By C.T. Heaney
I blame John Candy for this essay.
I got to thinking about Candy as a side effect of a large-scale project I started, cataloging (as best I can recall) all of the movies I have ever seen in my life. I loved Candy as a child, though not always the movies he starred in, and I was having trouble remembering which of his flicks I’d seen in reruns on TV, or watched on the family VCR after a run to 48 Hrs. Video (a small-time Blockbuster competitor noteworthy enough to have landed a wistful eulogy in the local rag when its last location closed in 2018).1 I recalled the name and poster of the 1991 Candy vehicle Delirious, but its plot didn’t ring much of a bell, and I decided – after visiting, probably not for the first time, Summer Rental and The Great Outdoors the previous week – that I’d give it a shot.
As it happened, I had easy access to the movie, because YouTube is streaming it for free (with ads, and a lot of them, if you’re not logged in to someone else’s paid account). Fantastic, I thought; no three-day wait to have the DVD ordered in from afar. I fired it up and settled in while a hard-charging James Brown funk track played over the opening montage of New York street scenes. It’s not a long movie (96 minutes), and not a particularly good movie, though the premise is clever and there is some hilarious Cleveland-bashing sprinkled throughout; if you like John Candy (or Raymond Burr, parodying himself in his final film role), it’s cromulent enough.
If you already know this movie well, however, you will know that something is amiss. The opening credits of this movie are not supposed to be soundtracked by James Brown; they are supposed to be soundtracked by Prince – specifically, Prince’s top-ten hit “Delirious”.2 I had no way of knowing this until I got to the closing credits, which note “Delirious” as the first song played in the film. I didn’t remember hearing it, so I went back to the start of the movie and confirmed that I’d heard James Brown’s and not Prince’s voice. Curious. Even more curious was a serendipitous new discovery: when I brought the video up this time, I accidentally clicked on the closed captioning as the film started. As the horns in the Godfather of Soul’s 1974 freakout “People Get Up and Drive Your Funky Soul” blow the opening melody, the captions state the following: “(Delirious playing)”. They then proceed to spell out the lyrics to the Prince song over the first three minutes of the film. Some sort of mischief, I knew at that point, most definitely was afoot.
Enter Wikipedia, for a time the world’s greatest repository of unverified hearsay, later displaced by Facebook and then Reddit and then Twitter and then Deuxmoi. The entry for Delirious (as of September 2021) begins by giving the date and major cast of the film, then says, in the second sentence of the article, “The film used Prince’s 1982 song as its title theme.” Not in the film I watched, it didn’t, but by this time I was convinced the editor who added this (user Ckruschke, July 29, 2013)3 wasn’t pulling the Internet’s chain. I went back to the video and looked in the comments to see if anyone had remarked on this possible disparity, but the top-rated comments were virtually all effusive praise for Candy. I scrolled down, loading more and more comments, but couldn’t find anything about Prince. However, doing a control-F search in the browser for his name dredged up a comment by user kubtastic, stating, “When I first saw this movie the opening theme was the Prince song “Delirious””. It was only a month old (the YouTube upload had occurred nearly two years prior, on October 23, 2019), and had sixteen upvotes, but this crucial piece of information had been buried by Candy love and quotes from the film. The day before I began writing this piece, a reply had been posted by user SpaceManMonster, stating, “Damn Copyrights…Probably”.
I suspected as much as SpaceManMonster did. I knew Prince was a particularly litigious songwriter and recordist, and that he jealously tried to keep his music from being re-used in ways he didn’t have direct intellectual and economic control over. Even though he died in 2016, it wouldn’t have surprised me at all if his estate had kept alive that aspect of his business operations. But it was pure speculation; the cut could have been for more straightforward copyright reasons, or for some other reason entirely. I set my copyright paranoia aside for the moment.
There were traces in the video that something had changed. The edit is not a clumsy one; in fact, it sounds like it had to have been done by someone who had access to separate tracks for the dialogue and the soundtrack, because Candy carries on a phone conversation over the music. Even more remarkably, when the James Brown cuts out in the YouTube version of the film (at 3:25), there is the sound of a cooing baby. This is exactly the same baby noise that jarringly ends “Delirious” – it had been left in the film, perhaps because it would not have scanned in an algorithm as part of the "Delirious" recording. That ghostly cooing-baby noise, in fact, is now deeply embedded in pop music history; it comes from “Happy Baby”, a track on the 1964 record Authentic Sound Effects, Volume 8 by legendary manager Jac Holzman, and after “Delirious”’s run on the pop charts in 1983 it returned to haunt a second generation of R&B lovers through its prominent use by Timbaland in the production of Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody”, a huge hit in 1998.
