In a Facebook discussion of this blog, a friend, Dan Rubin, suggested writing about the use of See You Next Wednesday in John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London (1983).

See You Next Wednesday didn’t ring a bell so I Googled it and got led down a surprising rabbit hole. SYNW turns out to be a treasured in-joke of Landis’s. There’s a reference to an imaginary movie of that name in sixteen of the films, music videos, and television episodes he’s directed, from his first film, Schlock (1973), to an episode of Masters of Horror that aired in 2006.

Most of the time SYNW appears either in a line of dialogue or on a movie marquee or poster. Here’s a mashup of a bunch of them. According to the boffins at Wikipedia, the ostensibly actual film is seen only in American Werewolf.

(Landis’s better-known running in-joke is his one-up-on-Hitchcock penchant for putting cameos of fellow directors into his movies, sometimes multiple times. Steven Spielberg and Frank Oz are both in The Blues Brothers; Beverly Hills Cop III features Joe Dante, Martha Coolidge, Ray Harryhausen, Arthur Hiller, Barbet Schroeder, John Singleton, and George Lucs; and Amy Hecklerling, David Cronenberg, Jonathan Demme, Paul Mazursky, Roger Vadim, and Lawrence Kasdan all turn up in Into the Night.)

The movie-in-movie scene comes near the end of American Werewolf. While a wolf, the title character, David (David Naughton), has killed his friend Jack (Griffin Dunne). Now in human form, he sees Jack, in the body of a zombie, beckoning him into a Piccadilly Circus cinema. He finds Jack in the dark theater and they and we watch a bit of the porno See You Next Wednesday.

“Good movie,” comments David, reminiscent of a line in The Last Picture Show. In that film the reference was to Red River and the statement was true. I can’t say I’d apply it either to See You Next Wednesday or the pretty dated American Werewolf in London.

Incidentally, the IMDB page for American Werewolf claims that the See You Next Wednesday scene came from Landis’s earlier Schlock. That’s not true, as Landis explained in an interview with The Guardian. “When I was working [in London] in the 1970s, I went to those little cartoon theaters they had, such as the Eros on Piccadilly,” he said. “So in the original script, I had him going into the Eros and there was a Road Runner cartoon playing. But when I got back to London in 1980, all these theaters had become pornos. So I had to change the script to show a porno called, in the best smutty British tradition, See You Next Wednesday. We made the porno ourselves and it was the first scene we shot. It starred Linzi Drew, who was a Page 3 girl at the time; she went on to have an impressive porn career.”

Elsewhere in the film, David has a nightmare in which a peaceful family viewing of The Muppets Show is interrupted by a home invasion of mutant Nazi zombies.

 

Muppets puppeteer Frank Oz turns up briefly in American Werewolf as an American embassy worker. His line, “These dumb ass kids never appreciate anything you do for them,” is an in-joke reference to the cancellation of The Muppet Show. It was Landis’s first director cameo, and a prescient one, too: Oz wouldn’t direct his first film, The Dark Crystal (a collaboration with Jim Henson) until the following year.