With the Super Bowl (over here I refuse to call it the “Big Game.” Come at me, NFL) just days away I thought it was a good time to revisit one of my favorite football movies. Considering I couldn’t find a good trailer for The Marx Bros.’ Horse Feathers I opted instead for Necessary Roughness.
Released in 1991, the movie tells the story of the Texas State University Fightin’ Armadillos, the joke of the college football circuit. Stuck in a perennial losing cycle, Coach Rig (Robert Loggia) decides it’s time to go for broke and bring in some ringers. His first stop is to Paul Blake (Scott Bakula), the best quarterback the school ever saw…decades ago. Despite the fact that he’s 20 years older than the other players Blake never graduated and so is so eligible for college ball. Rig also recruits Lucy Draper (Kathy Ireland), a woman’s soccer player who comes on as the team’s new kicker. Along with the usual ragtag group of underachievers, the movie plays out as the team comes together and goes on to great things.
The movie arrived at that weird cultural moment that was 1991. Nirvana and grunge were blowing up the music industry. And the first rumblings of a powerful indie film movement were being heard in Hollywood. So the movie was still the product of the 80s “zany” comedy and but at a time when these sorts of cliched stories were falling out of style in favor of something more “authentic” to the younger generation that was wielding more and more power in the entertainment world.
That tipping point is felt pretty strongly in the trailer. It starts out by showing us just how bad the Armadillos are before Rig goes and recruits his middle-aged quarterback, something that does not go unremarked upon. Blake tries to get the respect of his team and it’s clear they’re kind of getting better but not without plenty of problems along the way. The feeling of the 90s is clear in how the trailer hits a few points over and over: First, there’s the focus on Blake’s age, something that clearly is selling the movie to a similar middle-aged audience since those jokes are likely to fall flat with teenagers (though I enjoyed them with the movie came out). Second, the emphasis on Sinbad and Rob Schneider clearly shows who was popular at the time, including a couple shots of Schneider doing a variation on his “Steve the Copy Guy” schtick. Finally, there’s the way the trailer tries at times to sell the movie as a gag-filled farce along the lines of The Naked Gun series, which was still ongoing at the time.
The poster is pretty simple and hits the same kind of points as the trailer. The main element is a big cartoonish football sailing through the air while wearing a cowboy hat and sporting bull horns along with sunglasses and a gold tooth. So it’s clear we’re in Texas here. The cast is pictured below that in small cards. Between those two elements is the copy that tells us about how this team of misfits is going to come together and become “something they’ve never been before…a team.” All those combined means anyone who saw this got a pretty clear picture of what the movie was going to be about. It’s surprising Schneider isn’t featured here but let’s take a moment and appreciate a point in time where Kathy Ireland and Harley Jane Kozak were important enough to put on the poster. I miss 1991.
The “misfit team comes together to win the big game and gain everyone’s respect” genre has never really left us. But this was a moment before filmgoers became too cynical about this and the movies in this area became somewhat ironic. Just look at the original versus the remakes for both Bad News Bears and The Longest Yard. Or anything Adam Sandler has made along these lines. Necessary Roughness may have been the last authentic movie being sold without irony to an audience that was, apparently, all about late-80s stand-up comedians.
