sometime was Bishop of Canterbury, but yet the hermit knew not in certain that he was verily the body of King Arthur […].

Yet some men say in many parts of England [i.e., long after the fall of Arthur's Britain) that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross. I will not say it shall be so, but rather I will say, here in this world he changed his life. But many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: Hic jacet Arthur Rex, quondam Rex que futurus.

["Here lies King Arthur, who was once king, and will be king again." Or, "Here lies Arthur, the once and future king."]

• What is Boorman's version of the end of Arthur? Should we see Arthur going off "into the vale of Avilion"? Into The Mists of Avalon—a realm of preChristian magic? Barging off with three regal women—we know not where? Barging off to die and become a legend? • What are the generic effects of the various possibilities for an ending—or the effect on genre if the ending is strongly ambiguous?

(Source: Charles Richard Sanders and Charles E. Ward, The Morte Darthur by Sir Thomas Malory: An Abridgment with An Introduction [New York: Appleton, 1940: esp. 200-02]).

2. Two MU students a couple decades back coming out of a screening of Excalibur.

I grew up on such stories and a generation back many Americans still did—but did you? If you're new in the neighborhood of Camelot, what did you make of it? What generic expectations did you bring to the film? Should we see Excalibur as, finally, tragic (the fall of Arthur and old Britain)?

3. The backstory, birth, rise, triumph, and fall of Arthur—the great passion of Guenivere and Lancelot—these stories can be neatly told, and are neatly told in Excalibur. The Riverside edition of Selections from the Works of Sir Thomas Malory is called King Arthur and His Knights and includes a fair bit of the material that makes Malory's work a Late Medieval Romance (with Early Modern inflections). With a Round Table surrounded by valorous knights, it's easy to just go around the Table, so to speak, and tell their tales. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail look for a looser structure, one fitted for Romance and Satire.

4. Excalibur (1981) comes after Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975); should we see Python/Grail as a «pre-existent satire» of Excalibur? With or without satiric commentary, what should we make of the politics of Excalibur and similar Romances? HINTs:

Name two people at Camelot of rank below squire. (Alternatively, name four enlisted personnel on an Enterprise in any of the STAR TREK saga. Or name any two of the friends the Skywalker kids hung out with in the continuing STAR WARS saga.)

What alternatives to monarchy are considered as Britain gets politically organized? (What alternatives to a chain of command were considered for STAR TREK: Voyager?)

What efforts do we see to organize peasant militias, armed with the sort of primitive pikes and long bows that might bring down mounted marauders?

How is the coming of Christianity presented? (In the world of the film, is emerging Christianity progressive?)

What were the politics of the musicians whose existent music Boorman used? What, if anything, should we make of the politics of music? Can music be political?

e. What in the mise-en-scene cues us we're in RomanceLand? (Note the Queen of the Waste Lands in Malory, and that The Wasteland is a frequent alternative locale in Romance; what is it alternative to?)

Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, dir. UK: Michael White Productions, National Film Trustee Company, Python (Monty) Pictures Lt. (prod.) / 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, Cinema 5 Distributing, Columbia Pictures-Columbia TriStar, MI Films Ltd., Rainbow Releasing (dist.), 1975. 091 minutes.

Writing credits: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin (i.e., Monty Python).

Comments and Questions

1. For a Romance, Sir Thomas Malory's The Morte Darthur, is elegantly structured: a locale, a premise, an over-arching story of the rise and fall of Britain, the great love-triangle of Guenivere, Arthur, Lancelot (with various spellings). Still, it moves all over the place, as the various knights get their stories told—and a major knight like Lancelot can get a couple stories told. Malory offers great Lit.: love and war, sex, violence, betrayal, hate, and piety. Heavy on the piety with "Sir Galahad, the servant of Jesus Christ and very [= true] knight […] a clean virgin above all knights as the flower of the lily in whom virginity is signified" (King Arthur and His Knights 108; "The Holy Grail"). John Boorman's film, Excalibur, is even more tightly focussed, concentrating on the sword and Arthur and the love story—and giving us a relatively chaste Lancelot and sparing us a virginal, contrasting Galahad. Python/Grail offers some comparison and contrasts with both works.

