Half Baked

Half Baked landed in theaters on January 16, 1998 — a Universal comedy directed by Tamra Davis and written by Dave Chappelle with Neal Brennan. Chappelle plays Thurgood Jenkins, a custodian at a medical laboratory that keeps a supply of pharmaceutical-grade marijuana on hand. When his sweet, dim friend Kenny (Harland Williams), a kindergarten teacher, accidentally kills a police horse and lands in jail, Thurgood and the crew — Brian (Jim Breuer) and Scarface (Guillermo Díaz) — start dealing the lab's stash to raise ten percent of his million-dollar bail.

The movie is really a parade. Chappelle doubles as the preposterous rapper Sir Smoke-a-Lot, Clarence Williams III glowers as rival kingpin Samson Simpson, Rachel True plays a love interest actually named Mary Jane, and the cameo roster reads like a yearbook: Snoop Dogg as the scavenger smoker, Willie Nelson as the historian smoker, Jon Stewart as the enhancement smoker, Tommy Chong as the Squirrel Master, plus Stephen Baldwin, Janeane Garofalo, Tracy Morgan, Steven Wright, and Bob Saget.

Nobody mistook it for a hit at the time. Made for about $8 million, it opened sixth with $7.7 million and finished around $17.5 million; Rotten Tomatoes' consensus eventually sneered that "you'd have to be high" to enjoy it. But the theatrical run was never where this movie lived. On video and late-night cable it became a quote machine — passed between roommates, memorized in basements, its bit players' one-liners outliving whole Oscar seasons.

The longest shadow it cast was behind the camera. Half Baked is where Dave Chappelle and Neal Brennan learned to write together, and in 2003 the same partnership produced Chappelle's Show — one of the most influential sketch programs ever aired. The stoner comedy critics shrugged off in January turned out to be the pilot episode of a comedy empire.