The Unproduced ‘Far Side’ Movie Sounds Like It Would Have Been a Disaster
Gary Larson’s The Far Side may not seem like the best candidate for a feature film adaptation, considering that it contains no real narrative to speak of. But back in the late ‘80s, the iconic daily single-panel comic very nearly made the jump to the big screen, thanks to Alan Rudolph, the acclaimed director of offbeat films like Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and Mortal Thoughts.
Not too much is known about the unproduced movie, although we did get a taste of what it might have looked like, thanks to actor Dirk Blocker. In 2021, the Brooklyn Nine-Nine star shared photos from a Far Side screen test he participated in, recalling that, while the project didn’t “go anywhere,” the actors “laughed a lot and got to meet the amazing Gary Larson.”
In addition to these vaguely cursed photos, Rudolph revealed to The A.V. Club that his plan was to film a “sketch-based narrative with a loose story. Basically, an examination of everyday life in which humans, non-humans and objects equally occupy (space) with competing bizarreness.”
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How do you turn all that into a Hollywood script? The details are still somewhat murky, but the hosts of the Best Movies Never Made podcast, producer Stephen Scarlata and screenwriter Josh Miller, somehow got their hands on a copy of Rudolph’s screenplay. Along with guest Paul Scheer, the podcasters provided some additional details about the Far Side movie — and it sounds like it could have been a total disaster.
As Miller described, the “closest thing we get to the story” in the script involves an academic named Professor Henderson, who’s trying to come up with an all-encompassing existential theory to win something called the “Big Answer Grant.” In order to uncover the mysteries of life as we know it, Henderson (played by Night Court’s John Larroquette in the test shoot) dons a pith helmet and journeys into the jungle, where he soon runs into an elephant wielding a knife, just like in the comic.
Gary Larson
Meanwhile fellow academics “Miller” and “Smith” are also after the “Big Answer” so they decide to travel to outer space, thus allowing the movie to remake some of Larson’s alien jokes. There’s also a subplot in which “the Creature from the Black Lagoon emerges from the jungle and hitchhikes into town with the Hunchback of Notre Dame … and they’re just kind of wandering around the movie.”
In the end, Miller and Smith “fuck up the Martians, and so the Martians come down to fuck up Earth.” But then the Creature from the Black Lagoon pacifies the alien invaders, assuring them that the Earth will “make some changes,” which leads to “dogs rising up against their masters” and “animals taking over.”
The problem with the script seems to be that it’s just a nonstop series of classic Far Side jokes retold in movie form, which inevitably becomes exhausting after a while. As Scheer pointed out, the story has “no engine” and is “aggressively unfunny in parts.”
“They’re just transcribed Far Side cartoons,” Scheer explained. “They should be funny, but they’re grating. It’s like being force-fed a delicious treat. By the time you get 10 of them, you’re like, ‘I’m done. I don’t need anymore.’”
So perhaps it’s for the best that the Far Side movie never got made — although it has served as the basis for some great animated specials, wall calendars and the world’s most dryly humorous thongs.
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