John welcomes back Dan Gregor and Doug Mand (Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, Pretty Smart) to ask, how do you revive a dead genre? Using their upcoming movie The Naked Gun, they look at why the spoof genre fell apart, the challenges of introducing it to a new generation, and why turning genre tropes into jokes will always resonate with an audience.
We also look at other genres they don’t make anymore, follow up on Dogma 25, and answer listener questions on complicated rewrites and whether or not to hire a publicist.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John, Doug and Dan look at the movies that Gen Z hasn’t seen (and whether they even need to).
Links:
- The Naked Gun in theaters August 1st!
- Dan Gregor and Doug Mand
- Doug and Dan’s last time on the show, Episode 548: Made for Streamers
- Bottoms and Dicks: The Musical
- Melodramas: Now, Voyager, It Ends with Us, Spencer
- Sexual thrillers: Body Heat, Jagged Edge, (Bonus: Altered States, Dead Ringers)
- You Must Remember Thins: Erotic 80s
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
- Adult Romantic Dramas: The English Patient, Out of Africa, Past Lives, Materialists
- Mid-Budget Adventure Films: Romancing the Stone, The Lost City
- John’s Aladdin residuals
- Breakthrough cholesterol treatment can cut levels by 69% after one dose by Hatty Willmoth for BBC Science Focus
- One dose of experimental drug nearly wipes out stealthy cholesterol in ‘remarkable’ trial by Erika Edwards for NBC News
- The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology by Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha for WSJ
- Calvin Kang on Ingstagram
- Weekend Read 2
- Top movies that Gen Z have never watched revealed – including Oscar-winning classics from The Sun UK
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Ryan Gerberding (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
UPDATE 7-29-25: The transcript for this episode can be found here.