YMMV / 200 Motels

• Awesome Music: Strictly Genteel, sung by the whole cast, without torches but more awesome.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Lad Searches the Night for His Newts, with people dancing wearing newts masks and then being chased by Motorhead Sherwood. And then it ends and enters in a unrelated sequence. Sherwood stated in a interview that his character was a newt breeder, but you'd never know this just by watching the movie. Of course, it's because it is a unfinished project, but we are talking about the final, released product here, man.
• Comedy Ghetto: Zappa uses the film's Self-Deprecation to criticize this. Several characters dismissively call his work "comedy music" and the Mothers call themselves "a rock-oriented comedy group".
• Fetish Retardant: Mark Volman, topless and in drag.
• Ham and Cheese: Theodore Bikel clashed a bit with Zappa during filming, but he still sank his teeth into the role of Rance Muhammitz, especially the Magnificent Bastard and Smarmy Host aspects of the character.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • "Touring can make you crazy, ladies and gentlemen. That is precisely what 200 Motels is all about." Shortly after the film was released, Zappa became the victim of two of the strangest events in rock history while on a European tour. A fire broke out during a show in Montreux, Switzerland (as immortalized in "Smoke on the Water"), destroying the band's equipment in the process^note This happened on 4 December 1971. Zappa died on that same date in 1993. Then less than a week later, a fan pushed Zappa down into the orchestra pit of the Rainbow Theatre in London at the end of a show, knocking him unconscious and breaking numerous bones.
  • Keith Moon's nun death due an overdose of mandies.
• Moment of Awesome: Ringo Starr dressed up like Frank Zappa, attempting to sodomize Keith Moon who is dressed like a nun.
• Nightmare Fuel: A musical sequence consisting basically of a soprano and a baritone under heavy solarization effects exchanging lines apparently about fetishes, starting with soup, which is attributed to a memory of nuns, leading to a series of others objects of sexual affection, culminating in dental hygiene, with an educational animated film about it being played right away (which itself segues into a non-related Mushroom Samba of it's own). It's pretty mind numbing.

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