Reception
The film was a box office success, but it did not turn out to be the blockbuster film the two studios were hoping for. It was considered a flop in comparison to Spielberg's previous record on Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Writer Bob Gale defended it in a DVD documentary about the film:
- It is down in the history books as a big flop, but it wasn't a flop. The movie didn't make the kind of money that Steven's other movies, Steven's most successful movies have made, obviously. But the movie was by no means a flop. And both Universal and Columbia have come out of it just fine.
Spielberg joked at one point that he considered converting 1941 into a musical halfway into production and mused that "in retrospect, that might have helped."
Parodies of 1941 have cropped up in a number of unusual ways, including one by Spielberg himself. In an episode of Spielberg's Animaniacs, where Yakko, Wakko, and Dot inhabit a giant video store, a video copy of 1941 is used as a weapon, an exploding bomb.
According to Jack Nicholson, Stanley Kubrick allegedly told Steven Spielberg that 1941 was "great, but not funny."
Read more about this topic: 1941 (film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)