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The director of Shaquille O’Neal’s 1996 musical comedy Kazaam is offering his thoughts on the new Scary Movie taking a swing at his film.
In the Paramount comedy reboot that topped the box office over its opening weekend after debuting June 5 (with mild spoilers ahead), O’Neal is unmasked as Ghostface in a cameo near the end of the movie. Shorty Meeks, the franchise mainstay played by producer and co-writer Marlon Wayans, impersonates O’Neal as a mumbling NBA commentator before quipping, “But I never got over Kazaam.” He then kills the basketball legend for starring as a rapping genie in the Disney movie that underperformed at the box office 30 years ago.
“I had no clue,” Paul Michael Glaser tells The Hollywood Reporter about whether he knew the joke was coming. The Kazaam director adds diplomatically, “It’s nice that something you worked on has some resonance.”
After hearing a description of the joke, Glaser — known both for filmmaking and for such acting roles as Detective Dave Starsky in the series Starsky & Hutch — admits to mixed feelings. “That’s nice,” he says jokingly with a laugh. “It sounds to me that when they said, ‘I never got over Kazaam,’ and they killed him, that’s because Kazaam was such a terrible movie.”
