Elephant Parts (Pacific Arts Entertainment, 1981)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Lady from Chungking I showed Charles a favorite film of his adolescence but one I’d never seen before: Elephant Parts, a 1981 direct-to-video release (at a time when VCR’s were still in their infancy) from former Monkee turned multimedia entrepreneur Michael Nesmith. Mike Nesmith was the son of the woman who invented Liquid Paper correction fluid, made a ton of money selling the company to Gillette, and then died just a few months later, leaving Mike the Liquid Paper fortune. He was one of the Monkees who’d actually recorded professionally (at least two singles for the Dot label) before Columbia Pictures started the Monkees in 1966. The Monkees were the brainchild of Columbia producer Bob Rafelson, who had the idea of recruiting four young men with at least some musical talent and casting them in a TV show as a rambunctious rock band patterned after The Beatles – or at least after the way the Beatles had been presented in their films, A Hard Day’s Night and Help! They inevitably got nicknamed “the Pre-Fab Four” and took a lot of heat from the fact that on the first two Monkees’ albums, they weren’t allowed to play their own instruments. That was taken care of by record producer Don Kirschner and the fabled “Wrecking Crew” of L.A.-based studio musicians who specialized in rock. The Monkees rebelled and, starting with their third album, The Monkees’ Headquarters, insisted on playing on their records themselves. After leaving The Monkees in 1969, Nesmith signed a record contract with RCA Victor (The Monkees’ distributor) and had a fair amount of success with a country-oriented rock group, the First National Band. Then he changed the lineup and made a couple of albums that flopped, so RCA Victor dropped him.

Not that that was a problem for the Liquid Paper heir: he simply started a new company, Pacific Arts Entertainment, and continued to release solo albums on the Pacific Arts label. He also started making short films based on his songs and releasing them to the fledgling Nickelodeon channel – the precursors of MTV (which began as a knockoff of a video series on Nickelodeon which Nesmith produced). After releasing the LP Infinite Rider on the Big Dogma in 1979, Nesmith announced that from then on he considered the audio-only LP format dead and his future releases would all be on pre-recorded videotapes. Nesmith kept that pledge until he released another audio-only album, Tropical Campfires, in 1992. (There's a quite funny skit in Elephant Parts in which Nesmith spoofs commercials for the Ginsu and other knives by using a copy of his LP Michael Nesmith Live at the Palais as a kitchen slicing tool.) Elephant Parts was his first video release, though some of the videos on it were based on songs from Infinite Rider and a previous Nesmith album, From a Radio Engine to a Photon Wing (1977). Elephant Parts is basically a compilation of videos of five Nesmith songs (“Cruisin’,” “Magic,” “Tonight,” “Light” and “Rio” – it seems like Nesmith had a “thing” for one-word song titles then) interspersed with comedy bits in the manner of late-1970’s theatrical films like The Groove Tube, Tunnelvision and Kentucky Fried Movie that were also progenitors of Saturday Night Live.

Some of them are still screamingly funny – particularly the ones involving drugs, like a TV quiz-show spoof called Name That Drug and a commercial for “Elvis Drugs,” essentially drugs for older people who still want to get high. The “Elvis Drugs” come in multicolored pills shaped like guitars, blue suede shoes, teddy bears and other iconic objects in the Elvis mythology. There’s also a skit lampooning the gas shortages of the 1970’s and the mysterious appearance of ample supplies of gas once the price went up – this film posits gas at $52 per gallon, which we may yet live to see – and several skits showing Nesmith as a lounge singer. In one of them, “You Must Remember This,” he tries to sing “As Time Goes By” but can’t remember any of the lyrics past the first line. In another, “Dancing in the Dark,” he orders the lights turned out so people will literally be dancing in the dark – only we hear a bunch of people crashing into each other instead. In “Honeymoon in a Dryer,” a young (straight) couple agree to spend the three weeks of their honeymoon literally locked in a clothes dryer. There’s also a sketch called “Rock ‘n’ Roll Hospital” in which various patients succumb to the delusion that they’re rock stars, including one man who seems normal enough until he suddenly starts singing in the falsetto of the Bee Gees in the middle of an ordinary conversation. And there’s a commercial for a company called “Neighborhood Nukes” which sells petite nuclear weapons you can use in case your neighbors get out of line and start annoying you. There’s a sketch called “Large Detroit Car Company” which posits that not only will future auto makers design their cars so they fall apart within a year, they’ll actually advertise that about them as a positive selling point.

Another sketch, “Wrong Apartment Bogart,” makes fun of film noir by casting Nesmith as a private detective in full 1940’s noir regalia who comes to an apartment, starts making guesses about everyone living there and what crimes they’re involved in, and realizes he’s in the wrong apartment. Other skits date quite badly, like “Vegetable Safari,” about a hunter stalking big game in a grocery store and ultimately sneaking up on and blasting away at innocent heads of lettuce and other produce. There’ve been too many mass shootings at supermarkets, including a Texas Walmart as well as the Tops store in New Jersey (built to address the food desert in a Black ghetto and targeted by a racist shooter who wanted to kill as many Black people as he could), for this still to be funny. Another sketch that’s too weird to be funny is about flying lessons, though the teacher instructs the student to run around the airport and flap his arms like wings instead of actually showing him how to fly a plane. Yet some skits hold up quite well, including a spoof of modern-day gross-out horror films called “Have a Nice Day” (also a spoof of the smiley-face icon so big in the 1970’s); one called “Mariachi Translator” in which a man takes his (female) date to a fancy Mexican restaurant and gives her a highly fractured translation of what the mariachi singer at their table is singing; one called “Clandestine Typing Service” in which a company actually runs a clandestine typing service but pretends to be doing something else; an opening scene which spoofs Japanese giant-monster movies; and one of the best scenes, “Abject Poverty,” in which rents have risen so high that over 20 people are forced to share a single-room apartment and can only do so standing up. That one seems all too likely today!