A Real-Life McBain Movie Forced ‘The Simpsons’ to Prematurely Retire the Character
In addition to Krusty the Clown, Bumblebee Man and, very briefly, Gabbo, one of Springfield’s most famous entertainers is, of course, Rainier Wolfcastle, star of the popular McBain movies, as well as Undercover Nerd and Help! My Son Is a Nerd (it isn’t a comedy).
The McBain franchise, which was first introduced in the second season of The Simpsons, is an action parody smorgasbord containing elements of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, with a healthy dose of every movie Arnold Schwarzenegger ever made — although Schwarzenegger would later rip off Rainier Wolfcastle, so it all evens out in the end.
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As we’ve mentioned before, those early clips of McBain were designed to form one cohesive story — a more cohesive one than some real Schwarzenegger movies, to be honest. Fans, in fact, have even edited the scenes together as if it were a real film.
But in a rare case of The Simpsons actually predicting something, just months after McBain first popped up in the Season Two episode “The Way We Was,” an actual Hollywood action movie called McBain hit theaters.
Rather than a hulking Austrian bodybuilder, McBain starred the less-beefy Christopher Walken as a Vietnam veteran taking on Colombian drug dealers. Did we mention that Walken’s McBain also helps a band of rebels overthrow the government in the end?
James Glickenhaus, the director of the non-cartoon McBain, has stressed that The Simpsons in no way inspired his film. Although he did admit that he lifted the name from a Sergio Leone movie, presumably Once Upon a Time in the West, in which the McBain family is viciously gunned down.
In the DVD commentary for “The Way We Was” Simpsons writer/producer Al Jean described the “ironic” situation the writers found themselves in: “We thought this sounds like a dumb name that a Schwarzenegger character would have, and then a movie came out called McBain.”
“For a while, we lost the rights to use the name,” producer James L. Brooks added.
Yeah, despite pre-dating Walken’s movie by several months, The Simpsons was forced to prematurely retire the “McBain” name, instead referring to the character by the name of the actor who plays McBain: Rainier Wolfcastle.
Obviously The Simpsons’ moratorium on “McBain” didn’t last, probably because the real life McBain movie wasn’t exactly a hit. It made less than $500,000 at the domestic box office, but cost $16 million to make. So Springfield’s McBain was once again free to save UNICEF pennies from the clutches of Commie-Nazis.
Or dunk on Woody Allen during a stand-up set in McBain: Let’s Get Silly — which also, incidentally, gave us the “That’s the Joke” meme.
There are even McBain comic books, one of which apparently involves McBain fighting robotic orangutans, before he’s murdered, goes to Hell and then guns down the literal Devil?
Sadly, though, The Simpsons’ McBain has yet to stage a violent coup against a South American dictator.
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