Joe's Apartment is a 1996 musical-comedy film starring Jerry O'Connell and Megan Ward and the first film produced by MTV Films. It was based on a 1992 short film first made for MTV (which was used as filler in between commercial breaks), but was also inspired by the 1987 Japanese film Gokiburi-tachi No Tasogare (known as Twilight of the Cockroaches in the USA) and the 1987 American short film Those Damn Roaches.
The main focus of the story is the fact that unbeknownst to many humans, cockroaches can talk but prefer not to since humans "smush first and ask questions later". They also sing (as they do many times in the movie) and even have their own Public-access television cable TV channel. Actors providing the roaches' voices included Billy West, Jim Turner, Rick Aviles and Dave Chappelle.
Famous quotes containing the words joe and/or apartment:
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“The surprise of animals... in and out, cats and dogs and a milk goat and chickens and guinea hens, all taken for granted, as if man was intended to live on terms of friendly intercourse with the rest of creation instead of huddling in isolation on the fourteenth floor of an apartment house in a city where animals occurred behind bars in the zoo.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)