• "The Death of Arthur" story arguably moves from Romance into Tragedy for its conclusion, especially in Excalibur, where "the rest is silence" after the death of Arthur. How does Python/Grail end? Does Python/Grail conclude?

• How does Lancelot come through in Python/Grail? Galahad, The Pure? What is the Python take on martial heroism? On virginity?

Comic/Satiric—Political Theory Question: Why is male virginity often funny, female virginity less so? Would the scene of Galahad's temptation at Castle Anthrax be funny if we had a (female) Warrior Maiden among a bunch of horny men? In a nonpatriarchal, Amazonian culture, could you have such a joke (perhaps with a closet heterosexual)? In a truly Christian culture, would any kind of virginity be funny? (Maybe, in a comedy for a Protestant audience, such as Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.)

2. Kevin Thomas in the LA Times places Python/Grail in one historical context in 1975 and asserts that the film "can also be read as an expose of the folly and brutality of war" (see above). Do you think this assertion correct for audience response near the end of the Vietnam War in 1975? Do you think this is a legitimate reading for today?

3. If Python/Grail is not an antiwar film, what is the object of its satire? If it does not have a satiric "butt," a target, can it be a satire? If it is merely a parody of Camelot stories, is it satire? Alternatively, if you accept parody as a form of satire, can a mere parody be serious satire?

4. What is the significance of Dennis, and the anarcho-syndicalist critique of Arthur's rule? Why is this funny? Shouldn't good Jeffersonian democratic-republicans—e.g., patriotic Americans—find Dennis right in rejecting weird theories of divine right based on having a sword thrown at a guy by some "watery tart"? If something is being satirized in this scene—what? More generally, what're the politics of Python (and maybe of Satire generally)?

5. How does God come through in Python/Grail? How does Holy Church do? (Note that British churches can be unabashedly patriotic an militaristic, displaying banners and statues of military heroes. So The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch may have some British significances foreigners can miss.)

6. Steve Martin has said, "Comedy Is Not Pretty"; satiric comedy can get downright ugly. Why do we laugh at the Black Knight, as he gets cut to pieces by Arthur? Undoubtedly we take righteous pleasure at the reductio ad finem / reductio ad adsurdum (pushing to the end and reducing to the absurd) of macho masochism; still … what else is so damn funny? Why do we laugh at the murder of a father to avoid inconvenience during a time of plague? What is funny about the forced marriage of a son—and the destruction of a wedding party?

7. As early as 1957, in his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye noted the tendency of Satire—for all its claims to gritty realism—to move off into fantasy. When and how does Python/Grail move into at least what Kevin Thomas calls "the Pythons' absurdist vision"?

8. What is so funny—and is there anything satiric—about a modern British cop patting down for weapons a fully-armored knight (Sir Lancelot)?



Citation:
BLAZING SADDLES.  Mel Brooks, dir., co-script (with Andrew Bergman [story also], Richard Pryor, Norman Steinberg, Alan Unger), some songs, acting.  USA: Crossbow Productions, Warner (prod.) / Warner (dist.), 1975.  

Short Form: It's a Mel Brooks movie.

`Cleavon Little`	`Bart, Sheriff`	`Gene Wilder`	`Jim, The Waco Kid`
`Slim Pickens`	`Taggart`	`David Huddleston`	`Olson Johnson`
`Liam Dunn`	`Reverend Johnson`	`Alex Karras`	`Mongo`
`John Hillerman`	`Howard Johnson`	`George Furth`	`Van Johnson`
`Mel Brooks`	`Governor William J. Le Petomane/Indian Chief/ World War I-Era Aviator in Bad-Men Lineup`	`Harvey Korman`	`Hedley Lamarr, State Procurer/Attorney General/Assistant to the Governor`
`Jack Starrett`	`Gabby Johnson`	`Madeline Kahn`	`Lili Von Shtupp`
`Carol DeLuise`	`Harriett Johnson`	`Richard Collier`	`Dr. Sam Johnson`
`Charles McGregor`	`Charlie`	`Don Megowan`	`Gum Chewer`
`Robyn Hilton`	`Miss Stein`	`Karl Lukas`	`Cut Throat #1`
`Dom DeLuise`	`Buddy Bizarre`	`Burton Gilliam`	`Lyle`
`Count Basie`	`Himself`	`Gilda Radner`	`Townswoman in church (uncredited)`
`Robert Ridgely`	`Boris the Hangman (uncredited)`

