'Good Burger' Remains a Tasty Nostalgia Trip

Revisiting the original 'Good Burger' proves once again just how much of a comedic force Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell can be.

Nostalgia can easily cloud a more objective lens. There are some movies that we hold dear to ourselves based on our childhood connections to them, and it’s hard to separate that feeling when watching these movies again as an adult.

Good Burger (1997) is no doubt in that camp. It’s not a movie I’ve revisited much, if at all, since I was a kid, so it was reassuring to know it actually does still hold up as a genuinely good comedy that straddles the line of being something both kids and adults can enjoy.

But at its core, Good Burger is for the kids who loved Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell, the Good Burger sketches, and anything else Nickelodeon was doing in those days that felt like it was pushing the boundaries of normal children’s television.

Though much of the comedy in Good Burger holds up because it’s inherently funny and Thompson and Mitchell have always had expert comic timing together, the movie still works so well because it always felt like a precious commodity to ‘90s kids. Here was a movie that was made just for us, based on a sketch our generation knew and loved, not unlike what our parents got with some of their own favorite Saturday Night Live sketches.

And not just that, but it gave kids the chance to see a movie made just for them in theaters. For many of us, that fostered that early love of going to the movies, of being excited to see something on the big screen. If it’s not animated and really geared more towards an even-younger audience, or features superheroes, what movies can kids even get excited about anymore?

There simply aren’t movies made like this anymore. In their eternal quest for maximum profits and box office, studios have decided there’s simply no good reason to produce movies tailored to one sliver of the audience. Rather than hit a nice line-drive double into the gap (Good Burger made $23.7 million against an $8.5 million budget), studios are instead living in their own extreme launch-angle era, aiming to only hit gargantuan home runs that have the chance to gross $1 billion worldwide. Either that or it’s schlock that’s been relegated to a streaming service and has been dressed up to seem like appointment viewing (Good Burger is not immune to this, either, though the sequel has its moments).

Good Burger is truly a time capsule of a movie, and a still-tasty one at that.