Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
20 years of grabbing life by the balls
2004.
What a whacky time to be alive on planet earth. The American ideal, now teetering on an edge, was then beginning to lose its empirical luster. Ambiguous wars raged on in middle east; burgeoning tech start-ups like “The FaceBook” staked their claim in the prospects of this new thing called social media.
But, Hey! You know what else what orchestrated in 2004? DODGEBALL: A TRUE UNDERDOG STORY. A movie tentpole for my generation of would-be millennial burnouts.
On DODGEBALL’s 20th anniversary, I’ll wax about the dodge-duck-dip-dive-and-dodge of this seminal classic.
Dodge — Introduced an entire generation of kids to the concept of sports movies.
I was not a sports kid growing up. Those in my friend group weren’t, either. Our preferred body positions were sitting down, criss-cross. Ideally, we’d be planted in front of a television set, watching movies or playing video games.
But anyone brought up in the 12-k system knows one thing: Sports were everywhere!
Disciplined kids would practice after school, at night, early mornings. Some dabbled in Football just to have something to do on Friday nights. Others excelled at basketball, with dreams of professional stardom lighting their path.
I steered clear, preferring the must-scented safety of an orchestra pit to the violent camaraderie of a locker room. That same mentality fed my taste in movies. Anything that didn’t involve a ball hitting a net.
Sports movies featured games with obtuse rules and world logic. The characters were flat and the plots, contrived. The “best” of the cannon always felt like weird nostalgia plays disguised as sports movies. THE BOXER, FIELD OF DREAMS, A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. These were films for boomers.
But then DODGEBALL came out, and what did it feature? Dodgeball!
Now this was the game changer. A sport where physical aptitude meant nothing, that anyone could play. One where I could excel and still be obese, short of breath.
It didn’t take a professional to chuck a rubber ball at another kid’s cranium. I can dip and dive, and when need be, dole out punishment in the form of a hefty utility ball to the groin.
Dodgeball was the great equalizer. You felt like your contributions mattered. It fired up the synapses and invited camaraderie amongst the teams. You know, the things that make sports games special in the first place, but now dumbed down for someone like me!
You watch other kids play and get invested in their performances. Suddenly, you get invested in underdog stories.
In DODGEBALL: A TRUE UNDERDOG STORY, Vince Vaughn plays a gym owner faced with the potential closure of his long-standing establishment after a series of financial woes.
With the help of a scrappy team, Vaughn signs up for a dodgeball tournament, but not without push-back from the nefarious crew of a rival gym.
This is as “under” as the genre gets. But having experienced the sport of dodgeball in school, you feel invested, if not in the story, then in the sport, itself.
Films like MIRACLE and REMEMBER THE TITANS now felt personal. You root for those underdogs because you, too, have caught the competitive bug.
Duck — Ben Stiller: The Comedian's Actor'
Heres a thought experiment:
What is the FIRST movie that comes to mind when you think of Ben Stiller?
For me, it’s TROPIC THUNDER. If I ask someone ten years younger than me, they’ll say NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM. Ask anyone ten years older than me, they’ll say ALONG CAME POLLY.
Isn’t that weird? These are three completely different movies catering to different audiences. How many arrows can one person have in their quiver?
The list actors with careers that span decades, with various levels of success, runs so short as to be near negligible.
And yet, Stiller persists, no doubt due to his versatility. His character of the arrogant gym owner, White Goodman, ranks among my favorites. He relies on physicality, a great tactic if you’re making a comedy, and chews the scenery with visual language, alone.
That larger-than-life hair is amazing, especially in scenes of competitive dodgeball. How come it always looks so prim and unshaken?
The chiseled physique, too, stands out in every rewatch. It begs the question, how much gym time did Stiller clock in for this one movie? In any case, it payed off, coming back with a vengeance in TROPIC THUNDER.
Dip — An Ode to Walmart bargain bins
It’s the early-aughts.
The evergreen days of blockbuster still felt like so, but you’re a child with no money for video rental memberships.
So you head to Walmart and dive, head first, into the abyss of $5 movies. You’ve seen this bin before, near the electronics department. A large kiosk housing hundreds of plastic DVD cases, all heavily discounted.
Before the advent of “Video on Demand,” this, dear reader, was how movies garnered cult status.
Maybe they weren’t the best movies. Perhaps they were esoteric. But in the right environment, with the right crew, these movies clicked on a different level.
Just take your pick, these kinds of films could delight and ignite the mind.
This is how I remember finding DODGEBALL. Digging through the pile of throwaway junk, grinning ear-to-ear with my brother after finding a title we’ve heard of for so long.
It was a special time when kids had no responsibilities or concepts of how time work. Our lives revolved around school, so anything didn’t involve scholastic enterprise melded into a vat of nothing!