"He Rode a Blazing Saddle" by Mel Brooks, sung by Frankie Laine.  
To hear the song: http://www.farwestmeats.com/sounds/blazsad1.wav



When outlaws ruled the West
And fear filled the land
A cry went up for a man with guts
To take the West in hand.
They needed a man who was brave and true
With justice for all as his aim
Then out of the sun rode a man with a gun
And Thad was his name
Yes Thad was his name!

He rode a blazing saddle!
He wore a shining star!
His job to offer battle
To bad men near and far!
He conquered fear and he conquered hate
He turned dark night into day
He made his blazing saddle
A torch to light the way!

1. Rose Cooper says "Mel Brooks' point is that racists and their ilk are the stupid ones, ripe to be ridiculed and ignored for the idiots they are. In Blazing Saddles, we don't laugh with these fools, we laugh at them." Is this the point you get from Blazing Saddles? If not, what point(s) do you get? Or, does Blazing Saddles lack a point?

2. In a quotation I've undoubtedly given you, Northrop Frye suggests that Satiric genius tends toward what respectable society considers obscene. Want to add scatological as well, or whatever the correct term is for "fart jokes"? Is there a point to the bean-eating scene? (One suggestion: it defamiliarizes and deromanticizes all those scenes of cowpokes sitting around the ol' campfire eating all those beans, and nobody, ever cutting a fart. The critic suggested we'd never watch one of those cliché scenes against without giggling a bit—and that that was a very good thing.)

3. At age 18 in Military Science 101, I was rather surprised to learn that an official US Army text book, based on the official history of the Army, held George Armstrong Custer to be a villain worthy to be shot. My full-colonel instructor thought our text a little soft on Custer: "We hang murderers." Growing up on Westerns, I was also surprised to find Army actions in the wars against the Plains Indians called "the nadir [= lowest point] of American military history." The movies had it that Custer and the Cavalry were the good guys, not, in the Colonel's formulation, "guilty of war crimes" A colleague in the History Department not all that much younger than I was surprised that I was surprised; he'd grown up assuming movies lied about US history. What's your background here?

If you were not taught the gory details of The Conquest of the West, does Blazing Saddles perform a useful function for you in deromanticizing it?

• The Indians/Jews gag can be useful here: The Bible's description of the Assyrian Empires move through Israelite territory has been likened to a description of US Western expansion written from the point of view of the Sioux; the typification is double-edged. Given the chance—as at Jericho in ancient times and actions by the Irgun, the Stern Gang, and their more recent descendants—Israelites and Jews will commit massacres, but the great majority of our history has had us victims of massacres. Ancient Israel / Assyrians = Indians / Settlers should be a disturbing equation.

• In the classic Western, one could ask "Where are the Blacks and Chinese?"—Blazing Saddles raises the issue.

4. Lenny Bruce suggested that we should use racial epithets much more often—use them until they became just words and lose their power to hurt. Rich Erlich suggests that the ideal for the next few decades is less to get Americans from hating and contemning minorities than to get the minorities into positions where they don't have to care much if some people despise them. Accepting that such theories are at least arguable, is Blazing Saddles useful in defanging racist language? Or does the film "normalize" racist language and thereby work against US minorities?

• Is it useful to break the frame and insist we're watching a movie? (Doesn't such distancing undermine any point the film might have?)

• Does the breaking of the frame at the end fit in with the appearance of Count Basie providing the background music? The toll-booth gag?

6. Again, the legend, anyway, is that Cleavon Little had an answering line to Madeline Kahn's "It's twue! It's twue!" Certainly it's an obvious sort of gag. Why not leave in or put in such a joke? It would make the scene smuttier, but it would foreground assumptions about the size of Black men's penises. Wouldn't it be more offensive to a taboo but also more moral to extend the joke?

(Someone working on the Masters and Johnson sex project actually measured a sample: the flaccid Black penis averages "a silly millimeter longer," to recycle a line from an old cigarette ad—with no differences for erect penises.)

