Following the enormous success of our first edition of The Band-Aid you knew a second chapter just had to be written.

The concept is simple: we take a disappointing movie and figure out five things that could have been done to improve upon it. They may not make the movie great, or even good, but they will create something of a healing process, like an adhesive bandage, hence The Band-Aid. When Johnson & Johnson sends up a cease and desist letter, I guess we will change it to The Adhesive Bandage.

Today I bring you what many consider to be the worst sequel of all time, "Caddyshack part deux".

Pay Rodney His Money
As we saw in "The Godfather Part Three", sometimes it really does matter to give someone the cash they ask for. The story is that Rodney Dangerfield would return to once again play Al Czervik if they would give him a tidy sum plus creative freedom on his part. Since the first movie, Rodney had developed a successful film career in such things as the underrated "Easy Money" and the big hit "Back To School". He asked for a big payday probably because he thought he had earned it, or he wanted them to say no. But the producers should have bit the bullet to get the talent back.

FMAD suggests: Like Robert Duvall's absence in the final film in "The Godfather" trilogy, Rodney Dangerfield not returning for "Caddyshack 2" because of money is inexcusable. Let him loose on this film and good things would have happened.

Move In Another Direction
They couldn't get almost anyone back from the first movie, so they decided to cast new people into the same role. Robert Stack as the stodgy country club snob, Jackie Mason as the wealthy blue-collar loudmouth, Dan Aykroyd as a crazy guy fighting against a gopher, and so on. Jonathan Silverman, the man who was shown up by Andrew McCarthy and a corpse in not one but TWO “Weekend At Bernie’s” movies is the new Danny Noonan. And it all ends with a two on two golf match where a golf course explosion gives our heroes the win. Oh wait: SPOILER ALERT. So not only are you going to make a sequel to an awesome movie but you’re going to essentially remake it. Blech.

FMAD suggests: If you INSIST on doing this, you can’t win by trying to outdo the original. Have a new plot to follow. Maybe emphasize the caddies (the initial plan for “Caddyshack”) or get away from the class warfare. Have some creativity, I know that may be tough for the movie industry to understand but try your best.

Cut Back The Supporting Cast
The original movie had some very memorable moments with its supporting cast but it never took away from the major players and story. Not so in "Caddyshack 2". Instead of one or two great scenes like we had with the Bishop, Lacy Underall, Spalding, etc. we get constant bombardment of insignificant people that add nothing. Why do we need Robert Stack plus his wife, son, and daughter all over the movie when they all represent the same exact thing? Why do we need the OMG-she's-so-out-of-his-league-except-in-Hollywood Dyan Cannon around to romance shlubby Jackie Mason? Why do I need to see the spastic crazy nutjob Randy Quaid as a spastic crazy nutjob lawyer? Who had Frank Pentangeli killed? Who gave the order?

FMAD suggests: Keep the supporting players down to a few situations and put the emphasis on the main characters so we can keep the plot going, such as it is.

Don't Do It
A proper sequel to one of the funniest movies in history may not have been so terrible but when you have one one original cast member return, and in a supporting role, you're putting yourself into the company of such duds as "Mannequin 2: On The Move". Ted Knight and writer Doug Kenney were gone, you wouldn't pay Rodney, and Bill Murray had something better to do. I would expect such jabroni-ness from a studio executive but shame on Harold Ramis for signing onto write such a disaster.

FMAD suggests: Scrap the idea altogether and if you want to make a golf comedy under another name, that might be better but you'll just be compared to "Caddyshack" regardless, which is a no-win scenario. I'm talking about the Kobayashi Maru of filmmaking here.

Seriously, Don't Do It
Instead, enjoy this but not at work without headphones. Warning: adult language.

As the dog days of summer are upon us, we here at the Fat Man After Dark Institute are looking for new ways to entertain ourselves and you, the four loyal people who come to this website regularly that aren't spammers from a former Soviet republic. After a night of drinking Everclear and Oreo Cakesters, we came up with The Band-Aid.

The concept is simple: we take a disappointing movie and figure out five things that could have been done to improve upon it. They may not make the movie great, or even good, but they will create something of a healing process, like an adhesive bandage, hence The Band-Aid. When Johnson & Johnson sends up a cease and desist letter, I guess we will change it to The Adhesive Bandage. 

First up, The Godfather Part Three. For a movie that the major players didn't want to do, most of them got together 20 years after the first two films in the series to put a stain on the franchise. What could have been done to make it better? TO THE FMAD-CAVE!

