On the season 2 opener of ABC’s Cougar Town, the cast sat around drinking wine (as they are apt to do on this show) while they played their new MOVIE TITLE MASHUP DRINKING GAME.
Let’s watch the first few minutes of the Season 2 opener, “All Mixed Up” to see how it’s played:
See how easy it is? All you have to do is take two movie titles that share a common word, and combine the titles together. (ie “The Blue Lagoon” and “Goonies”) Now that you have the answer, you present the people that you’re playing against with the combined plot of the newly titled film, and challenge them to provide the answer to you.
What does the winner get? It doesn’t matter – everyone drinks every time.
First, some guidelines (Web Watch could call them “rules”, but that’s a bit too strict for this type of game — feel free to abide by these at your leisure):
- You must use the full titles of the combined movies. No dropping off words… with the only exception being a leading “The”. Because really – how many films do you know of that END with “the” in the title? But let’s say you wanted to combine “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” with “Bridget Jones Diary” — you can’t make it “Bridget Jones Diary and the Temple of Doom“, because you’ve left off the “Indiana”.
- You can’t switch the words around in the order of the film title. You’ve got to use ’em as they fall. Going back to our “Indiana Jones” option above, you wouldn’t be able to call the new film “Bridget Indiana Jones Diary and the Temple of Doom” because “Bridget Jones Diary” doesn’t appear in the new title.
- Can’t modify the words by adding extra letters to fit. “Star Wars of the Roses” can’t work, since the original film was called “War of the Roses“.
- Rule variation: using “Throw Mama Mia From the Train” as our example, sometimes you just have to be creative and allow for insertions like that. Your call.
Since you’ve seen the ones that Cougartown is using, here are some more MOVIE TITLE MASHUPS for you to try at your next gathering. Feel free to post your own in the comments below:
- DAY OF THE DEAD CALM: Zombies kill a couple stranded on a boat in the middle of the ocean
- UP IN THE AIR BUD: a golden retriever plays basketball in airport executive clubs across the country
- LAND OF THE LOST IN SPACE: a family (along with their wacky talking robot) goes from planet to planet… only to be eaten by dinosaurs
- OH GODFATHER: Marlon Brando leaves a horse’s head in John Denver’s bed
- BAMBO: a baby deer takes revenge on people intent on killing him
- MONSTERS VS ALIENS VS PREDATOR: in this animated family comedy, space creatures come to earth to hunt mutants for fun
- DIE HARD BOILED: bad guys seize an office building and a hospital, it’s gonna take a tough cop to get through this
- DIRTY HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS: Just a story about a boy wizard and his love for his .44 magnum
- DARK CITY OF ANGELS: A man struggles with memories of his past in a nightmarish world with no sun, run by beings with telekinetic powers who seek the souls of humans, until he is saved by a curly-haired blond doctor that shows him, he has one
- GRUMPY OLD MEN IN BLACK: Two ornery senior citizens must put their feud over the sexy new neighbor aside when the world is about to be blown to smithereens by aliens, and protect the earth from the scum of the universe
- MAJOR LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: a down-and-out baseball franchise corrupted by an evil owner has to enlist the help of women to play baseball while the men are away fighting WWII
- THE SIXTH SENSE AND SENSIBILITY: The Dashwood sisters move to their new home, a cottage on a distant relative’s property, where they experience both romance and heartbreak while a man helps them work through their issues… they later find that he’s been dead all along
- DEATH RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN: The warden arranges racing tournaments for inmates but one of the drivers escapes and picks up two kids who turned out to be aliens who just want to retrieve their spaceship which crashed in the mountains.