After a long career as an actor, writer, and director on stage and screen, the multi-talented Welshman Emlyn Williams added another title to his extensive résumé in 1980: at the age of 75, Williams published his first fully fictional novel, Headlong, a comic fantasy in which a commoner makes an unlikely ascent to the throne of England. Its sordid story begins with freak horror: aboard the maiden voyage of a dirigible named the Sky Whale, the entire Royal Family perishes by “instant incineration” when the airship explodes. “All that remained,” writes Williams, “was a twisted tangle of steel girders.”

When David S. Ward first began working on his film adaptation of Headlong years later, the novel’s opening moments required an overhaul. The action in his version of the story—which would eventually bear the title King Ralph—had been transported from the 1930s of the novel’s narrative to Ward’s contemporary moment: the late 1980s/early 1990s. A half-century after the Hindenburg disaster, dirigible explosions were no longer much of a concern. So Ward concocted a new calamity for the Royal Family: death by electrocution, courtesy of a rainy day and some faultily assembled photography equipment.

Ward was not the first writer to work on King Ralph, though his re-write of the script was significant enough to earn him the sole credit for its screenplay. The rights to Williams’s novel had first been acquired by Mirage Enterprises, the production company founded by Sydney Pollack in 1985. Originally, Ralph was developed with Pollack in mind as its director, but when the two-time Oscar winner shifted his focus to Havana—his 1990 Robert Redford-starring Cuban Revolution gambling drama—he offered the director’s chair on King Ralph to the one-time Oscar winner Ward, who was coming off his biggest success as a director with 1989’s Major League.

With Ward now attached as the film’s principal creative force—serving as both writer and director—the search began for a star to carry the film, which was set to be distributed by Universal. Though the studio would have preferred to have an established draw like Bill Murray or a rising star like Jim Carrey in the titular role, time and again the inquiries made to those kinds of names were met with the same response: the project’s timeline didn’t fit into those actors’ busy schedules.

One day, Ward’s agent proposed a somewhat unlikely name: John Goodman, who was then known principally as a character actor on the big screen (in films like True Stories, Raising Arizona, and Punchline) and as a sitcom star on the small screen (on Roseanne, of course). Goodman had never starred in a studio film before, but the actor’s schedule was open, and Ward could envision Goodman as the kind of humble Midwestern transplant he had written as his film’s main character. (Williams’s novel, it should be noted, does not locate any of its story world in or near the state of Wisconsin; its lower-class protagonist is from Cornwall.)

The majority of the cast was then filled out with British actors, including firmly established thespians like Peter O’Toole and John Hurt alongside fresher faces like Camille Coduri and Joely Richardson. Quickly into the shoot, Ward noticed clear differences between the American actors he had come to know and the new actors he was now getting to know across the pond, especially when O’Toole delivered two perfect takes of a two-page speech like it was absolutely nothin’. Per Ward, “I thought, you know, this is what happens when you're trained in Shakespeare. You're able to do these long speeches and not blank and so that was a real lesson to me. … American actors tended to want to play things rather than say things.”

The production for King Ralph was based in the United Kingdom, with a wide array of real-life castles and other historic buildings—including London’s Somerset House, Oxfordshire’s Blenheim Palace, and Kent’s Hever Castle—subbing in for off-limits locations like Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. Ward estimates that three-quarters of the shoot was held on location, with the remaining quarter taking place at the legendary Pinewood Studios. Principal photography commenced on April 17, 1990, with the shoot lasting somewhere between 50 to 60 days.

Reshoots later occurred in January 1991, just six weeks before the film’s premiere. Though Variety reported that the ending had been rewritten and reshot, Ward downplayed the severity of the reshoots, claiming that what actually spurred the trip back to England was the film’s stinger, in which Ralph—having abdicated the throne—lays down a slick studio cut of Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl.” (The executives, having previewed the film, wanted more of Goodman’s singing.)

Though Ward remembers the production of King Ralph fondly, the shoot was physically and emotionally demanding, especially given the constant travel between locations. The burden of the shoot was especially hard on Goodman, who appears in almost every scene in the film. In an August 1990 interview with TIME magazine, Goodman claimed that he saw little of England aside from “the road between [his] house and the studio,” while he told The Los Angeles Times in February 1991 that, “When you’re the leading man, your meter’s running all the time and you’re always working. There’s no goof-off time.”

Particularly difficult was the film’s big comic set piece, in which Ralph attempts to liven up a stale royal party with a bravura performance of Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly.” In a 2019 interview with GQ, Goodman characterized the filming of that sequence as “endless,” further saying, “We kept doing it again and again and again and I’m like, you know, 150 pounds overweight and sweating battery acid by the end of the day and it just kept going—it was relentless.” Ward remembers Goodman as totally committed to that day’s shoot, though he worried that his lead actor would have a heart attack at any moment.

Contemporary press around the film highlighted two outside forces that played a part in shaping it, both of them royal. The first, as reported in the Los Angeles Daily News, was the actual Royal Family, with British officials requesting that the film eschew the usage of the name “Windsor,” the appearance of any stand-ins for real-life royals like Prince Charles or Princess Diana, and the on-screen electrocution of any child-aged royal family members. Ward, though, was mostly unbothered by their demands: “Because the royal family is all dead at the beginning of the movie, you know, I had no conflict at all with them.” (He does claim, however, that at least one member of Parliament was outraged by the film’s story.)

The other external royal force exerting influence on the film was American: the Burger King, of course. King Ralph’s story takes its titular character to a London-based location of the noble fast food chain, where Ralph soon learns he can no longer easily mingle with common people. Along with lending its restaurant to the production, Variety noted that Burger King launched a massive four-week tie-in advertising campaign for King Ralph worth upwards of $8 million. Despite the big marketing spend, Ward pleads naivety about the product placement, claiming he simply considered it a good note from his studio: “I thought Burger King was the perfect place for him to go. That’s his kind of place! I didn’t even know there was one in England.”

King Ralph arrived in American theaters on February 15, 1991. It earned just north of $8 million in its opening weekend, good enough for third place at the Presidents’ Day weekend box office—or the value of one Burger King advertising campaign. It concluded its domestic haul at $34 million, with the worldwide gross estimated to be around $52 million.

The film was not a smash hit with the critics. Particularly scathing was the review found in the UK-based Sight and Sound magazine, whose writer Jonathan Romney deemed Ralph a “succession of witless stereotypes from start to finish” and a “vehicle for some stale jibes at the most hackneyed English eccentricities.” Michael Wilmington of The Los Angeles Times called Ralph an “empty, puffed-up blob of a comedy,” while The Washington Post’s Hal Hinson was unconvinced of the typically great Goodman’s potential as a movie star: “In small doses, he's a blessing -- a ton of fun. In larger ones, he's a load.”

However, the film fared much better with at least one young critic in New Jersey, who declared King Ralph a certified Porch Movie classic. And it is thanks to him that we coronate the film—as well as the Decade of Dreams—on this special night.

Sources consulted: author interview with David S. Ward on May 30, 2025; Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1980; AFI Catalog of Feature Films; TIME magazine, August 13, 1990; Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1991; GQ, August 15, 2019; Variety, February 17, 1991; Sight and Sound, May 1, 1991; Los Angeles Times, February 15, 1991; Washington Post, February 14, 1991.