Fat Suit Fart Attack #3: Nutty Professor II: The Klumps

RIP My Values, Because I Loved This Dogshit Crazy Movie!

[Welcome to Fat Suit Fart Attack, a special paid-subscriber series on fat suit movies—The Whale, Shallow Hal, etc. I’ll be releasing them occasionally in addition to our regularly scheduled Butt Newses and Buttcasts, so upgrade to paid if you want access!

And don’t forget you can get a full-access Butt News subscription with an $8/month subscription to my podcast Patreon. It’s a twofer!

This week I watched The Klumps—content warning for fatphobia and sexual assault because, u know, it was the 90s.]

When people start blah-blah-blah-ing about the 90s, they’re always like, “oh, *NSYNC, Columbine, Hale-Bopp, Janet Reno,” but it’s about TIME somebody BRAVE (me) told the real truth: The Clinton Years? Never heard of ‘em! From 1996-2000, America was in its PROFESSOR ERA.

Important Timeline:

• 1996: Russell Simmons (BOOOOOO) suggested to producer Brian Grazer that it would be a good idea to remake the 1963 stupid Jerry Lewis movie The Nutty Professor but with Black people instead. Grazer agreed and he talked to Eddie Murphy about it and Eddie was like “oh, hell yes, I(?)… love(???)… Jerry Lewis(????????)” and they asked John Landis to direct because (apart from when he decapitated three people) this man’s filmography has no equal, but unfortunately he was busy so they had to go get Ace Ventura: Pet Detective director Tom Shadyac instead, a downgrade, no offense. The movie is about Sherman Klump, a blubbery professor who is nutty and invents a nutty serum that causes him to lose 250 pounds in one night, turning him into an evil thin person named Buddy Love, which seems good at first because Buddy Love gets revenge on Sherman’s bully (insult comic Reggie Warrington), but then backfires because Buddy Love also has 60,000% more testosterone than a standard man, which makes him 60,000% worse. At the end, Sherman and Buddy fight each other to the death for control of their shared earthly vessel and Jada Pinkett declares she prefers Sherman’s nut over Buddy’s nut because even though he eats 100 cheeseburgers a day at least Sherman is KIND. As a fat person I certainly do dream of being loved despite my terrible body! This movie made $274 million.

• 1997: Encino Man director Les Mayfield thought it would be a good idea to remake the 1961 stupid Fred MacMurray movie The Absent-Minded Professor with exactly the same amount of Black people as the original (zero). When it came to professor movies in the 90s, it made no difference if you were black or white, as long all the people in the movie were the same kind! (If you don’t understand why it’s okay for Black people to make movies with all Black people in them but not okay when white people make all-white-people movies, GO AWAY! Get outta my house!)

  

  DIRECTED BY JOHN LANDIS

  Mayfield got on the horn to Robin Williams who said something totally RANDOM I bet and then they got John Hughes (Baby’s Day Out) to write the screenplay and changed the title to Flubber. Flubber (no relation to BLUBBER [see: Sherman Klump’s ass, above]) is about a regular-size professor named Phillip Brainard who is not nutty AT ALL, merely absent in the mind, so please CHECK YOURSELF before you suggest that he is even 1% nutty!¹ Brainard misses his own wedding twice because he’s absent-mindedly obsessed with creating a new source of renewable energy to keep his college from going out of business, but instead of making up a taller windmill or something he accidentally invents a sentient goo named Flubber—which is like the Sherman Klump to the Mucinex demon’s Buddy Love—a scientific breakthrough so sexy and sexual that Brainard’s robot assistant Weebo (THEE Jodi Benson) self-programs a horniness protocol and creates a fully-functional holographic body for herself—including… what do they call them? oh, FEET—so that she can sabotage Brainard’s third wedding to Marcia Gay Harden, but then she feels bad about it and dies. At the end, after using Flubber to cheat at basketball and kill Clancy Brown, they go to Hawaii in a flying car and try to convince Weebo’s resurrected clone-daughter to have sex(?) with Flubber? As far as I can tell from the Wikipedia! This movie made $178 million!

• 1997: Good Will Hunting! It also counts!

As we used to say in online journalism: Three examples? That’s a trend piece, baby.

As the millennium limped to a close and Flubber receded in the rearview, the professor-krazy American public began once again to slaver and gnash for their food! Nothing could sate them except MORE, MORE, MORE PROFESSORS WITH VARIOUS ATTRIBUTES! And then…