The Travolta/Cage Project Extra: Our Friend, Martin (1999)

There are a handful of credits and projects on Nicolas Cage and John Travolta’s resumes that are so obscure and/or feature them insignificantly enough that they don’t merit being included in a Travolta/Cage podcast. 

They similarly do not seem substantial, or Travolta or Cage-focused enough to deserve a proper The Travolta/Cage Project entry. The mesmerizingly misguided 1999 cartoon Our Friend, Martin is such an obscurity. 

I’m writing about it as a special bonus entry because John Travolta has a voice role in it but it’s brief and insubstantial enough that even if you’re specifically looking out for it you might miss it. 

Yet I’m glad I subjected myself to Our Friend, Martin all the same because it is a goddamn miracle so deliciously, exquisitely, thoroughly misguided that it suggests Rapsittie Street Kids Believe in Martin Luther King. 

It’s Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue level hyper-kitsch that is bold enough to finally ask the REAL question at the core of Martin Luther King’s life and legacy: why don’t dim-witted, sports-obsessed sixth graders from the present use a magical time-traveling watch to transport a young Martin Luther King to the future so that he was never assassinated? 

According to Our Friend, Martin at least, the answer is that if Martin Luther King had not led protests and boycotts the Civil Rights movement never would have happened and segregation would still exist. Hell, things might actually be even worse for black people in America than they were fifty years earlier.

For good measure the women’s rights movement would never have gotten anywhere, since MLK was never able to inspire Gloria Steinem, and all people of color would work as maids or janitors and Hispanic immigrants wouldn’t speak English. 

It’s essentially the Pottersville section in It’s a Wonderful Life or life under the Biff wins timeline in Back to the Future II but with the added bonus of unintentionally insulting pretty much EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE ENTIRE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT by attributing all of its success to a single endlessly mythologized martyr. 

It takes nothing away from Martin Luther King to point out that it’s called the Civil Rights movement because it was a MOVEMENT and not just a single man, no matter how great or important or transformative. 

It seems safe to assume that in a timeline where Martin Luther King does not lead the Civil Rights movement on account of he’s kicking it in 1999 with a bunch of time-traveling cartoon kids other figures such as John Lewis and Jesse Jackson would have filled the leadership vacuum. 

But for the sake of Our Friend, Martin, no Civil Rights leader ever would have accomplished anything without Martin Luther King, who was, in its mind, the alpha and the omega as well as the entirety of the black power movement. Yes, Our Friend, Martin represents the Great Man theory of history in its most cartoonishly literal and literally cartoonish form. 

We open with our glib, ungrateful, snot-nosed twelve year old anti-hero Miles Woodman (Robert Ri’chard) getting ready to leave for school and another day of disrespecting his heritage by focusing on his damn baseball glove and his hippety-hop music instead of focussing on school and respecting his elders and his history so he can be the next Colin Powell. 

His entrepreneur mother, voiced by Angela Bassett, drives home that message with elegant understatement when she lectures her son, “You make sure you hit those books instead of hitting that baseball when you get home from school today!” 

When he tells her that he wants to practice so he can be like Hammering Hank Aaron, she scolds, “If Hank Aaron were here he’d hammer into your head that any chance at a decent job comes from improving your grades!” 

At school Miles is bullied by a fat kid in ill-fitting garb who keeps losing his clothing through ostensibly comical mishaps. 

It speaks to what a unique project Our Friend, Martin is that it seems as invested, if not more invested, in a running gag in which a comic relief fat bully keeps literally losing or ruining his shirt in humorous ways as it does in articulating the greatness and cultural relevance of Martin Luther King. 

Miles’ other classmates include Maria Ramirez (Jessica Marie Garcia), a painfully precocious brain who spouts insufferable one-liners like, “Talk to the hand!” and “I’m about to lose my lunch and I haven’t even eaten it!” in our timeline but scrubs floors and doesn’t speak English in the timeline where MLK never led the Civil Rights movement and consequently they decided to overturn all child labor laws in his absence.

Then there’s Kyle Langon, the aforementioned plus-sized bully, who is on hand for the broad, fat-shaming comic relief every tribute to the legacy of a great Civil Rights leader angrily demands but also so that he can surprise everyone at the very end with his spiritual growth by suggesting that he and his classmates can best pay tribute to the legacy of MLK by serving their community.

At school a hippie teacher voiced by Susan Sarandon warns Miles that he’s in danger of failing. She shows him his grades and he has not just an F in history but a glowing F so toxic and radioactive it is contaminating his other grades. 