7. Are women dealt with fairly in Blazing Saddles? More or less fairly than in classic Westerns? Do women appear any worse than the men?

8. Does Blazing Saddles undermine authority? If so, does it do so usefully? (The politics of attacking authority can get very complex, and interesting.)

Making Mr. Right. Dir. Susan Seidelman. USA: Orion, 1987. John Malkovich, Ann Magnuson, stars. 098 minutes

Brief description: Pygmalion/Galatea motif with some gender reversal and other twists (possibly including a sendup of male questing). Dr. Jeff Peters is a scientist who makes a male android who gets humanized by Frankie Stone—who becomes more fully human in turn. Peters does not get humanized, but he does get a happy ending, shot into space. Frankie Stone and the android (Ulysses) live happily ever after?

1. John Malkovich is the star of Mr. Right, but the character, Frankie Stone, is the protagonist. Note opening of film and notice how we know Stone will be important, and so will the relationship between men and women.

2. In the little movie we see at the meeting early in Mr. Right, note the title for Jeff Peters: Chief Robotic Engineer. Since the soundtrack of the commercial within the film makes clear that what's being pitched is an android, the "Robotic" in the title becomes ambiguous. How is "Dr. JEFF PETERS" a Chief and a "Robotic Engineer"? Does he change during the course of the film? If so, does he become a bit more human? More like a man?

3. This movie is in form a comedy, and the traditional pattern of comedies moves from relative unhappiness to happiness—for the positive central characters. In Northrop Frye's analysis, central characters who aren't positive and remain that way have to be circumvented or expelled (such an expelled character is an alazon [plural, alazones]). Generally, romantic comedy moves toward integrating as many people as possible into a new, better, more flexible society, coalescing around a central couple. How happy is the conclusion of Mr. Right? How appropriate? How appropriate if the film examines a Ulysses character from Penelope's point of view? How appropriate if the fim is satiric comedy?

4. According to Henri Bergson ("Comedy," ca. 1900), the essence of comedy is "the superimposition of the mechanical upon the organic," specifically upon the human. How does Mr. Right use this technique? How does it get comedy out making the mechanical more human?

5. How does the film use voice-over announcements and intercut TV shows and commercials? (Compare RoboCop.)

6. Given the men in this film, is there something to be said for a woman's getting herself an android, or even a robot, and making Mr. Right? Is the film an equal opportunity satire, getting us to laugh at women also?

7. Joan Gordon and several other big-time feminist scholars of science fiction once agreed that, if men erred in enjoying "T&A" films, it was equally bad for women to enjoy films that let them lust after men. "But what the hell; it's sexist but fun"—and she lead an extended discussion of Mr. Right as a "C&B" flik (where the "B" stands for "buns"). Is part of the attraction of the film for women (gay men?) Malkovich's body—or at least for women intellectuals over 30? Is part of the fantasy "making" Mr. Right—sexually initiating a well-hung innocent?

The film Metropolis makes much of "the male gaze" and both the power of women (or female robot) and oppression of women (at least of the saintly sort) through the male gaze. Is the male-gendered Ulysses the object of the female gaze in a similar and/or different way?

8. Making Mr. Right shows women interested in sex. Is this aspect of the film «Good for the Women» (as a power minority in patriarchal culture) or not? Is it good for women if the "cultural dominant" is sexual puritanism and finds lust in one's heart as bad as adultery?

From the ancient world well into the Enlightenment, women were held by many male intellectuals to be inferior and (and because) women were sexually insatiable. In the 19th c., women were better than men because far less interested in sex than the male beast—and one of the reasons to keep women home and domestic and carefully married was to protect women.

• American society, as typified by Miami, Florida? (Note Ulysses as an "innocent abroad" in Miami, FL.)

• Women who waste time and talent searching for Mr. Right? The Mr. Wrongs those women often get? The "Romantic Code" that requires most American women and many American men to have as a prime goal finding one's "life partner" and "soul mate"?

If several of the above—is Making Mr. Right an unusual comedy but fairly typical satire?

