Say goodbye to Burger City with this list of very good alternate titles for American Graffiti
They say that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but surely a rose would smell even sweeter if it had a kickass name like Goodbye Burger City. As it turns out, that was apparently one of the alternate title that Universal suggested for George Lucas’ American Graffiti, according to /Film’s Peter Sciretta. Other suggestions included The Hot Time, Kids, and simply Burger City (no “Goodbye”).
The letter Sciretta posted on Twitter comes from Taschen’s The Star Wars Archives, and it acknowledges that all of these suggestions are “dreadful.” However, we think there are some real winners in there that shouldn’t have been ignored. American Graffiti is a fine title, but it is not a better title than 1962 Was Some Year, The Fast And The Deadly, The Cherry Coke Summer, Look Back Once, Pals ‘N Gals, Supercola, Buddies, The Toy Dreams Gone, or Make-Out. All of those names are perfect and wonderful and deserved to be the name of some movie at some point. At the very least, George Lucas owes it to all of us—the people who spent years screaming at him about Jar Jar Binks—to release a special edition of American Graffiti that allows you to pick a different title.