Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind having been very well received by critics and mass audiences, [Spielberg] decided his latest feature, 1941, would be something entirely different—a comedy (the previous films were only unintentionally funny). So, keeping Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in mind, he began with a script … about the pandemonium in Los Angeles during the week after Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, the director never asked himself whether the paranoid superpatriotism of that era actually was humorous. Was the xenophobia that led to the forced "relocation" and imprisonment of thousands of native Americans of Japanese descent really funny?

Of course, Spielberg's idea was to make a free-for-all comic fantasy, not a political satire…. [Thus] 1941 became another big-budget spectacular, laden with expensive special effects, explosions, crashes, mindless destruction, and crowd scenes. It also turned into a colossal bore, totally lacking in good belly...