Li’l Abner (1959)

You are not ready for Li’l Abner. It’s like the Ozarks on acid, a hick hoedown of barefoot pinup models carrying pigs and pretending to be inbred. Shingle shacks sag like Dali watches, trees are painted orange and purple, costumes are a bright crazy quilt of sewn patches and heaving cleavage. The jokes are hokey, the music is lively, and the dancing is a crazy athletic scramble of bent knees and flailing arms. The top of the painted backdrop is visible in many shots…. Surrealism is meant to provoke a psychological reaction through random juxtaposition and disturbing imagery, but Li’l Abner runs gleefully into the dark recesses of the psyche, then stands there posing half-undressed and smiling vapidly.

Originally a comic strip by satirist Al Capp, then a Broadway musical, Li’l Abner tells the story of a backwoods community called Dogpatch, where the annual matriarchal tradition of Sadie Hawkins’ Race (where local women chase down lazy men and force them to become their husbands) is threatened by the government’s desire to test an atomic bomb. But Mammy Yokum convinces the scientists that there is something redeemable about their community: a tonic made from a bush that grows in her front yard which has made her boy Abner big and beautiful — if somewhat dim and sexually immature.