‘Upton Saturday Night’: Blockbuster trade gets blockbuster movie poster

When the Justin Upton trade went through Thursday and he landed with the Atlanta Braves and his brother B.J. Upton, it got me thinking about puns with Upton. This was the best I could come up with: Mashing the Uptons with "Uptown Saturday Night," a movie from the mid-1970s starring Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Harry Belafonte and Richard Pryor.

"Uptown" would come on WGN-TV in Chicago once or twice a year in prime time, often in a series with other black cinema of the time, like "The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings," "Greased Lightning" and so forth. Now, "Bingo Long" (starring Lando Calrissian himself, Billy Dee Williams), was about the Negro League era (probably a good blog for another day), but "Uptown Saturday Night" has the wretched Upton pun. Plus, it wasn't too much trouble to take the "Uptown" one-sheet and graft the heads of Justin Upton, Jason Heyward and B.J. Upton onto the cartoon bodies of Cosby, Poitier and Belafonte. Here's the original.

Movie posters are the best.

And yet, there is a better Upton pun on the internet — and the creator didn't have to go back nearly 40 years to make it, either:

Well, the photoshopping isn't great, but it's darn funny. Will DMX like it?

(By the way, in case you doubt the relevance of "Uptown," they've been trying to remake it for years with Denzel Washington and Will Smith.)

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