Sequels and Stand-Up Revivals

Thom Tuck

A couple of months ago, we boldly ventured out of British Comedy Guide Towers to one of London's finest comedy venues, The Bill Murray, to watch a grown man talk about Disney movies, alongside a cuddly toy version of The Lion King's central character, Simba. Not just any Disney movies, either: the show Thom Tuck Goes Straight to DVD is about Disney sequels that did just as the title suggested. And the place was packed.

He had a lot to work with, in truth, as there are a lot of Disney sequels. The Lion King alone begat The Lion King 2: Simba's Pride, then the confusingly titled Lion King 1 1/2, then a Disney Channel series called The Lion Guard: Return of the Roar, plus a big West End / Broadway musical, and next year a live-action version of the original movie. The character names from the Savannah have even started popping up in more unexpected places. Alongside fruit machine-like gambling opportunities with titles like Lucky Mr Green, Rise Of Olympus and Jumanji is the completely unrelated African Simba fruit machine game, which you can play online; and there's now Simba mattresses being advertised on the tube, which are apparently excellent but appear to have no lion links at all, confusingly.

Sketchorama. Thom Tuck. Copyright: The Comedy Unit

By next year there will have been a slightly bewildering quarter-century gap between the original Lion King movie and the Beyonce-starring live action version, but it's also seven years now since Tuck started doing his Disney-sequel show, at the Edinburgh Fringe. It got a Best Newcomer nomination, then a spin-off radio series, but Tuck eventually moved on to other things, and the original show seemed lost for ever.

We should probably point out that the show is about more than just Disney sequels, by the way - although certain audience members would happily have settled for that - as Thom Tuck also journeys through the dramas of his own relationships too. Thankfully the good people at the Cardiff-based DVD imprint Go Faster Stripe decided to record it for posterity, hence us all turning up in Islington on a Sunday afternoon.

Who knows how these things suddenly come about umpteen years on, but Tuck had presumably written the script down at some juncture (which isn't always the case with comedians' shows, as they tend to evolve and mutate over the course of a Fringe and tour), or he just has an absolute hard-drive of a memory and rattled through it like, say, Simon Callow reciting a classic bit of Shakespeare, off the top of his head. But Tuck wasn't reciting King Lear or Othello; Tuck was working with stuff like Lilo and Stitch 2: Stitch has a Glitch, and still making it poignant.

However it happened, we should give a little internal fist-bump (actually, anyone with an internal fist should really get it looked at) that an almost-forgotten show from 2011 eventually found another stage, and will be available to watch in the comfort of your own home/train/workplace in the near future. Perhaps one day he'll even make a sequel.

Published: Thursday 6th September 2018

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