The Raunchy Robert Evans Animated Vehicle Kid Notorious Was a Crass Misfire That Fatally Misunderstood Its Star's Appeal
I generally have four or five blog ideas in my head at any time that I may or may not get around to actually writing. One of them is about how, if things turn around for me, I will be almost obscenely grateful.
I will be SO, SO grateful. I will ooze gratitude from every pore. People would see me strutting happily through a now charmed life and marvel at just how grateful I seem.
I need to believe that we learn something essential from our struggles, that they serve a purpose. I desperately want to believe that they teach us things that we need to learn because honestly, the idea that life is just hard and full of disappointment and then you die is just too depressing to bear.
Because I believe in gratitude and appreciation I diligently waited until after Robert Evans had died to even think about writing scathingly of his ill-conceived, poorly received early oughts animated vehicle Kid Notorious for My World of Flops.
I wanted for Evans to be dead for a while before I turned my attention to this late-period folly and, full disclosure, the show wasn’t uploaded to Youtube until fairly recently and you better believe it’s not available legally in any form in our country. A DVD of its only season was never released. It’s not on Amazon Prime.You won’t find it on Hulu.
Like The Fat Lady Sang, Evans’ ill-fated second memoir, Kid Notorious is weirdly invisible for a post-The Kid Stays in the Picture project from one of the most ostentatious icons ever to strut confidently through the Paramount lot.
Watching Kid Notorious in 2023 is surreal because it is, at this point, an early oughts period piece a full two decades in the past. But it’s also surreal because it's the only time I've ever watched a television program where I’ve met the stars and slept at its primarily setting.
As I will never tire of reminding the world, I once spent a magical weekend at Robert Evans' legendary estate after he flew me in into Los Angeles first class to discuss ways he could promote The Fat Lady Sang.
It was one of the most incredible, unbelievable, unforgettable experiences of my life although I suspect that Evans was thoroughly underwhelmed by me. He undoubtedly expected some slick, confident young dynamo, not someone who dresses like a community college student who’s about to drop out so that he can sell weed full-time and possesses Unabomber-level social skills.
I’ll always be grateful to Robert Evans for inviting me to his home and paying for me to fly first class for the second and final time in my life (unless things start to go great for me, which, honestly, could happen) and talking to me and feeding me and giving me his book to read, there, that first night. That’s why I waited to write this piece until there was absolutely no chance that Evans would read it and be hurt.
Am I worried about being visited by Robert Evans’ ghost, possibly on Christmas Eve? You bet your sweet ass I am. Did that keep me from this writing this piece anyway? Not on your life. Conflicted? A little. Hungry? I could go for some food. Sleepy? I’m a little tired.
Kid Notorious arrived at a curious crossroads in Evans' life and pop culture as a whole. Evans became a beloved cult figure through his 1994 autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture and its audio-book, which attracted an audience all its own and stands as one of the most important audiobooks in the medium’s history.
The genius of The Kid Stays in the Picture audio-book was that it captured Evans' extremely imitable voice as a writer, storyteller, bon vivant and all-around raconteur but it also preserved that seductive, sonorous purr of his, which was his trademark every bit as much as his model-handsome face or success with the ladies.
Evans returned to producing as well. After sitting out much of the 1980s due to various legal and personal problems he helped put together movies like 1993’s Sliver, 1995's Jade, 1996’s The Phantom, 1997’s The Saint, 1999’s The Out-of-Towners and finally 2003’s How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days.
More importantly, Evans lent his voice, soul and essence to Bret Morgan and Nanette Burstein’s glossy documentary adaptation of The Kid Stays in the Picture. Like the book and audiobook it was a big success that further solidified Evans’ legend as the man who saved Paramount and lived the world's most glamorous and exciting life.
Exaggerated? Perhaps. Hyperbolic? A little. Full of questions that are then answered? Indubitably.
The masses angrily demanded more Evans. The problem? Evans wanted the world to remember him as he looked in the early 1970s and not as a relatively frail man in his seventies who had had a stroke.
So a vehicle was created for Evans that would allow the actor turned executive to take center stage without ever having to show his face. They would take this brilliant caricature of the ultimate show business egotist and make him a literal cartoon playing the best role he could possibly imagine: himself.
Kid Notorious arrived in a post-South Park, post-There’s Something About Mary environment, where there was a race to the bottom to determine who could be the grossest of the gross.
The winner? Tom Green and Freddy Got Fingered but that avant-garde masterpiece still has not gotten the praise and recognition it deserves.
