Come for recaps, stay for laughs

Rob Anderson has turned his viral videos into a musical show sending up '90s films.

- BY JESSICA LIPSKY

MAX BRONNER

"I took a gummy, and I watched it and I was very confused," comedian Rob Anderson excitedly recounted in a video about the '80s Canadian kids' movie "The Peanut Butter Solution," in which a boy puts a spreadable solution on his bald head, grows luscious locks, is kidnapped, then forced to grow his hair for paintbrushes. "So I watched it again without a gummy and it made even less sense. I was more baffled."

It's a weird premise to be sure, but that Anderson is baffled by any millennial media is both charming and part of the fun.

The New York-based comedian has been posting recaps and take-downs of television shows and films from the '80s, '90s and early 2000s since 2023 with a few Hallmark and Netflix Christmas movies thrown in for good measure, along with the occasional bizarre design show -and has developed a significant following on social media. Nothing is sacred: "The Princess Diaries" and "Coyote Ugly" are dissected for verisimilitude; "Big" and "Never Been Kissed" checked for their statutory-adjacent plotlines; "Saved by the Bell" is posited as classist; "Annie" is reconsidered as anything but a kid's musical.

"They're all movies that I have watched before," Anderson, 38, says of his dozens of comedic recaps. "That's the real enjoyment: You're watching it simultaneously from what you remember as a kid, and then also as a grown adult going, Oh my God, this makes no sense."

Anderson is here for the melodrama, the special lessons and the climaxes that fall flat. "There's something so great about a big moment that is supposed to be enormous for this person who is so successful at singing or dancing or whatever they're doing. At the time [of release], we're like, This is great. And then watching it back, you're like, Wait, what?"