That's Entertainment Parts 2 and 3

Last Saturday at noon, TCM aired the 1974 film That's Entertainment!. It's a good movie to watch for the actors talking about their time at MGM in between the clips from the classic movies. I figured they used up all the good material in that movie, since one of the tag lines from the trailer is that it will never happen again.

Of course, just two years later, there was a sequel, That's Entertainment! Part II, and that one is airing tomorrow at noon on TCM. (Part III, which only was released in 1994, will be on next Saturday the 19th at noon.) I have to admit to never having watched Part II, and only the ending of Part III. As I said in the first paragraph, the natural assumption is that since there was originally no plan for a sequel, the studio would pull out the best scenes they could find for the original movie, and when it did come around to making a sequel, they only had the dregs left.

Many of the IMDb reviews suggest that Part II is nowhere near as good as Part I, although MGM did have so much material to work with that they could still come up with enough good stuff to make a movie. After all, Part I deals mostly with the musicals, so if you look at the other stuff, you're going to have a lot left over. And Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire work together.

So perhaps this is a movie that I should give a bit of a chance, and any of you should watch for yourselves rather than relying on the other reviewers.