Pam Brady, who co-wrote Team America: World Police and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut worked on the show as a writer and had a personal as well as professional relationship with Evans but her impressive credentials did not keep this from feeling like a dire South Park knock-off.
“Hip Hop to Godfather”, the first episode that aired, is sadly representative of the series as a whole with its rancid self-satisfaction and casual and not so casual racism and misogyny. The episode has Evans competing with a Sharon Stone-stage production of The Vagina Monologues that she has hilariously re-titled Sharon Stone's Vagina.
The writers make all of the expected jokes about Sharon Stone’s Vagina opening and Sharon Stone’s Vagina stinking and how everyone has seen Sharon Stone's Vagina and how Evans wants to make sure that Sharon Stone’s Vagina closes permanently. The joke, and I hope you’re following me, is that the phrase “sharon stone’s vagina” refers to the genitalia of the actress of the same name as well as being the name of her play. This is what is known in the “biz" as a double entendre or possibly a single entendre because it’s so lazy and obvious.
The episode's other, somehow even more offensive plot thread finds Evans competing with Sharon Stone’s Vagina (oh, but that joke gets funnier every time I write those magical words) by staging a Hip Hop version of The Godfather that features racist caricatures of hot-headed, profane and violent black gang-bangers instead of the Mafia.
Evans’ anthropomorphic car Puss Puss gets into the racist spirit of things by morphing into a feline version of a thug, complete with do-rag, malt liquor, weed and gun.
Kid Notorious loves stereotypes. For Kid Notorious, stereotypes represent the height of wit and the ultimate comedic tool. It does not get more stereotypical than Tollie Mae (Niecy Nash), a sassy, hyper-sexual black maid whose mouth is even bigger than a behind that is referenced so often, and figures so prominently in the proceedings, that it becomes a character in itself.
Like far too many empty exercises in cheap shock, this mistakes crudity for transgression and profanity for truth. Even worse, Kid Notorious fundamentally misunderstands the nature of of Evans’ appeal. It seems to think that people liked The Kid Stays in the Picture because it was about a cocky, profane Hollywood player who got laid all the time. To me, what makes The Kid Stays in the Picture so oddly enduring and irresistible is not the raunch or the decadence but rather the vulnerability and weird innocence.
People fell in love with The Kid Stays in the Picture and its author because of its fascinating juxtaposition of arrogance and vulnerability and unique combination of Old School Hollywood glamour with New Hollywood vices.
Without that tender, sincere side to Evans’ persona Kid Notorious feels crass and empty. It also feels like a mistake to set the show in the vulgar, hopeless present instead of Evans’ fabled past because part of Evans’ appeal was always that he was the living embodiment Hollywood's past.
Another key to The Kid Stays in the Picture's success was that for a winner, Evans sure seemed to lose a lot. These weren’t small or private losses, either. This was losing a career as a movie actor and losing Ali McGraw to Steve McQueen and losing his career and his reputation due to the Cotton Club scandal.
Evans furthermore always seemed to be on the ropes but he always found a way to come back. That, unfortunately, is not the case here. The fictionalized Evans found in Kid Notorious always wins, always sleeps with the girl and is always ten steps of the buffoons around him.
A show about Robert Evans, starring Robert Evans, and based on the mythology that Evans has created around himself that seems more interested in appealing to Evans' ego than in satirizing one of the easiest and most popular targets for satire in all of entertainment is fatally misguided.
It does not help that the show’s take on Hollywood and its players is a dire combination of toothless and misguided. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck figure prominently in the proceedings. The joke, such as it is, is that they’re always carrying around their Academy Awards and speak in unison because they’re so similar as to be identical, I guess? That wouldn’t be funny even if Damon and Affleck weren't so different.
In one of the show's better lines, its gung-ho, wrestling-obsessed Donald Rumsfeld says that there are two kinds of people in the world: Americans and the evil. The show seems to share his xenophobia. A characteristic gag involves a terrified-looking little dog inside a Dagwood-style sandwich eaten by a native when Evans is in Nepal for one of his misadventures.
The kicker for an episode about French President Jaques Chirac is that he's motivated by a homosexual lust for Evans and not LaToya Jackson, as he had claimed.
I’m not sure I laughed a single time at the show's entire run. It might not have been the worst possible vehicle for Evans in the Autumn of his life but it was uniquely misconceived and terribly executed.
Kid Notorious wanted to be Robert Evans' Hollywood version of South Park, a crude, irreverent provocation that spoke to the kids in their own profane language. Instead he gave us his version of Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon".
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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