Of course, the genre would continue on after the breakthrough years of 1987-88: Rob Schneider and Rachel McAdams would swap bodies in The Hot Chick, Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis would switch brains in a Freaky Friday remake, Matthew Perry would turn into Zac Efron in 17 Again (surprisingly, not a remake of 18 Again!), and Regina Hall will become the daughter from black-ish in Little, the latest entry in the genre, due out later this week.īut we shouldn’t forget where it all began. Or… could it be that studios just thought teaming up an adult star with a kid/teen star would be a great way to appeal to audiences of all ages? Yeah, it’s probably the second thing. (But then again, I’m visualizing a 2019 entry in this genre, where a 30-year-old man swaps brains with a teenage boy and ends up watching lots of cartoons, obsessing over comic book superheroes, and playing video games all day would anyone even notice the difference?) Could it be that this was the last time American culture espoused a strong belief, as instilled into most baby boomers as youngsters, that there had to be a sharp demarcation between being a “kid” and an “adult”? That there simply had to be a definitive time when a boy put away childish things and became a man? And that films like these were made as a direct rebuke to that ideology? And there were plenty of body-swap shenanigans happening on TV, in everything from Bewitched to Gilligan’s Island to Fantasy Island to the original Star Trek.īut for some reason, in the late 1980s, the notion of fathers and sons swapping bodies was particularly intriguing. Plus, it may be one of the most incoherent movies I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen Zardoz.)īut what we’re dealing with here is really just a small subset of the body swap genre, which was already well-established at the time these movies were released Disney’s original Freaky Friday had Jodie Foster swapping brains with Barbara Harris, Heaven Can Wait had Warren Beatty’s soul inhabiting a dead guy’s body, and Lily Tomlin got trapped inside Steve Martin in All of Me. Another film that often gets included is 1989’s Dream a Little Dream, with Corey Feldman swapping bodies with Jason Robards, but it doesn’t count for the purposes of this Movie Duel because their characters aren’t related. (1988’s Big often gets lumped in with these three, even though Tom Hanks doesn’t switch bodies with anyone. So what could possibly justify our first Movie Duel threesome, our first menage a duel, our first-ever filmic fingercuffs, other than the wildly and briefly popular subgenre of Comedies Where Dads Mystically Switch Bodies with Their Teenage Sons? Well, it must have been wildly popular, because for a seven-month stretch from October of 1987 to April of 1988, no less than three films in this niche saw theatrical release: Vice Versa, Like Father Like Son, and 18 Again! Welcome to our first-ever Three-Way Movie Duel! For those unfamiliar with the Agony Booth’s Movie Duels series, this is where we look at films with strikingly similar premises that came out at nearly the same time, but up until now, we’ve only been pitting two films directly against each other, mano a mano.
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