Sure! let’s watch dodgeball, again, for the 6th time this week. Sleeping over at Diego’s house? Does he have a dvd player? Bring the hits!
Keep that disc spinning, the components chugging.
“Go back to that part where Vince Vaughn falls on his ass!”
“The disc skipped, lets rewatch the last hour!”
You would introduce your friends to stupid comedies, and obscure dramas. They, in turn, would introduce you to something exciting, or disturbing, or just downright confusing.
We were passing these plastic dvd sleeves around like they were venereal diseases. We’ll never get this time back, so let’s make the least of it. Let the future figure itself out.
And sure enough, we’d lose that copy of DODGEBALL somewhere in that heady haze. Never to find it again. It was then, when we turned to the next sure fire bet in 2004……
Dive — Comedy Central, baby!
I was your typical twelve-year-old. Translation: recalcitrant, and excruciatingly horny. (shout-out to the 12-hive!) Comedy Central was the warm blanket I nestled in after the tyranny of school. My cultural diet consisted of large helpings of The Daily Show, South Park, and Reno 911.
Jon Stewart, in particular was a guiding light for my burgeoning curiosity. Stewart would come on late-night and wax poetic about the conundrums of the political moment in a high-low comedic style.
South Park, on the other hand, was the pertinent text of our times. A piece of genius that secretly masqueraded as a cartoon farce. One of those read-between-the-lines delights that similarly ignited ones imagination about the possibilities of linear television.
“Fuck yeah!” I would exclaim. My fellow 12-year-old freedom fighters had a north star, a mantra. In Comedy Central, youths like me found our voice.
And since the revolution would not be televised, we wallowed gleefully in the veil of Cheeto dust and empty cans of Mountain Dew.
Comedy Central was king. Nowhere else could you find trenchant political voices followed by the typical, much-anticipated run of SOUTH PARK episodes. All this, before settling in to MALIBUS: MOST WANTED.
Shot, shot, Chaser.
And sure, we visited the cinemas. Watched the typical things 12 yo’s would: LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS, SPIDERMAN 2, SHREK 2.
But it was Comedy central that ultimately curated our adolescence. 40 DAYS AND 40 NIGHTS, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, DEATH TO SMOOCHY, HAROLD & KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE, JOE DIRT, DOGMA, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR.
Irreverent, pleasure-principle fair that went down easy, even if it eventually slipped from memory. These movies primed us for a certain kind of slap-stick sensibility that followed in the footsteps of the Adam Sandler formula.
But out of all the comedies that had been released in that special pocket of time, in 2004-05, it was DODGEBALL: A TRUE UNDERDOG STORY that stood above the rest.
It was our HAPPY GILMORE. The movie with a bankable star and a funny supporting cast geared for comedy - our portal into the long cannon of quotable movies spanning the length of cinema history.
And our faces would light up whenever the revolving time slots on the TV guide channel would land on Comedy Central. And there, nestled in between the Daily Show and Crank Yankers was the late-night showing for DODGEBALL.
Dodge - JASON BATEMAN, JASON BATEMAN, JASON BATEMAN.
“Because I was there for such a short amount of time, I did’t know…really how to fit the comedic tone of the movie - what would be too much or too little……be a dumbass? I got that!” — Jason Bateman
Art is all about making choices.
In films, they are often times large scale choices (costume design, set decoration, music choices) These choices add spice to your project. They are elements that sell a story.
However, they can sometimes be small choices (the smile on someone’s face, a physical tic, a walking pattern, etc.) These small gestures, though seemingly insignificant in the moment, often times lead to memorable moments.
As you’re bound to learn in any synagogue, church, job seminar, yoga class, liposuction consultation: Less is more. A damn fine philosophy by any measure.
Jason Bateman’s performance as Pepper Brookes is the embodiment of this philosophy.
In a recent GC interview, Bateman shines a light on the 4-hour shoot, and how some fast-paced brainstorming lead the birth of the iconic color commentator, Pepper Brooks.
It’s safe to say that Bateman’s turn as the early-aught, stoner beach dude has aged the best out of everything in DODGEBALL. You see him all over social media. Commenting on the latest political blunder, news announcement, or sports game.
“Bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for ‘em. “
You could just hear it in your head.
And talk about choices! The over-sized jersey/spiked hair look is the stuff of legend.
“Ouch-town, population you, bro”
“I don’t know how they can play in diapers, Cotton. I never could.”
“I sure do like pumpkins, Cotton.”
Brooks is in the movie for no more than 5 minutes, and Bateman just Kill! A testament to small choices that payoff in the end.
Could this be one of the first proper memes in internet history? It damn well feels that way. In any case, here’s a compilation of all of his hits. Thank you, Jason Bateman!