I now needed to see if I could obtain the film in its original, unedited release. How long had people been hoodwinked into thinking that Delirious didn’t start with “Delirious”? Thankfully, as it turns out, not long. The streaming service Pluto had the film on offer for free, and it had the original soundtrack. I also ordered the 2016 Kino Lorber DVD release from the library (God love the public library for keeping a solid stock of thirty-year-old John Candy movies), and it, too, played Prince over the opening credits. Only YouTube was the anomaly – and stranger, still, given that promotional trailers for the film are on YouTube, and they use Prince’s “Delirious” as well.4 YouTube hosts a number of gray-area user-submitted uploads of full movies, but the available video for Delirious is not a user upload; it’s presented under the account name YouTube Movies & Shows, which is an official site chan nel for full-length films and television episodes. It has the imprimatur of officiality, and thus the veneer of respectability, quality, and integrity. But what I watched was not presented with integrity. It was changed, and without any indication of alteration.
How much does that really matter, in the grand scheme? There are two components to that question. First, there is the question of what it does to the work itself. Is Delirious mangled substantially by the change? James Brown, after all, is on the actual soundtrack to the film – about two-thirds of the way in, “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” plays over a parody of the classic elegant Hollywood dance. So what if a little musical switcheroo led to hearing him jam twice on the soundtrack, instead of just once? For one thing, the tone of “People Get Up and Drive Your Funky Soul” is much, much removed from “Delirious”. The Prince tune is a sprightly electronic blues, and it has an unforgettable whipsaw of a keyboard line that almost works as word-painting; the riff suggests daffiness, cloudy-headedness, delirium. The James Brown tune has none of that – it’s tough and gruff funk workout, and feels distinctly grounded by comparison (though it’d surely make a fine soundtrack to an urban montage in another kind of film). “Delirious” is very ‘80s sounding in its production and instrumentation (synths, drum machines, lots of high-end), and “People Get Up and Drive Your Funky Soul” is very ‘70s by comparison (warm horns and prominent bass). The Prince feels near-contemporary to 1991, while the James Brown feels retro.
Does that mean the latter doesn’t fit? Your mileage may vary, I suppose, but it suggests a more general principle, that simply switching out soundtrack songs isn’t always an aesthetically irrelevant action; oftentimes, songs are chosen for very specific reasons by filmmakers. I have no direct evidence that that is the case here, as very little contemporaneous press coverage of this film is available online as of yet, and people were not exactly inundating director Tom Mankiewicz (who wrote or co-wrote five Bond films and Superman II) with questions about his artistic choices in this box-office bomb.5 “Delirious”, however, opens the movie. It sets the film’s tone as light and comic in a way that the James Brown joint simply doesn’t. It also suggests the movie’s theme; most of the film revolves around John Candy’s accident-induced delirium and subsequent inability to tell when he is in the real world and when he is in a soap opera for which he is a screenwriter. In fact, Prince’s repeated intonations of the word “delirious” are the only time it is spoken in the film; the word does not otherwise appear in the script at all.6
Second, there is the question of how to think about altered works of art in relation to larger considerations about culture, history, and memory. I’m sure many people were simply delighted to have 99.44% of the film to watch again for free, and didn’t care much (or notice) that it was altered – no more than they would have been bothered by cuts for a network television broadcast, some of which often do much more violence to story and character development. But broadcast television operates under an explicit expectation of content alteration for children, and this is well understood by the audience (and, in some cases, explicitly stated at the start of the film). There is no such expectation for YouTube.
