Twenty years ago today, a stoner film for children premiered. I'm still trying to make sense of it.

Originally a recurring sketch on All That—Nickelodeon's peak '90s rendition of Saturday Night Live for kids—Good Burger starred Kel Mitchell as Ed, a dim-witted but sweet fast-food employee who continually frustrated burger-joint patrons by being extremely literal and also possessing very little sense of personal space. When the sketch proved a hit, Nickelodeon, approaching the peak of its popularity and influence as an arbiter of taste for '90s kids, decided to turn it into a movie. It was only the second film from Nickelodeon, following Harriet the Spy, and unlike that movie's attempt at broad box-office appeal, Good Burger was really weird.

Good Burger is a movie where a small fast-food joint is targeted by a corporate chain of industrial mega-burgers, one that tries to kill its small competitor by lacing special sauce with shark poison. It has an extended sequence where its characters are committed to a mental institution for a riff on One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and it features George Clinton. It co-stars Abe Vigoda and Linda Cardellini! It opens with a surreal dream sequence where Ed hallucinates burgers talking to him.

Of course, none of this is why kids watched. They watched because it was the first movie to pair Kel Mitchell with Kenan Thompson, two of All That's biggest stars who had, in between seasons of All That, headlined their own sitcom, Kenan & Kel. Nick kids loved Kenan and Kel, and Good Burger was the most Kenan and Kel anyone had ever seen at that point. The people who made Good Burger loved George Clinton and Abe Vigoda. The result was one of the weirdest films in children's entertainment.

If you were to watch Good Burger in whole or in part today, it would doubtless lead to the same reaction: How the hell did this get made? The answer, as you can read in an oral history—because of course there is one—is kind of boring: It cost almost nothing to make, and no one really cared enough to say no.

As a result, Good Burger feels like a relic of days gone by, of the sort of ethos that gave us surreal children's entertainment like Rocko's Modern Life or Ren & Stimpy. Even in the era of Peak TV, it's hard to imagine a movie like Good Burger materializing from a few kids' show sketches—not in 2017, where everything is attached to a franchise and a single work's success is only the first step in building a cinematic empire. These days, that's the sort of creative freedom that's only really afforded to horror films.

Even in the era of Peak TV, it's hard to imagine a movie like Good Burger materializing from a few kids' show sketches—not in 2017, where everything is attached to a franchise and a single work's success is only the first step in building a cinematic empire.

Looking back, you'd also wonder a bit about the strange twist of fate that caused stars Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell to take wildly divergent paths, as the former's profile steadily rose until he became a Saturday Night Live regular while the other receded into cult films and then obscurity. According to a 2013 interview in The Atlantic, Mitchell and Thompson were in competition for the same SNL gig, and rumors that it led to the two falling out over it sprang up in the years that followed.

At the time this is being written, Thompson is still on Saturday Night Live as its most senior cast member, and Mitchell still maintains a mostly low-key career, currently starring on the Nick sitcom Game Shakers, about a bunch of seventh graders who start a gaming company. But two years ago, Jimmy Fallon brought the two of them back together for a special Good Burger reunion sketch, and, remarkably, the two just picked up right where they left off, amid reports that they were finally talking again.

Of course, if you wanted to, you could revisit it right now—it's streaming on Netflix.

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