The bumper or tag scene. It’s that short scene that comes after the end credits have finished, a little extra for those in the audience who have sat through the scroll list of names of the films grips, sound crew, special effects technicians and caterers. It usually doesn’t have much bearing on the preceding film, but is just a nice little Easter egg for those who stuck around.

Although cinema is over a century old, the tag scene has only come about I the last couple of decades. Up until the late-1960s, most films had their credits in the beginning, just a quick on-screen card or two to note the main crew members behind the film. Sometimes, the main cast list was reprised at the end of a film, but that was all. But as film loaders, grips, focus pullers, stand by painters, transportation captains, boom mic operators and more were added, the credits were shifted to the end of films, where they could play out while the audience left. It wouldn’t be long until someone decided that just because the credits were rolling it didn’t mean that the film was over.

Let’s take a look at the five most influential of these mid- and post-credit scenes.

Airplane!

When David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker released Airplane! in the summer of 1980, they wound up rewriting many of the rules for film comedy. And one of those rules was that the laughs didn’t have to stop just because the films credits had started. Those Airplane! audience members who didn’t jump up and head for the exists the moment when Otto and his inflatable stewardess flew the TransAmerican jetliner off into a hail of fireworks were treated to a couple of gags buried with the film’s end credits crawl. (Generally In Charge Of A Lot Of Things – Mike Finnell, Author of A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens)

The topper came at the end of the credits, though with a quick little scene featuring the man in the cab who Ted Stryker (Robert Hayes) abandoned on the curbside of LAX at the beginning of the film. Although the film cuts back to him twice during its first 50 minutes, he isn’t seen for the rest of the picture. But Zucker, Abrams and Zucker hadn’t forgotten the poor soul and cut back to let us know that he was still waiting for Stryker to return to take him on his trip. But after waiting nearly the entire run-time of the film for his cabbie to come back, the now slightly frustrated man vows, “I’ll give him another twenty minutes! But that’s it!” A funny moment and one that is noteworthy as it appears to be the first time that a button scene appeared in a film.

“When In Hollywood, Visit Universal Studios. Ask for Babs.”

While not technically a tag scene, there is a joke that comes at the end of National Lampoon’s Animal House’s credits that calls back to something from the main part of the film. Specifically, the film’s closing moments revealing the futures facing members of the Delta and Omega fraternities. Martha Smith’s character of Babs is revealed to have become a tour guide at Universal Studios. At the time it was standard for Universal Studios films to have an end title card promoting their studio tour in Hollywood and Landis decided to give a last wink to any of the audience still in the theater by changing the card to read “When In Hollywood, Visit Universal Studios. Ask for Babs.”

The gag soon became one of Landis’s many signature touches; perhaps only second to his use of the phrase “See you next Wednesday.” He would use it for all of his subsequent movies made for Universal including The Blues Brothers (1980), An American Werewolf In London (1981), Coming Soon (1982), Into The Night (1985), Amazon Women On The Moon (1987) and Blues Brothers 2000. It also appears on the Animal House DVD supplement/mockumentary Where Are They Now?: A Delta Alumni Update.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

One of the refreshing aspects of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was the amount of times that Matthew Broderick’s titular character broke the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience. It was something that hadn’t really been done in cinematic comedy since the days of the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope and Ollie and Johnson’s Hellzapoppin’. It is a conceit that carries right through to after the credits when Ferris pops back on screen and tells everyone to go home. Probably not a gag that really works in this day and age of home video, but it is still a nice last moment to end the film on.

While I can find no documentation to back it up, I have to wonder if this button scene started as an improvised joke on the set. Hughes was open to improvisation on the set and the moment where Ferris is singing “Danke Shone” in the shower grew out of Broderick practicing the song for the parade sequence while the crew was setting up the shower scene.

Wild Things

While not technically button scenes, there are several short scenes in the 1998 thriller Wild Things that were embedded into the closing credits crawl that revealed that what audiences thought they saw in the bulk of the film might not have been what actually happened. Which is saying something as the movie has several twists and turns.

By this time, it wasn’t completely unusual for a film to have additional material in the credits. Through the late 70s and early 80s, Burt Reynolds would customarily put shooting outtakes into the credits of his films to show how much fun the cast and crew had while making the film. It was a practice that Jackie Chan copied for his Hong Kong action films after he appeared in The Cannonball Run, but he used it to show that how dangerous many of the stunts he and his team performed really were. But Wild Things was one of the first to include material which could legitimately be called vital narrative material. (Yes, I know Ferris Bueller has the credit sequence scene with Rooney’s car getting towed and him having to hitch a ride on the bus, but it is a scene that isn’t really necessary to the story.) And in just a couple of years, the idea of narrative material at the end of the credit roll would be placed into ply by the next film on our list.

