Joseph Bologna

(YouTube Streaming, October 2022) It’s too bad for The Big Bus that the ultimate parody of disaster films (Airplane!) not only came out four years later, but is also one of the best comedies of all time. That doesn’t leave a lot of room in cultural memory of The Long Bus, and that’s kind of too bad, because it’s an enjoyable spoof comedy that’s never afraid of getting as absurd as the classic Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker spoof movies of the 1980s. Taking the disaster film genre to its dumbest extreme, it imagines a nuclear-powered bus (two stories high, two bus-lengths long) able to cross the continent from New York to Denver without stopping. The sheer absurdity of the concept becomes increasingly apparent, as the bus is revealed to fit a seating area, dining area, kitchen, lounge (complete with piano player), pool and bowling alley inside. No, it’s not meant to be realistic—in fact, The Big Bus gets better the more ludicrous it becomes. Some of it is clearly due to budget (it’s funny how a trip from New York to Denver looks exactly the same as a trip from Los Angeles to Denver…), but there are some surprisingly large-scale physical gags in here: The long bus actually “existed” in physical form as a loosely-bolted combination of two buses, but there’s no denying the thrill of seeing such a monstrosity interacting with its physical environment. The script’s stream of jokes feels low-density compared to later genre efforts, but is still higher than most comedies of the time. Not every gag lands well, but that’s the nature of that kind of film. Joseph Bologna plays a disgraced driver (who never resorted to cannibalism when his previous bus got stuck in the mountains, oh no) trying to redeem himself, while Stockard Channing is very cute as the daughter of the bus’s lead scientist/designer—she gets the “attractive woman delivering the exposition and reacting to the craziness” role, but she does have a bravura sequence of physical comedy towards the climax. It’s all profoundly silly, but in a charming way—even if tons of comic opportunities remain on the table, leading to a result that’s slightly too laborious to be top-notch. Director James Frawley would prove here his ability to steer big physical comedy set pieces that would land him the job of directing The Muppets Movie three years later. Still, as far as mostly-forgotten films go, The Big Bus is far more fun than expected—it’s got plenty of chuckles in store, and it’s much closer to its inspiration than many other spoof movies. I’d even suggest it as a hidden gem of the mid-1970s.