Don't Cast Sofia Coppola
This is the most infamous problem with the movie. Winona Ryder was cast in the important role of Michael Corleone's daughter Mary but she withdrew due to exhaustion from making a bunch of shitty and forgettable movies like Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael and Mermaids. So instead of finding ANY trained actress IN THE WORLD, Francis Ford Coppola's ego decided to cast his own daughter Sofia. She has gone on to redeem herself, kind of, as a screenwriter and director but her performance here left a lot to be decide and caused an enormous gaping hole in the film. We agree with the Washington Post's Hal Hinson who described her acting as "hopelessly amateurish."

FMAD suggests: Bring in any of several hundreds of actresses who could have played the role. Adjust your filming schedule and rewrite scenes if need be. Just a few potential names off the top of my head to consider for the part include Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Angelica Huston, or Madonna.

Pay Robert Duvall His Money
The biggest name not to return to the third movie is Robert Duvall as the Irish adopted son of Vito Corleone, consigliere Tom Hagen. Everyone agrees that this was because of movie troubles but different players agree on the specifics. The bottom line was that we were reduced to a pitiful replacement in George Hamilton's character whose name is so inconsequential that it escapes me even though I have the interweb at my fingertips. Tom Hagen was a major player in The Godfather series and for him to have died off-camera leaves us limp.

FMAD suggests: Pay that man his money. Give the Oscar-winning Duvall what he asks for and bring Tom Hagen to our screens.

Focus, Daniel-san. Focus.
The plot is all over the place and doesn't narrow in on what is important. In the original movie, everything related to the Corleone Family's war against other New York families and its impact on the characters. In Part Two everything was related to Michael's dealings with Hyman Roth that took us from Lake Tahoe to New York to Cuba but it was all focused on that. Part Three is all over the place with subplots that just don't matter. There's the romance between Mary Corleone and her cousin Vincent, the heir apparent. We have Michael's son Anthony pursuing a music career, Michael and his ex-wife Kay trying to reconcile, even an irrelevant glorified cameo by Bridget Fonda as a journalist.

FMAD suggests: Trim the fat off the plot and let's concentrate on what's at the heart of the story: Michael taking on corrupt Vatican officials and their mobster allies in a battle for money and power.

Tone Down The Drama
Francis Ford Coppola was looking to make a Shakespearean tragedy (cf. King Lear) of operatic proportions and that's exactly what we get. But that doesn't mean it was good. The first two movies had a realism to them even while they were fantastical. Godfather III holds that one note of over-the-top drama throughout. The acting and direction play into that drama as everyone seems to be eating their Wheaties and chewing up each scene like it's a high school production of Fiddler On The Roof.

FMAD suggests: Take it down a notch. Michael Corleone is going to be a tragic figure even without all the pomp and nonsense that takes away from the story and turns some of the better actors of their generation into hacks.

Create A More Stand-Alone Movie
The film would be better if it wasn't obsessed with its own history and having moments referred to in nerdom as "fanwanky". Did we really need to have Andy Garcia's character be Sonny Corleone's illegitimate son from his trysts with the girl he nailed during the wedding in Part One? He could have been Sonny's legitimate son and we wouldn't need to deal with rehashing a minor detail of the original movie. Michael didn't have to reconnect with his former protector Don Tommassino in Sicily nor did we need any of the moments that limited the enjoyment of the movie to certain people without allowing everyone to partake.

FMAD suggests: Keep it simple, stupid. Obviously there will be ties to the previous two films but you don't have to beat the snot out of us with references and connections.

So that's all I got for this one. Remember it's not personal; it's only business. Next up: Caddyshack II. Yeah I don't where to start with that one either.

Jason Jorgenson is an old friend of Fat Man After Dark. He is a Brit currently exiled by the Time Lord High Council to the United States and is a proud Scottish Tory. He has a love for parliamentary procedure, buffets, and the non-word irregardless.

Britons woke up this morning to the news of a hung parliament. As the results came in, it appeared that Labour would lose just shy of a 90 seats, the Liberal Democrats have lost 5, and the Conservatives have won about a hundred seats more than in the previous election. But no party has won 326 or more seats, the amount needed for a majority.

Constitutionally, in Britain, Gordon Brown may have suffered the worst drubbing since the Thirties, but it still entitled to see if he can form a working coalition. However, it looks increasingly unlikely that even with Liberal-Democrat support he'll be able to do so. Complicating this effort on Gordon Brown's part is the fact that Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal-Democrats -- the kingmakers in this hung parliament -- has said that David Cameron, the Conservative Leader, is entitled to try to form the government as the largest vote and seat winner.

