YMMV / The Kentucky Fried Movie

• Adaptation Displacement: The film uses the skits that ZAZ had originally performed on the Kentucky Fried Comedy stage show.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The song used in the opening and closing credits, "Carioca", is an actual recording from Jo Stafford and Paul Weston performing as "Jonathan and Darlene Edwards", who did a lot of intentionally off-key comedy records in the '50s and '60s. It wasn't written for the movie.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: At the time of its release, it was most notorious for "Catholic High School Girls In Trouble", especially the buxom, nude woman in the shower, though it's now celebrated as "that sketch movie that ZAZ did before Airplane!."
• Crosses the Line Twice: Enough that there's arguably none to begin with, but special mention goes to Rex Kramer: Danger Seeker. Walking into a group of tough-looking black men and screaming the n-word; indeed, very dangerous.
• Director Displacement: The Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team only wrote the film, but John Landis directed it. They wouldn't make their directorial debut until Airplane! three years later.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The headache reliever advertised by Bill Bixby is called Sanhedrin.
  • When he sets out to Seek Danger, Rex Kramer crosses over to the Wrong Side of the Tracks.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In a parody commercial, an oil company describes using recycled fast-food grease for auto fuel. Biofuels now make the idea of using vegetable oil usually used for cooking as auto fuel sound less outrageous.
  • Rex Kramer's idea of a thrill being using the N-word in front of a group of black men is more-or-less how the other Kramer torpedoed his own stand-up career decades later.
  • All the fake movies are produced by Samuel L. Bronkowitz, years before another Samuel L. became famous.
  • The classic "Take him to Detroit" punishment Dr. Klahn gives to an American spy. Interestingly, as of 2023, the city of Detroit is doing significantly better than it did in 1977, when this movie came out. However, scars still remain within the city (such as its crime, poverty, and depopulation).
  • A few years after his turn as Dr. Klahn, Bong Soo Han played a similar villain in the serious martial arts film Force: Five. Since it was directed by Enter the Dragon's Robert Clouse, it almost qualifies as an Ascended Meme Casting Gag.
  • John Anthony Bailey, who played the man in the "Sex Record" skit, actually went on to become a successful porn actor. Even more amusingly, later in his career he became one of the most famous porn actors to not actually participate in any on-screen sex.
  • Speaking of Rex Kramer: The character name was used again in Airplane!.
  • A toy robot in a martial arts movie? It's not used as a weapon, but one does show up in Ninja Terminator.
• Moment of Awesome: Klahn's sentencing of a racist CIA agent to Detroit. The previously defiant agent is reduced to pleading for Anything but That!
• Memetic Mutation:
  • BIG JIM SLADE! Hevenu shalom aleichem...
  • "Take him to Detroit!"
  • "You have my/our gratitude!", and to a lesser extent Dr. Klahn being repeatedly described as "a man of extraordinary magnitude".
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Stephen Bishop as the "show me you're nuts" guy.
  • Cleopatra Schwartz. There's people then and now who'd pay good money... well, five bucks... to see that movie for real.
  • George Lazenby says that this building is unsafe.
• Retroactive Recognition: The announcer in a few skits (including the parody of The Dating Game during A Fistful of Yen) was Shadoe Stevens, who would later announce the Davidson run and most of the Bergeron run of The Hollywood Squares, as well as doing some acting and replacing Casey Kasem as the host of American Top 40.
• Signature Scene: Chances are, you've heard of this film because of one thing: "Take him to Detroit!"

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