Why weren’t we Delirious consumers told that the movie was changed? Hollywood, at one point, started voluntarily doing that as a matter of course; in 1993, the MPAA adopted a number of boilerplate notices relating to reformatting and content to stave off a Congressional mandate to inform consumers of changes after a film’s release when the changes were made over the objections of filmmakers or their families. (Gen-X movie junkies will recall the notice “This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen.” at the start of fullscreen VHS tapes.) The MPAA also fought hard against third parties who tried to sell bowdlerized versions of films to family-friendly markets, but not from a position of high-minded artistic integrity. While it occasionally paid lip service to the ideals of auteur filmmakers, the thrust of its legal argument alleged that these altered copies infringe the studios’ exclusive right to make derivative works – in other words, only we, the studios, have the right to bowdlerize at will. YouTube isn’t a studio, in this case, only a distributor, but it’s possible that the change was made due to a studio’s demand. It’s also possible, conversely, that YouTube was responding to a musical challenge and made the change without the studio’s knowledge or consent. The film was not, is not, and probably never will be a cash cow, so it may very well be that the controlling studio is ignoring, willfully or not, the possibility of copyright infringement here on YouTube’s part.
I’m not arguing that YouTube doesn’t have the right to change this movie, or really any upload. It may very well be that rights considerations compel YouTube to make the change, or at least lead the company to believe that it is in its own best interest not to stir the pot in a way that might invite legal scrutiny. It’s not easy to know that without having access to company counsel. What I am arguing is that YouTube has a responsibility to note that the film has been changed – that alterations have been made which potentially impact the aesthetic, artistic, or historical understanding of the film, and that viewers deserve to know about these things, even if it leads to viewers complaining (and thus to more headache for the company).
This is not the first time Delirious was altered, and to the extent that the film still exists in the popular imagination at all, it may be more as a cautionary tale about the darker machinations of Hollywood than for Candy’s zany antics. Before the film’s release, Mankiewicz assembled a rough cut of the film which included a jab at Scientology, and the Church caught word. As final work on the movie continued, Mankiewicz and producer Richard Donner were beset by a flurry of calls from Scientologists to cut the joke from the film, which they resisted at first. Threatening phone calls soon followed, and then Mankiewicz’s house was broken into, which Donner connected with the Church. After this occurred, Mankiewicz and Donner decided to cut the line from the film, with Mankiewicz later remarking to Premiere magazine, “We all felt a little cheaper for having cut the line.”7 I noted above that there was no documentation about how important “Delirious” was to Mankiewicz or anyone else with creative control over Delirious; however, this quote clearly implies that Mankiewicz cared about the artistic decisions he was making quite deeply, irrespective of any preconceived notions one might have about high and low art. (Imagine the outcry if YouTube had replaced “Gimme Shelter” at the beginning of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed with, oh, say, “Dirty Water” by the Standells.) However, it also means there are two cuts; the rough cut and the release cut. Why am I not complaining about the lack of access to the rough cut? First, I would happily complain about lack of access to the rough cut if there were a possible path to obtain access. I think it’s miserable that the event happened (both to Mankiewicz and Donner and, secondarily, to the film), and the movie probably would have been better with the joke in it. It’d be a phenomenal addition to a Blu-Ray special edition that will never come out. (The Kino Lorber DVD has no bonus footage.) But I have no idea whether that footage even exists anymore, let alone how to go about petitioning MGM to release the Scientology Cut of a movie they will probably never break even on.
Secondly, there is a difference between decisions a creator makes (including those made under negotiation with, or under duress at the hands of, a publisher or patron) before a work’s release and decisions made after that work has already been issued to the public. Once it’s out there, in the hands of the populace, the work becomes, in an important sense, part of their story, in addition to being part of the creator’s. It has passed a watershed and become an entry in the history of art and entertainment, and changes to the work change that history; when done quietly and without notice, they do so insidiously, suggesting the world was other than it was at the time. This is a lamentably common process; it’s particularly pernicious in places like law and politics, where investigative journalism and historical research fight a constant battle to uncover tacit changes to government reports, the Congressional Record, politicians’ Twitter feeds, judicial opinions, and myriad other public documents. But similar processes occur in the entertainment sphere frequently, as well, especially in response to embarrassment or the expectation of offense or public outrage. Fantasia’s pickaninny centaurs were edited out of the film in the 1960s; Michael Jackson changed “Jew me, sue me,…kick me, Kike me” to “do me, sue me,…kick me, strike me” in “They Don’t Care About Us”;8 Taylor Swift (very quietly) changed “So go and tell your friends that I'm obsessive and crazy, that's fine, I'll tell mine that you're gay!” to “…that’s fine, you won’t mind if I say…” in “Picture to Burn”.9 Again, artists have the prerogative to revise and reissue their output to suit more contemporary tastes if they so choose; you may even agree with some, or even all, of the changes. (I think Roger Ebert had Fantasia about right when he remarked that archives ought to have the original for posterity, but perhaps the copy you show to your five-year-old doesn’t need to have grotesque stereotypes in it.)10 But most people under the age of 80 probably don’t even know about Fantasia’s changes at this point; it’s well documented by animation historians, but the Fantasia most people know and understand is not the one they would have seen in theaters in 1940, and that’s an important difference, a change in public memory that elides a major change in social mores between then and now. Taylor Swift’s first album, and the streaming services through which most people hear it nowadays, make no notice of the change; I’m sure she’s determined that it’s not in her best interest to publicize it. We hear it differently now, and for most of us, unconsciously.