The issue now is who can woo the Liberal Democrats. At 14.30 BST, David Cameron is expected to announce how he plans to do this. Experts suggest that the sticking point will be over electoral reform; Nick Clegg has made electoral reform the price for coalition. Gordon Brown can deliver on that, but David Cameron may be more wary. But Gordon Brown is widely seen as having lost the election, and Clegg might be very unwilling to join a Coalition of the Losers when his own party did so poorly compared to expectations.

Indeed, Nick Clegg's inability to turn his own "Cleggmania" into electoral success for his party is being seen as one of the major stories of this election.

But David Cameron was also unable to "seal the deal." He failed to make significant in-roads in Scotland, and the North of England did not see the sorts of large swings that Cameron enjoyed in the South. And while Labour did worse in Wales, they still held off a three-pronged offensive from the Tories, Plaid Cymru (a Welsh nationalist party) and the Lib-Dems. Finally, Cameron was not able to swing support in Liberal-Democrat constituencies quite the way he did in Labour ones (with Montgomeryshire in Wales being a notable exception.)

As a result, Cameron may only be able to lead a minority government. And experts point to the fact that the last time this scenario happened, there was another election within months.

“I have a better chance of regrowing hair on my head than Smarty Jones does of winning this race” – FMAD Senior (my father) on the afternoon of May 1, 2004. Hours later, Smarty Jones would win the Kentucky Derby.

The handicapping of any horse race is difficult; the handicapping of the Kentucky Derby is usually impossible. There are just so many intangibles that you rarely see except on the first Saturday in May. For example, most races have a maximum of fourteen horses while the Derby has twenty. There are horses coming in from New York, Florida, California, and Arkansas, not to mention the dastardly locals. In recent years, the use of a synthetic surface at some tracks has made it even more difficult to crack open an educated guess at who will take to Churchill Downs the best.

But with apologies to Yoda, we will try. And let’s start off with a bombshell like my dad gave us all those years ago:

The favorite, Lookin At Lucky, will NOT win the 2010 Kentucky Derby
Lookin At Lucky does have an impressive background and is not surprisingly the 3-1 morning line favorite entering the race. However, there are a lot of negatives when we dig deeper so I’m taking a stand against this animal.

First, five of his six wins have come on synthetic track, something that may one day be the industry standard but right now remains controversial at worst and infamous at best. His only non-synthetic win came by a head-bob against fellow Derby runner Noble’s Promise, a horse of limited skill that finds trouble every time he races.

Second, Lookin At Lucky has drawn the first post position. This means that he will have nineteen horses to his right and won’t be able to get into the kind of stalking position he’ll need to have so he can run his race. He will be stuck and possibly even jostled right from the start of the race. No bueno.

While the favorite has won a good percentage of previous Derbies, this will not be the year of the Lucky.

The Fat Man’s Derby Horse
Standing right next to Lookin At Lucky, in the number two post position, is Ice Box. This horse is trained by Hall Of Famer Nick Zito, the winner of two previous Kentucky Derbies and five Triple Crown races overall. Ice Box pulled a big upset in the Florida Derby after coming from nowhere to nip the second-place horse for a victory. This is my Derby pick.

Despite also having an inside post, Ice Box’s style is to come from far behind so he won’t need to jam up at the start. He can sit back and maneuver around when the time is right, exactly what he did in the Florida Derby.

Ice Box is coming into form just at the right time. He ran the best race of his life in Florida and has taken over a month off to properly rest while continuing to have stellar workouts over the Churchill Downs track.

I’m not one for bloodline analysis but Ice Box isn’t hurting there. His great grandfathers are two of the best horses ever, Seattle Slew and Secretariat. His grandfather, AP Indy, was a superstar of the early 1990’s. Ice Box has the champion gene.

The Bets
Usually we will take a mythical bankroll of $100 and place wagers accordingly HOWEVER since Ulysses Grant is my favorite alcoholic President, we’re adding an extra fifty-ball so I’m giving you $150 in action. The focus of our bets will be keying in on Ice Box with some of the other contenders so we could hit some tasty stuff as well as my usual longshot special. JUST A REMINDER THAT WE HIT THE LONGSHOT SPECIAL WITH DA’TARA IN THE 2008 BELMONT STAKES! I know that FMAD insider Binky remembers as he cashed in.

$40 Win: Ice Box ($40)

$5 Exacta Key: Ice Box 1st and 2nd with Stately Victor, Devil May Care, and Dublin ($30)

$1 Trifecta Key: Ice Box 1st and 2nd with Stately Victor, Devil May Care, Dublin, Dean’s Kitten, and Backtalk ($40)

$20 Win: Dean’s Kitten and Backtalk ($40) – Longshot Specials!

FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY
BET WITH YOUR HEAD, NOT OVER IT