Cheech And Chong Up In Smoke The Song

[Avenall Trejo]

CheechChong had been a counterculture comedy team for about ten years before they started reworking some of their material for their first film. Most of the film was shot in Los Angeles, California, including scenes set in Tijuana, while scenes set on the Mexican border were actually filmed at the border in Yuma, Arizona.

Anthony "Man" Stoner, an unemployed, marijuana-smoking drummer, is told to either get a job by sundown or be sent off to military school by his parents. Man leaves the house and later becomes stranded on the highway. Man is picked up while hitchhiking by the equally enthusiastic stoner Pedro de Pacas, and the two share a large joint, which is revealed to contain Labrador feces after the dog ate Man's supply. When Pedro freaks out and seems to have trouble breathing, Man accidentally gives him an extremely powerful dose of LSD. The police find their car parked on a traffic median with them in it, discover that they are high and arrest them. At trial, the pair are released on a technicality after Man discovers that the judge is drinking vodka.

In an attempt to procure more marijuana, they visit Pedro's cousin Strawberry, a Vietnam War veteran. During the party, a lady snorts a couple of lines of Ajax set up by Man, under the presumption it was cocaine, despite Man trying to warn her. They narrowly escape a police raid on Strawberry's house while Strawberry has a flashback and thinks the police are the Viet Cong, but are soon deported to Tijuana, by the INS, along with Pedro's relatives, who actually called the INS on themselves, so they could get a free ride to a wedding in Tijuana.

The film concludes with Pedro and Man driving in the former's car and dreaming how their future career will pay off. Man then lights a small portion of hash and gives some to Pedro. However, it falls into his lap, causing him to panic and swerve the car while trying to put it out; Man attempts to put the hash out with his beer. During the scuffle, the car swerves down the road and smoke billows out the windows.

The screenplay was written under the title The Adventures of Pedro & Man.[5] Paramount Pictures provided the budget of $1 million but refused to provide the additional $800,000 needed to complete the film after studio president Michael Eisner saw a rough cut, so Lou Adler used his own money to complete it.[6]

As this was the comedy team's first film, Paramount wanted the initial screenings to be filled with their most ardent fans.[7] Cheech and Chong also came up with the novel (and ultimately successful) idea of advertising the film through comic strips, which they left on bus benches.

The film had test screenings in August 1978 and opened in nine theatres in Texas in early September, grossing $344,785 in its first 10 days.[6][7] The film went on to become a huge success. Prior to its official release date, the film had grossed $1.7 million, and by the end of the first month of release it had grossed $20 million[6] and went on to gross $76 million at the domestic box office and over $104 million worldwide.[3][8]

The film was banned in South Africa during apartheid. Censors in the country said that the film "might encourage the impressionable youth of South Africa to take up marijuana smoking".[10] It was also banned in Colombia.[3]

On April 10, 2018, a 40th Anniversary Edition set was released, which featured the movie on Blu-ray and DVD, and the album on vinyl record and compact disc, as well as a 7-inch picture disc vinyl record single featuring the songs "Earache My Eye" and "Lost Due To Incompetence (Theme From A Big Green Van)", with an image of Cheech from the film on the A-side and the "YESCA" license plate image on the B-side.[11]

The 40th Anniversary Edition CD featured two bonus tracks, a previously unreleased version of the song "Up In Smoke" with an additional Spanish verse by Cheech, and a newly recorded "2018 version" of the same song.[11]

The soundtrack album was released in 1978.[12] Allmusic gave the album a score of 3 out of 5 stars.[13] In 2017, Billboard named Up in Smoke as one of the 10 best stoner film soundtracks.[14]

On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 47% based on reviews from 19 critics. The site's consensus reads, "Oft-quoted but undeniably flawed, Up In Smoke is a seminal piece of stoner cinema thanks to the likability of its two counterculture icons."[16] On Metacritic it has a score of 57% based on reviews from 11 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[17]

Pauline Kael of The New Yorker compared the film favorably to The Groove Tube, writing that Up in Smoke was "also crudely done but is more consistently funny." She added that "Cheech and Chong are so gracefully dumb-assed that if you're in a relaxed mood you can't help laughing at them."[23][better source needed] Art Harris of The Washington Post wrote that the film "may give you a buzz, but don't count on it to keep you high. Like, you know, the film suffers from a bad case of burn-out, leading one to nod off between jokes and wonder why producer Lou Adler bothered to attempt a Doper's Delight in this post-Woodstock age of Clean Living."[24] David McGillivray of The Monthly Film Bulletin observed that the film "looks, unfortunately, as if it were more fun to make than it is to watch."[25]