Delirious’s change is not due to moral infelicities; its story is, in all likelihood, much more prosaic than that, a simple cock-up of rights that YouTube sutured away. These kinds of rights issues are often substantial barriers to redistribution of television shows, whose music synchronization licenses were often short-term and did not include packaging for DVD or streaming. This has hampered, for instance, the unedited return of shows like Happy Days and Dawson’s Creek to home video or digital distribution platforms. In Dawson’s Creek’s case, the omission of the iconic opening music – Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait” – on streaming services was such an affront to fans that Cole was eventually entreated to re-record the song so it could be restored, in a manner of speaking.11 Beavis and Butt-Head was enough of a rights quagmire that many of the music-video commentaries – the heart and soul of the show, many argue – were simply excised from DVD releases, leaving only the animated storylines. Other changes were made, seemingly due to concerns about encouraging bad behavior (or the belief that the jokes simply weren’t as funny as they thought in the early 1990s). In Beavis and Butt-Head’s case, this actively and dramatically changes what one would get from watching it now in an attempt to understand American satire in the 1990s.
Is providing access to an altered version better than not providing access at all? For Beavis and Butt-Head, I would say, rather emphatically, no. And for Delirious? The example illustrates that this question is ultimately a false binary. The change, I’ve argued, is not a trivial one, and it suggests a simple consumer-protection action: if it’s changed, let the public know. One hopes that Ebert’s archives will be out there, assiduously collecting original copies of all manner of cultural works (from tinfoil to TikTok) so that the historical record will be accurately preserved. In the case of altered works for which the original artists or distributors will not or cannot release the original version in addition to, or alongside, any New, Improved Changes, we have only the acute eyes, ears, and memories of fans like kubtastic to tell us that a transformation has occurred. I think we deserve the dignity of notice.
C.T. Haney has a Ph.D. in Library Science, and collects masters degrees like pogs.
[1] Ryan Kneller and Jon Harris, “End of an era: Last 48 Hrs. Video store closing in Allentown”. The Morning Call, May 3, 2018. Available at https://www.mcall.com/business/retail-watch/mc-biz-48-hrs-video-closing-last-store-allentown-20180503-story.html
[2] To keep the different deliria straight, I will keep the convention of referring to the film in italics and the song in quotation marks.
[3] Difference between revisions, “Delirious (1991 film)”, Wikipedia, July 29, 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Delirious_%281991_film%29&type=revision&diff=566303751&oldid=566302933
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM3-JJz5HT4
[5] Delirious had an $18 million budget and made $5.5 million at the box office. See https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0101701
[6] The script for Delirious is available at http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/d/delirious-script-transcript-john-candy.html
[7] John H. Richardson, “Catch a Rising Star”. Premiere, September 1993.
[8] Richard Harrington, “Michael Jackson Changes His Tune on Lyrics”. Washington Post, June 23, 1995. Available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1995/06/23/michael-jackson-changes-his-tune-on-lyrics/bd138b88-c73c-4e4d-9bd2-5c1d3bf82952
[9] Gil Kaufman, “Hayley Williams Isn't the Only Artist with Lyrical Regrets: Lines Katy Perry, Taylor Swift & JAY-Z Would Take Back”. Billboard, August 1, 2017. Available at https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/7882332/katy-perry-taylor-swift-jay-z-lyrical-regrets
[10] Roger Ebert, Questions for the Movie Man. Andrews McMeel, 1997, p. 176.
[11] Riana Buchman, “Paula Cole’s ‘I Don’t Wanna Wait’ Returns to ‘Dawson’s Creek’ on Streaming Services”. Boston Globe, September 5, 2021. Available at https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/09/05/lifestyle/paula-coles-i-dont-wanna-wait-returns-dawsons-creek-streaming-services
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