But he can turn it all around with a project on Martin Luther King. As a student at Martin Luther King Middle School in Martin Luther King’s backyard in a unit devoted to Martin Luther King, Miles understandably recoils at the idea that he should have to know something about Martin Luther King. 

“What’s there to know? He’s famous for doing a bunch of good stuff for African-Americans back in the day and now we get his birthday off” Miles scoffs in a way that ensures he’ll feel differently following some manner of time-traveling adventure with King himself. 

At the Martin Luther King Museum, Miles and his skateboarding, surfer-slang-spitting white best friend Randy (Lucas Black) end up being sent back in time to 1941 by Mrs. Peck (Whoopi Goldberg), the museum’s preternaturally gifted proprietor and tour guide. 

In one of the special’s many bold, insane decisions Goldberg alternates between doing broad Whoopi Goldberg comic shtick (like telling the kids, “Try not to sneeze on the glass, because you know who will have to clean it up later!”) that is politely ignored by everyone and setting the plot in motion through her time-travel watch. 

In 1941 our heroes meet a 12 year old Martin Luther King and discover this that this really gross thing called segregation existed and meant white kids and black kids couldn’t play together and also that black people were second class citizens. 

When Randy, whose contemporary garb understandably confuses people in the past, tells a disapproving white mother voiced by Ashley Judd that he hangs out with his black best friend she sourly retorts, “I suggest you leave them negroes alone or the only “hanging” you’ll be doing with them is from a tree!” 

It’s an astonishingly tone-deaf treatment of lynching but then Our Friend, Martin is so crass, contemporary and vulgar that any time it touches upon the very real abuse and mistreatment Martin Luther King and his fellow activists endured it feels wildly out of place, tasteless and inappropriate. 

True to the film’s title, Miles and Randy learn that not only was Martin Luther King a great man and a sworn enemy of this messed up “segregation” thing but that he’s also a great friend and a real mensch, the kind who will let you eat his food, crash in his room, borrow fifty bucks and even help you move without asking for pizza or beer as compensation. 

When Martin takes the boys to his family for dinner they ask about their unusual clothes and they nervously explain that they are from “out of town”, “FAR out of town.” This causes MLK’s minister father (voiced by James Earl Jones, one of a number of African-American dignitaries roped into legitimizing this nonsense with their presence) to comment that they certainly do seem “far out.” 

Next the boys hop ahead three years in the timeline. Martin Luther King is now voiced by Urkel and has more to teach these slow-witted time-hoppers about black history and the central role he played in winning rights for African-Americans. 

Throughout the special, stock footage of the real-life King and his times is juxtaposed with animation in a way that’s supposed to add a documentary feel to this convoluted science-fiction nonsense but just ends up highlighting just how little the show’s paper saint version of MLK looks and sounds like the real thing. 

The real MLK demanded your attention and respect and spoke in a commanding voice reverberating with the Old Testament authority of a biblical prophet. Our Friend, Martin’s fictionalized MLK, in sharp contrast, politely requests our time. That might have something to do with Martin Luther King being voiced at various points in his life by the two most legendary black geeks of the twentieth century in Jaleel White and Levar Burton.

When Our Friend, Martin implements real audio of King’s speeches into an insultingly stupid and convoluted context the result is as utterly jarring as when it includes stock footage of protesters being abused by the police. 

When Miles and Randy realize that their buddy Martin Luther King got killed while still a relatively young man they foolishly decide to mess with the fabric of time and space by taking him into his future/their present so that he can avoid James Earl Ray’s deadly bullets. 

This changes the timeline to an unimaginably bleak dystopia where segregation is still the law of the land, feminism never happened and even Randy now hates black people, because EVERYONE is racist in a world without MLK to teach them that, actually, racism is bad. In this timeline he no longer attends Martin Luther King Middle School: instead he matriculates at a school named after Robert E. Lee.

The alternate future timeline in Our Friend, Martin adds “dazzlingly out of place Christ allegory” to the special’s uniquely bizarre, unpalatable combination of elements. Martin Luther King realizes that he must sacrifice himself, his life and his future for the sake of humanity.

Our Friend, Martin was designed to teach children about the importance of Martin Luther King by speaking their language. Instead it talks down to its audience to such a surreal degree that it becomes an accidental exercise in high camp, historical kitsch and unintentional comedy. 

You will learn impressively little about black history and the life of Martin Luther King from Our Friend, Martin but if you want to understand how the noblest of intentions can go wildly, hilariously and entertainingly astray then it has much to teach us, albeit not at all in the intended fashion. 

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