The World’s Weirdest Franchise
From falling Coke bottles and honey badgers to hopping vampires and basketball-playing pandas.
You may have a favorite movie franchise that you feel has gone off the rails. Perhaps the lead actor was recast. Or the costume redesign was weird. Maybe it was rebooted one too many times. But it doesn’t have anything on what happened to The Gods Must Be Crazy.
1: The Gods Must Be Crazy
If you haven’t seen this movie yet, stop reading right now and find a copy. Just because the franchise took a quick cruise into crazy-town doesn’t take away from the fact that this is an amazing movie. Director Jamie Uys was known for directing a nature documentary called Animals Are Beautiful People. It was unlike any documentary before it, using voiceover to add personality and humor to its cast of characters. He set out to do the same thing with a narrative film, and approached a genuine uncontacted tribe in the Kalahari looking for his lead actor.
He found N!xau, and once the director explained the concept of a camera to him, N!xau turned out to be an amazing comedic actor that would rival Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and all of the silent era’s stars. In the film, a Coke bottle falls from the sky (due to a littering pilot) and the tribe must figure out if it is a gift from the gods, or a curse. He ends up on a road trip across the country to throw it off the end of the Earth.
Watch the trailer here. ★★★★★
2: The Gods Must Be Crazy II
When the first film became a huge hit all over the world, Jamie Uys returned to N!xau’s village to make a sequel. It contained all the smart comedy and beautiful visuals of the original, and became extra adorable with the addition of his kids.
N!xau was now a real live movie star, and started earning big bucks. When he was paid for the first film, he didn’t know what money was so he just left it in the desert. But things were about to get nuts.
Watch the trailer here. ★★★★★
3: Crazy Safari
This is where things got weird. With the franchise going strong, a Hong Kong studio decided to do an Aliens vs Predator-style franchise teamup. However, they didn’t do faux-documentary comedy road trip movies, they did kung fu vampire flicks.
They did find a way to fit the two together though. Just like the first film, it kicked off by an object falling from an airplane. Here, it just happened to be a Chinese hopping vampire instead of a Coke bottle.
Oddly enough, it somehow works. It follows the same rhythms as the original films. Before, much of the comedy came from people butting up against the strict rules of the Kalahari. If a rhino sees fire, he will stomp on it. If a honey badger bites you, he won’t let go. Here, if a hopping vampire hears a bell, he will follow it. If he has a yellow piece of paper on his forehead, he will obey you.
The highlight of the film is when N!xau is attacked by diamond smugglers. One of the Chinese characters is able to do a trick called “oversoul,” wherein he can possess one person with the spirit of another. He possesses N!xau with the ghost of Bruce Lee. Yes, Bruce Lee is in this movie. Both in the form of reused footage, and in an absolutely amazing impersonation by a bushman who had never heard of him. If you watch this scene on YouTube, you can forget about watching the rest of the movie. Nothing else in this film will live up to what you saw. Or any other film, for that matter.
Seriously, forget the trailer, watch that scene.★★☆☆☆
4: Crazy Hong Kong
The studio decided to keep the franchise going on their own, and got N!xau on a plane to Hong Kong for their attempt at a Crocodile Dundee movie.
However, the writers this time around didn’t have quite the same grasp of the films, and seemingly only remembered two things about the franchise. N!xau got hit in the head with a Coke bottle that one time, and he tried to shoot a goat with his little bow and arrow.
So the film begins with him getting hit in the head with a Coke bottle (while returning the Coke bottle he’d been hit in the head with a few minutes earlier) and falling into a suitcase bound for the big city. He spends the rest of the film either interacting with Coke bottles, or trying to shoot random animals.
Oh, and he takes breaks to be confounded by copy machines, get called ‘Eddie Murphy’ by a racist and smoke pot in a truck with this dude. Yes, Garfield is in this movie. Twice.
Watch N!xau find himself in a stoner movie here. ☆☆☆☆☆
5: The Gods Must Be Funny in China
To cap off the franchise, they brought N!xau to mainland China. And it’s entirely possible that whoever wrote this film had never actually seen a The Gods Must Be Crazy movie. They couldn’t even get the title right. And they didn’t bother to explain how N!xau got in China this time, he just inexplicably shows up at a Great Wall of China marathon in a yellow mumu with a giant Papier Mâché Coke bottle strapped to his back.
What they did do is throw him into a weird combination of an underdog sports story, a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Kung Fu epic, and a Free Willyesque movie about dancing, basketball-playing panda bears. Yes, the pandas are played by actors in theme park fursuits. The entire time, referencing earlier events that never happened in any of the previous films.
At least they knew that interacting with animals was part of N!xau’s schtick, so they had him run into a talking chimpanzee and his gang of “whatever trained animals the producers could get their hands on” which included two tigers, four monkeys, an elephant, a sloth bear, and a herd of pomeranians and dancing poodles.
I’m pretty sure none of which are native to the area along the Great Wall of China.
No trailer. Even YouTube wants to forget this movie existed. ☆☆☆☆☆
Written by Ryan Estrada.
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