A freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankster’s fabled road trip across America in the legendary Magic Bus. In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “the merry pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s On the Road. Kesey intended to make a documentary about their trip, shooting on 16mm, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen until now.
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This film was worth it just for the brief unadulterated snatches of Neal Cassady alone, not to mention Kerouac and Ginsberg in New York and Ram Dass, all clearly not quite on the same wavelength as Kesey’s pre-hippy, all-American Merry Pranksters.
More like (and almost literally) American Graffitti on acid than anything else, this shows up Easy Rider and all that hair-and-tit-exploitation junk for the piss-poor Pot Noodle of leftover trends (and amateur production) it always was.
Thank Wavy Gravy the makers didn’t use the Magic Bus as a pulpit to bang on about the ‘coming dawning of awareness in American youth’ or similar nonsense, but cool-headedly presented the social experiment nature of the whole thing – sadly without quite hitting every nail (did you know the Magic Bus was wired for sound inside and out, making a ‘rolling’ mid-60s mix-tape of America?).
It would have been great to have more commentary from the rare similar characters to Kesey (Stewart Brand etc), but overall, boffo.