Mel Brooks returns to the Bible in History of the World: Part II
Seth Rogen plays Noah, while Jay Ellis plays Jesus, in the miniseries sequel to the 1981 film.
Indiana Jones and Willow aren’t the only 1980s properties getting the sequel treatment these days. Mel Brooks is about to unleash a follow-up to his 1981 comedy History of the World: Part I—and, yes, he’s calling it History of the World: Part II.
I wrote about this miniseries eight months ago when news surfaced that the sequel would feature Jesus, just like the original film did—and that this time, Jesus would be black. (He was played by John Hurt in the 1981 film.)
A new trailer released by Hulu yesterday confirms these rumours, and it also reveals that, in addition to showing New Testament figures like Judas and Mary Magdalene, the miniseries will dip into the Old Testament story of Noah.
The trailer also indicates that artistic representation of Jesus will be another theme that the miniseries has in common with the original film. In the film, Leonardo da Vinci shows up at the Last Supper to paint a group portrait of Jesus and the disciples—a portrait that is photobombed (paintingbombed?) by a waiter played by Brooks—while the trailer for the miniseries highlights a scene in which church officials apparently make a point of depicting Jesus as “white” in their “marketing materials”.
You can watch the trailer here:
A few other observations:
The depiction of Moses in the 1981 film was obviously modeled after the Charlton Heston version of the character in 1956’s The Ten Commandments, but the depiction of Noah here doesn’t resemble any particular movie version of the character. The Russell Crowe film may have been a decent box-office hit in 2014, but it didn’t make a dent in the iconography around the character.
The actor playing Noah is Seth Rogen. To my slight surprise, this seems to be the first time Rogen has appeared in a biblical comedy. A lot of his friends and mentors were involved with 2009’s Year One, a gross-out buddy comedy that riffed on the first half of the book of Genesis, but Rogen himself sat that one out.
Wanda Sykes is in this miniseries. I don’t know if she’s in any of the biblical scenes, but this is at least the second comedy she’s been involved with that has featured some version of the Noah story, following 2007’s Evan Almighty. (I took part in a roundtable interview with Sykes on the junket for that film.)
Regarding the casting of non-white (but also non-Middle Eastern) actors as Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and other characters from the gospels, I noted in my post eight months ago that this has been a recurring theme in recent films and TV shows such as 2006’s Color of the Cross, 2008’s The Passion, 2015’s Killing Jesus and A.D. The Bible Continues, 2018’s Mary Magdalene, 2022’s Magdala, and the current hit streaming show The Chosen—and since that post, The Book of Clarence has gone into production too. (See this post for some Old Testament examples, too.)
It has been 42 years since the film came out. Mel Brooks, at 95, is still with us. But a lot of his co-stars are not—figures from another era like Sid Caesar, Harvey Korman, Dom DeLuise, Madeline Kahn, Gregory Hines, etc. I wonder how many of the miniseries’ stars had even been born yet when that film came out?
Here are a few screencaps of the New Testament characters in the trailer:
The eight-episode miniseries will air over four nights—at a rate of two episodes per night—between March 6 and March 9. That’s just seven weeks from now.