Film Biz as Simple as ABC, CBS, Etc.

“Where you from?”

“France. From France.”

--From the coming movie “Coneheads.”

“Are they from another planet?”

“If not, we should nuke France right away.”

--From “Coneheads.”

“Marty,” “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and “Days of Wine and Roses” were excellent television dramas of the 1950s that were later turned into theatrical movies. But they were the exception in making the jump from small screen to large.

For years, snooty movie people looked down their noses at television. More recently, however, having been spiritually reborn as true believers in the big-screen marketability of TV, they’re profiting from it. Listen closely:

“Hey, Mr. Wilson!”

Oh, nohhhhhh. The squeaky voice. The unruly yellow hair. The addiction to mischief. Yipes! It could be . . . it may be . . . it is! The absolutely worst nightmare of that hapless, ever-victimized fuddy-duddy, Mr. Wilson, is ba-a-a-a-a-a-ck .

Aimed mostly at the sub-teen summer crowd, the just-arrived “Dennis the Menace” is yet another theatrical movie spinoff from a television series, having been preceded in the mid-1960s by big-screen treatments of “McHale’s Navy” and “The Munsters” and, more recently, by movie versions of “The Muppets,” “Star Trek,” “The Addams Family,” “Wayne’s World,” “Dragnet” and a “Twin Peaks” prequel. And for purists, it should be noted that two very funny “Naked Gun” movies were inspired by the short-lived TV series “Police Squad.”

Coming soon to a theater near you, moreover, are “Coneheads,” “The Fugitive,” “The Flintstones” and “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Movie versions of “Hawaii Five-0,” “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Brady Bunch” have been reported in the works. A movie based on “Car 54, Where Are You?” awaits release, and there is industry talk about movie versions of “Maverick” and “Mission: Impossible.”

You could add past “Superman” and “Batman” movies to the mix, too, except that both were genetically closer to comic-book super-heroes than their TV ancestors.

Amiably mindless “Dennis the Menace,” on the other hand, is less an offspring of Hank Ketcham’s venerable cartoon strip than of the early 1960s TV series that the strip inspired, nostalgically recalling a frozen-in-time sitcom age when families spent their evenings chatting on the front porch, moms (even the 1993 Dennis’ career mom) wore shirtwaist dresses, front doors were never locked and crime was as alien as aliens. The unshaven, hog’s-breath of a transient thief in “Dennis the Menace” stands out like a green-glowing extraterrestrial in this otherwise hermetically sealed cinematic universe but, true to the genre, is such an unmenacing boob that he’s no match even for 5-year-old Dennis.

Remembering the awful CBS series and its little brat of a hero played by peroxided, artificially cowlicked Jay North, I was prepared to intensely dislike “Dennis the Menace” the movie. But I ended up enjoying it, in part due to its seductive escapism (no Bosnia, no gangs, no recession, no reality), in part due to peer pressure.

Aside from a few chaperoning parents, I was the only one in the audience taller than three feet. And surrounded by these little tykes, I found myself whooping it up with them when Walter Matthau’s crotchety Mr. Wilson (“I can’t stand that kid; he’s a menace”) got a weird look on his face when chewing some barbecue that Mason Gamble’s Dennis inadvertently seasoned with paint. And when Dennis accidentally tied Christopher Lloyd’s buffoon of a thief into knots. And when Dennis concluded his 94 minutes of mischief by innocently causing a snotty woman to get her head stuck in a copy machine. A copy machine! All of us in the theater agreed, this was comedy.

I got much less from “The Addams Family,” the movie version of a 1960s ABC comedy series based on cartoon characters created by Charles Addams. Raul Julia’s Gomez, Anjelica Huston’s Morticia and Christopher Lloyd’s Uncle Fester were fine, and Hand played Thing to a tendon. But the sight gags didn’t wear well, and the movie would have been much creepier, and thus funnier, in black and white.

Given the box-office success of “The Addams Family,” a sequel is inevitably on the way, and so, too, is one for “Wayne’s World,” a quirky “Saturday Night Live” spinoff that I didn’t much care for either. Moreover, the movie version of Jack Webb’s NBC classic “Dragnet” was a thin, stunningly dull parody of a self-parody. And by the time “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” arrived, I was too burned out by the original ABC series to care.

“Star Trek” generally transferred well to the big screen, as did “The Muppets.” Although I didn’t see the feature versions of “McHale’s Navy” and “The Munsters,” they sound as bad as the original series themselves.

With that little prankster Dennis still in my mind, however, I see the big screen similarly raising “Gilligan’s Island” to artistic heights by providing the panoramic scope it didn’t receive from three TV movies and two cartoon series. And a host of TV reincarnations never came close to tapping the potential of “The Brady Bunch.” In a darkened movie theater, fasten your seat belts!

I’ll miss Jack Lord’s calcified curl, but a neo “Hawaii Five-O,” with Dano sitting on McGarrett’s lap like his Howdy Doody puppet and some special effects to juice the action, will undoubtedly make it big as movie. As will Harrison Ford in the coming screen version of “The Fugitive.” I always felt that David Janssen’s Richard Kimble, by putting himself in jeopardy to help others week after week, was too much of a goody-goody.

I do have my doubts about whether “Coneheads”--with Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin reprising their roles as the otherworldly Beldar and Prymaat of early “Saturday Night Live”--has the potential to be anything more than an extended TV sketch. Meanwhile, director Penelope Spheeris was wise to hire Cloris Leachman, Lily Tomlin and Dabney Coleman to support Jim Varney (who succeeds Buddy Ebsen as Jed Clampett) in “The Beverly Hillbillies.” But when she recently called the original series a “national treasure” and promised “no big departure,” I took that as a threat.

Yet who better than John Goodman to touch the soul of that big palooka Fred in the coming film version of “The Flintstones,” whose cast also includes Elizabeth Perkins and Elizabeth Taylor?

“The Flintstones” undoubtedly will pave the way for future conversions of animated TV characters to the big screen, with two in particular topping my personal wish list.

“MTV’s Beavis & Butt-head: The Movie.”