“There’s Nothing Like a Show on Broadway” from The Producers

The credits of the disappointing film version of The Producers were pretty much the only part of the movie that was funny, thanks to the hilarious parody of Oscar Bait ballads “The Hop-Clop Goes On”. Unfortunately, to get to that gem, you had to wait through this tedious and misguided attempt at an ending theme. Not only are most of the jokes fairly obvious (Neil Patrick Harris would do the same ideas much better in his Tony hosting gigs a few years later), but the song’s subject matter and title come off as massively ironic following the movie the audience just sat through. If there was ever a musical movie that was merely a faint echo of its great Broadway source material, it’s this one, so ending the film with a song like this was an almost hilariously stupid move. Ironically, while it consists of the film-makers perfectly summing up their own mistakes, it actually bespeaks a monumental lack of self-awareness. Granted, the tune itself is catchy enough, but even it sounds like a secondhand imitation of the stage score’s distinctive sound. This is one of the all-time monuments of unintentional irony in film-making, and it makes the film even more of an embarrassment than it already is.

Verdict: Not just bad, but depressingly bad.

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