Some movie franchises have an awful origin. Some movie franchises should’ve never become franchises. And some movies never should’ve been made to begin with.
The legend of both Bob Hope and Bing Crosby was elevated by their Road to… series of movies. Thankfully these have been forgotten by pretty much everyone. Except Seth Macfarlane, that is. He made Stewie and Brian spoof these movies in several Family Guy episodes. It’s the only reason we’ve ever heard of them. Naturally, we had to check them out.
Big mistake. Road to Singapore is the first venture in this series, and it’s an awful start. First off, the story is crap. Two immature sailors evade responsibility and growing up only to wind up finding a woman that makes them responsible. Sort of. That’s pretty much the story. And they decided to make it a haphazard musical. Bing Crosby’s singing is probably the highlight of this movie, but that’s not enough.
Spoilers, they don’t make it to Singapore. If they do, they sure don’t make it known. And there’s definitely no road, either. It’s all false advertising. They only get as far as a fictional island in Indonesia where they meet Dorothy Lamour, who is apparently not native to the island. The whole island is a haven of misappropriation and cringe. And that’s before Hope and Crosby paint themselves brown to appear native in order to go to the big feast.
From beginning to end, this is a cheap romp of sophomoric cringe that makes National Lampoon look grown up. Crosby’s singing and Hope’s humor are both tarnished and do nothing towards saving this dung heap. We will not be checking out the other movies in this series. It’s probably best to avoid them and just stick to the Family Guy spoofs, which are bad enough.
The only redeeming thing here is the subtle homoerotic relationship between Crosby and Hope. It’s a bit strange that they want to travel the world together and swear off women. They even sleep in the same bed. Yes, we’re reading into it, but the possibility of them and Lamour ending up in a polyamorous relationship at the end was about the only thing keeping us going through this film. Of course it didn’t turn out that way. But if it had, maybe we would’ve had a more enjoyable time.
Cracker Classics: Can We Still Watch This? 