Citation (Extended):

National Lampoon's Animal House (vt Animal House). John Landis, dir. USA: Universal (prod.) / MCA/Universal Pictures (US dist.), 1978. Douglas Kenney, Harold Ramis, Chris Miller, script. Ivan Reitman, Matty Simmons, prod. Original music by Elmer Bernstein and Stephen Bishop (songs). 109 minutes.

Uther Pendragon	Gabriel Byrne	Arthur	Nigel Terry
Morgana	Helen Mirren	Igrayne	Katrine Boorman
Lancelot	Nicholas Clay	Gawain	Liam Neeson
Guenevere	Cherie Lunghi	Cornwall	Corin Redgrave
Perceval	Paul Geoffrey	Kay	Niall O'Brien
Merlin	Nicol Williamson	Leondegrance	Patrick Stewart
Mordred	Robert Addie	Boy Mordred	Charley Boorman
Ector	Clive Swift	Uryens	Keith Buckley

Graham Chapman	King Arthur/Voice of God/Middle Head/Hiccoughing Guard
John Cleese	Second Soldier with a Keen Interest in Birds/Large Man with Dead Body/Black Knight/Mr Newt (A Village Blacksmith Quite Interested in Burning Witches)/A Quite Extraordinarily Rude Frenchman/Tim the Wizard/Sir Launcelot the Brave
Eric Idle	The Dead Collector/Mr Blint (A Village N'er-Do-Well Very Keen on Burning Witches)/Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave-as-Sir Launcelot/The Guard Who Doesn't Hiccough but Tries to Get Things Straight/Concorde (Sir Launcelot's Trusty Steed)/Roger the Shrubber (A Shrubber)/Brother Maynard
Terry Gilliam	Patsy (Arthur's Trusty Steed)/Green Knight/Soothsayer/Bridgekeeper/Sir Gawain (The First to be Killed by the Rabbit)/Animator
Terry Jones	Dennis's Mother/Sir Bedevere/Left Head/Voice of Cartoon Scribe/Prince Herbert
Michael Palin	1st Soldier with a Keen Interest in Birds/Dennis/Mr Duck (A Village Carpenter Who is Almost Keener Than Anyone Else to Burn Witches)/Right Head/Sir Galahad the Pure/Leader of the Knights Who Say 'Ni!'/Narrator/King of Swamp Castle/Brother Maynard's Roommate
Connie Booth	The Witch
Carol Cleveland	Zoot and Dingo
Neil Innes	The First Self-Destructive Monk/Robin's Least Favourite Minstrel/The Page Crushed by a Rabbit/The Owner of a Duck
Bee Duffell	Old Crone to Whom King Arthur Said 'Ni!'
John Young	The Dead Body That Claims It Isn't/The Historian Who Isn't A.J.P. Taylor At All
Rita Davies	The Historian Who Isn't A.J.P. Taylor (Honestly)'s Wife
Avril Stewart	Either Piglet or Winston
Sally Kinghorn	Either Winston or Piglet
Mark Zycon	Prisoner

John Malkovich	Dr. Jeff Peters , Ulysses
Ann Magnuson	Frankie Stone
Glenne Headley	Trish (F.S.'s friend)
Polly Bergen	Estelle (F.S.'s mother)
Laurie Metcalf	Sandy
Ben Masters	Steve Marcus

John 'Bluto' Blutarsky	John Belushi
Eric 'Otter' Stratton, ∆ Rush Chairman	Tim Matheson
Dean Vernon Wormer	John Vernon
Marion Wormer (Mrs. Dean Wormer)	Verna Bloom
Larry 'Pinto' Kroger	Tom Hulce
Mayor Carmine DePasto	Cesare Danova
Donald 'Boon' Schoenstein	Peter Riegert
Mandy Pepperidge	Mary Louise Weller
Kent 'Flounder' Dorfman	Stephen Furst
Gregory 'Greg' Marmalard	James Daughton
Daniel Simpson 'D-Day' Day	Bruce McGill
Douglas C. 'Doug' Neidermeyer	Mark Metcalf
Otis Day	DeWayne Jessie
Katy Fuller	Karen Allen
Robert Hoover, Pres. ∆ House	James Widdoes
Barbara Sue 'Babs' Jansen	Martha Smith (I)
Clorette DePasto	Sarah Holcomb
Shelly Dubinsky