In December 1978, Rolling Stone published an article stating that Cheech and Chong had "seven scripts waiting in the drawer" which included one for an animated film, and one for a sequel to Up in Smoke.[12] No sequel was ever produced, and Cheech and Chong's Next Movie, released in 1980, did not feature the characters of Pedro and Man, although the characters they played had personalities and character traits that were virtually identical to those of Pedro and Man.

The Grammy Award Museum in Los Angeles features an Up in Smoke exhibit which displays the master tape for the soundtrack album, the annotated original script, limited-edition 40th anniversary "smoking devices," and part of Marin's collection of "Blazing Chicano Guitars."[5]

In 2021, an officially licensed graphic novel entitled Cheech & Chong's Chronicles: A Brief History of Weed was released by Z2 Comics. Written by Cheech Marin, Tommy Chong, and Eliot Rahal, the graphic novel acts as a sequel to the Up in Smoke film, as it features Pedro de Pacas and Anthony "Man" Stoner as the main characters of the story.[26]

According to Wikipedia, there are seven "primary" Cheech and Chong films made between 1978 and 1985, all of which Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin wrote, directed, and starred in. This does not include any of the secondary Cheech and Chong spin-off films (of which there are many), or the animated Cheech and Chong film that was released in 2013.

Despite the fact that I've smoked weed habitually for the majority of my two and a half decades on this earth, I have somehow never seen anything in the Cheech and Chong canon, let alone the secondary stuff. Which, frankly, is shameful. So in honor of 4/20, I've decided to pay tribute to America's favorite stoners by smoking weed nonstop while I watch Up In Smoke, the first movie in the Cheech and Chong franchise, and live-blog my reactions.

I will also photograph my eyes at various intervals throughout the film to catalog my transformation from "normal" to "crazy stoned lizard." I think it will help you get a more visceral image of just how incoherently high I am. Here's my baseline:

Unfortunately, yesterday I woke up with such intense pain that I couldn't breathe deeply without feeling like my rib was being stabbed with a knife. I wasn't too alarmed because I have had chronic pain in my shoulder and rib cage for probably eight years. I've been to a lot of different doctors about it. My general practitioner recommended physical therapy, which was helpful. All the other doctors lectured me on drug abuse and did nothing to diagnose or treat my pain.

But despite my insistence that doctors wouldn't help me, my boyfriend, Tyler, took me to urgent care. I told him I would only go if he came into the room with me, in the hopes that having a white male professional in there would make my pain seem more legitimate. I think that worked; the doctor not only diagnosed me with a compressed nerve, but he also showered me with codeine and muscle relaxers to treat the pain.

12:53 PM

Oh my god. They're in the car and smoking a massive joint full of dog shit. Chong is saying how his dog accidentally ate his weed and he had to inspect his dog's poo for a week before the dog pooped out the weed. When he found the weed poo, he rolled it into a massive joint and now they're smoking dog shit.

1:00 PM

Cheech stopped in the middle of the road because he started freaking out from the dog shit weed and now cops are pulling up. In this scene, Chong follows the same advice my mother always gave me: If you get pulled over by the cops and you have weed on you, eat all the weed.

1:25PM

My ex had a mustache like Cheech. I went through this phase where I couldn't stop imagining him (my ex) ramming his dick into blocks of cheese and cold tubs of margarine. Don't ask me why. I don't understand it either.

2:05PM

Cheech and Chong are now headed to a battle of the bands at the Roxy? They don't know any songs and Chong appears to be unconscious on stage. Cheech is wearing nipple tassels and a tutu. He seems to think his outfit will make them win?

2:10PM

Okay, so hear me out on this one: In this scene, a cop dressed like a Hare Krishna accidentally got stoned because a van made of weed caught fire nearby, so now he is rubbing pizza all over his face and body.

Perhaps Mr. Martin was my gateway stoner comic, preparing me for the two wild and crazy guys (Mr. Cheech Marin and Mr. Tommy Chong) who would soon guide me fuzzily into my nerve-wracking, hormone-ravaged teenage years.

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