After nearly a year in hibernation, the creature known as #BluntLarson has returned to provide the huddle masses with NASCAR hot takes.
They might not be the hot takes we deserve, but they’re the hot takes we need right now.
Is #BluntLarson (better known as Kyle Larson) pontificating on the pros and cons of the performance of the Next Gen car?
Nah, that was last week’s discourse.
Is he sharing his thoughts on NBC Sports play-by-play announcer Leigh Diffey?
No, he’s left that to people who have weird hangups about foreign accents (and who think Australian and British accents are interchangeable).
So what subject is #BluntLarson spitting facts about this time?
Ricky Bobby.
Yes, ladies and gentleman, #BluntLarson is speaking hard truths about the 2006 Will Ferrell comedy Talladega Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby.
For whatever reason, Larson has been on the podcast circuit this week. And it was on this circuit that he dropped this truth bomb.
Yes! Finally, someone willing to speak truth to power about the last time NASCAR was the focus of a major motion picture, 19 years ago.
I’m not counting the 2017 dramedy Logan Lucky because the sport itself was basically a tacked-on farcical side quest in a what was actually a heist film.
In the mid-2000s, NASCAR was at its peak popularity wise. Within months of each other in 2006, movie theaters were graced by two films based on NASCAR.
The first was Cars, an enjoyable Pixar film that spawned two sequels and which to this day still has toys being sold in Walmart and Target stores across the country.
The other was Talladega Nights.
I’ll admit, there’s stuff I laugh at in the movie. Lines like “I’m all jacked up on Mountain Dew!,” “Don’t you put that evil on me!” and “I don’t know what to do with my hands.”
However, as a whole, the movie should be called The Tragedy of Ricky Bobby. You name a NASCAR stereotype, Talladega Nights has it in spades.
Anyone coming into the movie with preconceived notions about the sport and its culture leaves with those notions completely reinforced. I’ve lost count of the number of times over the years that a guest celebrity at a race — usually at Sonoma Raceway — has said some version of “I thought NASCAR was just like Talladega Nights.”
In other word, a joke.
Larson wasn’t the only one calling out the movie.
But the problem is, to the general public, it is the first thing they think of.
Plenty of people leap to defend the movie as “just being a comedy,” including former NASCAR executive Jim Cassidy.
Therein lies the rub. Think about all of the depictions of NASCAR in mass entertainment over the last 45 years. Most all of them have been in the form of a comedy.
Stroker Ace in 1983? Comedy. The 2005 Lindsey Lohan vehicle Herbie: Fully Loaded? Comedy. The Cars trilogy? Comedies. The one season of the Kevin James Netflix series The Crew? Sitcom.
You can’t leave out Brad Keselowski’s and Joey Logano‘s cameos in whatever you want to call “Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!”
In 45 years, the only legitimate Hollywood product that even pretended to take NASCAR seriously was Days of Thunder in 1990. There’s a reason even the possibility of getting a sequel has fans salivating.
Sure, Happy Gilmore was a comedy. But it was one comedy in a canon of golf films that also has a respectable number of movies that treat the sport legitimately.
The same goes for football, basketball and baseball. For every Major League, there’s a For the Love of the Game. Audiences have gotten an Adam Sandler remake of The Longest Yard and Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday.
While you can laugh at BASEketball, you can be stirred by Hoosiers and Glory Road.
NASCAR’s leaned almost exclusively in one direction. In the last 35 years, the only respites have been Days of Thunder and a two-part episode of Walker, Texas Ranger.
NASCAR desperately needs a version of itself on the silver screen that makes it look cool while also reminding general audiences the stakes of a driver strapping into a racecar every weekend.
It can’t come soon enough.
Daniel McFadin is a 10-year veteran of the NASCAR media corp. He wrote for NBC Sports from 2015 to October 2020. He currently works full time for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and is lead reporter and an editor for Frontstretch. He is also host of the NASCAR podcast "Dropping the Hammer with Daniel McFadin" presented by Democrat-Gazette.
You can email him at danielmcfadin@gmail.com.