When I was a kid, WLVI-TV 56 in Boston used to run It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World the Friday after Thanksgiving every year. I’ve probably watched it 40 times since. For a kid staring down the barrel of six months of dirty snow, busted pavement and algebra homework, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was a glimpse into another time and place that made California seem like a newly minted paradise. This fantastic video from the Criterion Collection — which has been preserving classic films and delivering them in modern formats since 1984 — shows all the memorable locations from the film — from the site of Smiler Grogan’s demise to the “Big Dubya” — and recreates them with footage from the current day.
Some of the locations are dramatically different from what you see in the film. The airstrip in Thousand Oaks, for example…
…now appears to be a school ballfield:
The stretch of desert road where Sid Ceasar almost loses his 1962 Plymouth Fury wagon and takes out “Dingy” Bell’s 1954 Volkswagen Cabriolet…
…now looks like any other divided highway in America:
But then, there are locations that look startlingly similar. When Phil Silvers meets up with the Willys CJ-2A-driving farmer looking for someone to deliver his wife’s medicine, it’s on this deserted spot…
…that looks almost exactly the same today, minus the freshly painted lines in the road that have disappeared in the hot sun.
This location in Yucca Valley…
…is instantly recognizable, less the Coca-Cola cooler, the phone booth and J. Algernon Hawthorne’s 1955 Willys Station Wagon.
It’s three and a half minutes of awesome. No spoilers here, but you have to hang in there and see the shot of the airfield in Santa Rosa. It’s worth the three minutes just for that. If this was one of your favorite movies ever, you’re going to want to clear the decks and check out the video below:
Absolutely the best comedy movie of all times, bar none. I might be approaching 40 viewings myself! Saw it in the theater when I was ~10 years old, started laughing about 5 minutes into it and couldn’t stop until it was over. Just about busted my gut. Long enough to have had an intermission half way through. Never before or since has there been a cast like that one.
We share your sentiments for that movie, and drove down the Seven Steps last year just for fun. Great article in Wikepedia.
Melville didn’t take out Dingy’s V-Dub here. It was on the road to the airport…”You got dust in the carburetor” was Benji’s diagnosis. Imagine the day when you could rent a 61 Impala 2 door hardtop from Avis.
I was shopping at Sams Club and digging through the DVD’s. When I found this movie I abandoned a cart full of groceries, bought this and went right home to watch it. This movie might be the cause of my prodigious consumption of Old Fashioneds.
If any of you guys are going to be near Costa Mesa Ca. on Sept. 1st ,the Triangle Square Theater there is showing it on the big screen. The theater on the other side of town showed The French Connection a few weeks ago, it was awesome!
quality entertainment.great old iron watched it with the folks at the drive in and many more times