'Da Bears Movie Dat Wasn't':

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http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/the...-last-time.html

 

'Da Bears Movie Dat Wasn't': Da Coach goes to bed early but the Super Fans hit the cheesy curly fries one last time

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Well, Da Coach, Da Coach whose name was on the tickets, skipped the late-night sausage, the cheese-swamped curly fries and the on-stage kegger in honor of Lord Stanley. But as you'd expect, the Super Fans were forgiving at the end of the show.

 

Their walrus 'taches did not droop at being jilted by their icon. Their aviator glasses concealed no tears.

 

"He's old," said Carl Wollarski, otherwise known as Robert Smigel. "He's gone home."

 

"Keith Van Horne," noted Bob Swerski, otherwise known as George Wendt, "played Ditka a lot better than Ditka." His Superbowl ring sparkling in the lights of the Park West nighterie, dazzling the Super Fans like it was the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the former Chicago Bears tackle was indeed a pretty decent faux-Ditka.

 

Da Coach did show up to play himself at the first sold-out performance of "Da Bears Movie Dat Wasn't," a one-night-only reading of a screenplay about the Super Fans of Saturday Night Live fame that was penned, back in the day, by Smigel and Bob Odenkirk.

 

Those Hollywood suits, who wouldn't know an fat onion rink from a freeze-dried Maki roll, passed. The screenplay passed into the cultural murk of the mid-1990s. We never got to see the backstory of Carl, Bill, Bob and Todd. We never got to meet their wives, view their lives on the Southwest Side, their Bridgeport church. We never got to watch their constant companion, the All-Ditka channel, that piped in a camera trained on Da Coach 24 hours a day. We never got to swill pork soda nor see that fantastical pipe-laden contraption--worn on the noggin'--allowing cheesy curly fries to be delivered directly to the heart, washed down by two free-flowing sides of brewski.

 

Such a shame. The now-mothballed screenplay--a very funny and, frankly, prescient satire of the impending take-over of professional sports franchises by cold business interests more interested in skyboxes than the regular, die-hard fan--has a plethora of up-the-people amusements, including a killer moment when the new owner of Da Bears (played, with fey jolliness by Odenkirk) comes up with a plan to increase ticket revenue by creating a movable skybox--a bubble-like affair that floats all over the field--for the suits and relegating the Super Fans to a new bank of cheap seats jutting from the outside wall of Soldier Field.

 

But there's something poetically apt that the Super Fans never got their Hollywood movie and that the coach went home to bed while they all still were yakking. And that Wollarski, Odenkirk, Wendt, Joey Mantegna, Horatio Sanz (filling the big shoes of the late Chris Farley), Dave Koechner, Richard Roeper and various supporting players all had to gather back in Chicago to spit it out, complete with cheesy little computer graphics helping us visualize what might have been in a time when the Lovabulls where the slickest game in town and cellphones were taller than any Polish sausage.

 

For Chicago partisans, who, in the best Second City tradition, have turned a satirical slam into a badge of civic, sports-loving honor, it was one for da books.

 

Da Bears!

 

 

[madlithuanian]

I was there!

 

http://www.talkbears.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5965

[Cutsizzle]

That's awesome ML!