I was there when the Blaxploitation craze hit the silver screen. Fresh out of college and living in Washington, D.C. I laughed through Cotton Comes to Harlem and cheered at the end of Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song when the movie promised that the pimp-turned-revolutionary be back taking names and collecting dues. Like many a young black man my age, I wanted to be Shaft, strutting through the black community with Isaac's Haye's lyrics, "who is the man who would risk his life for his brother man," playing in my head.
For the second time around, it was a first. Not since the 1920s and '30, when the pioneering black film director Oscar Michaeux shot more than 30 movies in Chicago, could we see black actors starring in black films about black people.
Then came Superfly, the dope dealer who dressed like a pimp and who surely inspired the cable TV show, Pimp My Ride. Superfly's ride was a Caddy with an oversized, customized chrome grill that soon had life imitating art. In no time flat, Harlem hustlers and Chi Town players were doing the gangster lean in their own deuce and a quarter. The big screen car that spawned the ones in the ghetto may have singlehandedly wrecked General Motors' rep as America's most prestigious ride and driven rich white Americans in droves to buy a Mercedes Benz.
With the exception of middle-age and older Jews, who harbored no fond feeling about German engineering, after Superfly, the only time white Americans who could afford them wanted to be caught in a Cadillac was when it was the hearst carrying their dead body.
But, in the hood, Superfly was a smash hit, helping to give birth to scores of other movies that exploited its black American audience. Before long, Hollywood was churning out one low-budget, stereotypical and formulaic movie after the next. Set in the ghetto with drug dealers, pimps and whores as the hero or heroine were always out to get "the man."
There was Trouble Man, where Marvin Gaye's theme song, like Curtis Mayfield's for Superfly, was far superior to the flick. There were the Rudy Ray Moore movies, Dolemite and The Human Tornado and the Pam Grier flicks, Coffy and Foxy Brown. Fred Williamson's Hammer, Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem were just three of more than a dozen blaxploitation films the former AFL star starred in.
Of course, that was back then and we are right now. If Black Dynamite has it's way, a blaxploitation flick will be playing next year in a cineplex near you. From it's trailer, the movie looks to be a satire on the '70s genre. Since the flicks of in that era quickly became a put-on of themselves, it's hard to tell if this parody will play in Richard Pryor's hometown, Peoria.
It's also hard to tell whether Black Dynamite is going to be as good as Undercover Brother or as awful as Soul Plane. The movie is due out next year.
Here's the trailer now.
And this video may be a clue to how serious Black Dynamite actually is.
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