Bury Your Art: Rumors have persisted that Bill Cosby bought the television rights to make sure this movie would never appear on television, it made its network television debut on CBS on April 24, 1990. He was unable to get the home video rights, so the movie did receive a DVD release.
Box Office Bomb: Ultimately, the public listened to Cosby's requests to stay away. Budget, $24 million. Box office, $4,615,255. The Golden Raspberry Award founder said that "we were probably half the gross" wanting to confirm if the movie was a shoo-in for the next winner.
Creator Backlash: Cosby might have been co-producer and co-writer, but ended up begging audiences not to see it shortly before its release. When the film won a Golden Raspberry Award, Cosby asked the studio make his statuette out of gold and marble so he could accept it in style.
It's one of the handful of movies that led to distributor Columbia Pictures winding up in Sony's hands by 1991, though the damage this film did was more reputation-oriented.
It also blasted apart the career of director Paul Weiland, who had been labeled as "Inexperienced". He didn't direct another theatrical film for seven years (City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold) and didn't have a very visible role in Hollywood since.
Star-Derailing Role: For Cosby's film career. Any cache he still had as the star of The Cosby Show was wiped out when his next film, Ghost Dad, became another critically drubbed flop.
Throw It In!: Apparently, the shot of the rainbow trout swimming past an issue of Playboy magazine and doing a double-take was completely unintentional — that was the trout's actual reaction. Many viewers consider this to be the only funny joke in the entire movie.
The film won three Razzies at the 1987 ceremony, with Cosby winning Worst Actor and Worst Picture in his capacity as producer, as well as sharing Worst Screenplay with scriptwriter Jonathan Reynolds.
that "we were probably half the gross" wanting to confirm if the movie was a shoo-in for the next winner.