Iron Man

On May 2, 2008, comic book movie fans were buzzing about how Marvel Studios’ Iron Man may or may not end. Rumors had been circulating that Samuel L. Jackson had filmed a cameo for the film but early reviews didn’t mention it. It wasn’t until the first midnight screenings ended on the East Coast and folks took to the internet confirmed the existence of such a scene after the credits. Of course, the scene also opened up a flurry of new questions, most specifically, what did Jackson’s character Nick Fury mean when he referred to “The Avengers Initiative”?

The following Monday, during a quarterly earnings conference call Marvel formerly announced their plans to build an interconnected series of superhero franchise films that would culminate in one giant crossover/team-up film, The Avengers, confirming what fans were wildly speculating about over the previous 72 hours. And with only one scheduling change – Thor was originally marked to come out last summer and The Avengers was slotted for this summer – the studio has managed to keep on track for what could be considered the most ambitious bit of franchise management seen yet. And Marvel has continued to use button scenes at the end of all their films to help build that shared universe and tease the next film on their schedule. The result is the high-level of anticipation for next summer’s The Avengers even among non-comics fans.

Back in February, we told you about a possible Blues Brothers television series that was being worked on by John Belushi’s widow Judy and writer Anne Beattes, who worked on Saturday Night Live in the same era that launched the musical act. Variety is now reporting that a pilot script has been written and is currently being shopped around Hollywood. The script has been written by Judy Belushi, Beattes and Wayne Catania and Kieron Lafferty, the two singers currently portraying Jake and Elwood in the official Blues Brothers Revue that is currently touring.

The plot of the new series would have the Brothers just getting out of prison after a 20 year stretch and heading out on the road to find Elwood’s real father. The show would feature a new Blues Brothers Band and a musical number in each episode.

Judy Belushi described the project by saying “I think these are great American characters. We want to keep them alive. We chose to introduce them as new characters but do it in an way that they have some history, have some life behind them.”

Beatts elaborated by explaining, “We’re not trying to replicate Dan and John but Jake and Elwood… It would be Route 66‘ meets Glee, and it all goes to hell in a handbasket.”

While I admire the idea, I remain leery of the execution. To many, including myself, Jake and Elwood were Belushi and Aykroyd, and anyone else playing them would be sacrilegious. The one thing giving me some optimism is that Aykroyd has apparently given the project his blessing by agreeing to appear in the show as the voice of the Brothers’ parole officer.

This isn’t the first time that there has been an attempt to bring Jake and Elwood back to the medium that they started on. In 1997, television network UPN ordered up an animated Blues Brothers series that would have featured the voices of Dan Aykroyd’s brother Peter and James Belushi as Elwood and Jake. Mark Hamill was also in the cast as a law-enforcement agent pursuing the Brothers. Eight episodes were produced before the network brass changed and the incoming executives decided not to air the show. The completed episodes have never been screened.

A few years ago an excited murmur went through the Blues Brothers fan community. Somewhere, some preliminary work was being done on a new soundtrack album for the film. Exciting news, as most fans consider the soundtrack released by Atlantic Records to be somewhat lacking when it comes to representing the music from the film. For a movie that was virtually wall to wall music, the released album had a rather paltry eleven songs on it and many of them were variations of what was heard in the film. Many of the songs sported different mixes and a baritone sax could be heard in certain songs even though there is no baritone sax player in the Blues Brothers Band. And I’ve never been able to figure out where the female background singers in the album version of “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” are in the film.

Unfortunately, before too much work could be done on what was to be a two disc set, it was canceled. Word was that the label’s legal department deemed that it would be too expensive to produce.

But you can get a taste of what the new soundtrack album would have sounded like thanks to a poster over at Sound Cloud. There are 13 posted songs, five of which never made it on to the original soundtrack album. The other songs have been remixed to bring them back in line to how they sounded in the film and many of them include some of the studio chatter from the recording sessions.

You can hear the tracks here.

1. Shrek Forever After  (Paramount/Dreamworks, 4,359 Theaters, 93 Minutes, Rated PG): The Shrek franchise is one of the highest grossing ones of all time. The voice actors do minimal work yet it most likely is the most lucrative of their careers. The concept has endless possibilities. Yet, this will be the last Shrek film forever?

Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it.

Shrek misses being an ogre, so he makes a deal with a mystical being to have one more day of feeling wild and untamed. Unfortunately, this mystical being he makes the agreement with is Rumplestiltskin, whose every deal he makes is more of a trick. Now Shrek finds himself hunted, Puss in Boots fat, and having never met Donkey or Fiona. He must find a way to return things to normal before the changes become permanent.

If this is the last installment of the franchise, then I hope it goes out with a bang. The premise doesn’t seem like one that would be all that spectacular. But, who knows? This film might be the last in name only.

2. MacGruber (Universal, 2,551 Theaters, 99 Minutes, Rated R): There seems to be some mistaken belief that Saturday Night Live is still a breeding ground for sketches that can be turned into sure fire box office hit movies. But there are far more misses (Superstar, A Night at the Roxbury, Coneheads, The Ladies Man) than there are hits (Blues Brothers, Wayne’s World). And I think this one is going to land in the miss column.

MacGruber is a series of sketches usually used as cut-aways before commercials on SNL. The entire premise can be boiled down to one thing: What if MacGyver was incompetent. That’s it, that’s all. It is a wonder how they got as many sketches as they did out of that concept, let alone a film.

This film feature MacGruber being called in to track down a terrorist who has stolen a nuclear bomb. Add to that stale concept a bunch of quirky, vaguely filthy sounding names and the lead character’s bungling, bumbling incompetence and you have what they’d like you to believe is hilarity.

The sketches are usually my clue to go to the bathroom or fix myself a snack on the rare occasions I watch SNL. So why would I want to pay money to see it in the theaters?

Is their latest mission from God taking them back to the medium that spawned them?

According to Undercover, John Belushi’s widow Jane Belushi Pisano is spearheading an attempt to get the Blues Brothers back on to television in their own series. Working with former original Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beattes and Wayne Catania and Kieron Lafferty, the current stars of the officially sanctioned Blues Brother Review tour, she states that she has been developing a new television series which would see the classic musician characters created by her late husband and partner Dan Aykroyd. “The way we have scripted it over 6 to 8 shows where they are on a mission down the Mississippi back to New Orleans.”

While a Blues Brothers project without Belushi may sound like sacrilege to some fans (see Blues Brothers 2000), Belushi Pisano doesn’t have a problem with new actors sliding on the sunglasses and porkpie hats.

They are great American characters. People tend to think of them as John and Dan. They were the first actors to do it but they won’t be the last. When you see Kieran and Wayne you will see how they embody those characters and make them work. There is a spirit of Blues Brothers. It is an umbrella for the Blues.

A Blues Brothers television series doesn’t sound as far-fetched as it initially sounds. The musical Glee has been a surprise hit for Fox, and I have to confess that I’m surprised we haven’t already heard of other knock-off musical shows being developed by other networks. Of course, there are numerous hurtles to leap before we start setting our DVRs for this. For one, there is no mention of Aykroyd’s involvement in, or at least approval for, the project and I would think that would be needed.

Also, it sounds as if the project is in its very early days and that they haven’t shopped it around to the networks yet. Personally, it sounds like it might be a better fit for a cable network like HBO or Showtime rather than the over-the-air broadcast networks who are hampered by the FCC in what language they can use.

Via Blues Brothers Central.

Comic actor Henry Gibson, whose film career spanned four decades, died Monday, September 13, 2009, at his home in Malibu, California it was announced earlier today. He was 73.

After making his breakthrough in the late 60s comedy series Rowan And Martin’s Laugh-In, Gibson carved out a career in numerous comic supporting roles in both television and films. Although his first screen appearance was in the Jerry Lewis comedy The Nutty Professor (1963), Gibson’s first important role didn’t come for another decade when director Robert Altman cast him as the evil Dr. Verringer in The Long Goodbye, a rare dramatic role. Gibson would appear in three more films for Altman. For the directors 1975 Academy Award-winning Nashville, Gibson played the obnoxious country music star Haven Hamilton. Gibson also wrote all of his character’s songs.

Despite his short stature, Gibson frequently played quiet yet comically menacing-types. In John Landis’ 1980 musical comedy The Blues Brothers, he played the head of a group of Illinois Nazis chasing after John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s titular musicians. (Gibson had previously worked with Landis on the sketch film Kentucky Fried Movie (1977).) He had more villainous turns in films like The ‘Burbs and Innerspace. Other film appearances include Gremlins 2, Magnolia, Wedding Crashers and Big Stan.