Roscoe Arbuckle - Legacy

Legacy

Many of Arbuckle's films, including the feature Life of the Party, survive only as worn prints with foreign-language inter-titles. Little or no effort was made to preserve original negatives and prints during Hollywood's first two decades. By the early 21st century some of Arbuckle's short subjects (particularly those co-starring Chaplin or Keaton) had been restored, released on DVD and even screened theatrically. Arbuckle's early influence on American slapstick comedy is widely cited.

In Will Self's 1993 book My Idea of Fun, a character namechecks Arbuckle as being 'one of the all time great fatties'.

In 2007 director Kevin Connor planned a film, The Life of the Party, based on Arbuckle's life. It was to star Chris Kattan and Preston Lacy. However the project was unable to find funding and was shelved in late 2008.

The 1975 James Ivory film The Wild Party has been repeatedly but incorrectly cited as a film dramatization of the Arbuckle/Rappe scandal. In fact it is loosely based on the 1920s poem by Joseph Moncure March. In this film, James Coco portrays a heavy-set silent-film comedian named Jolly Grimm whose career is on the skids, but who is desperately planning a comeback. Raquel Welch portrays his mistress, who ultimately goads him into shooting her. This film may have been inspired by misconceptions surrounding the Arbuckle scandal, yet it bears almost no resemblance to the documented facts of the case.

An episode of Mathnet featured the death of a silent film actor named Roscoe "Fatty" Tissue. When asked if he buried his fortune with him, secretary Lynne Thigpen declares, "there was nothing in the casket but Fatty Tissue."

Chris Farley had expressed interest in starring as Arbuckle in a biography film. This idea was suggested to him by comedy guru Del Close. Farley died before any details of the film had been worked out.

Fatty Arbuckle's is an American themed restaurant chain in the UK prominent during the 1980s named after Arbuckle.

In April and May 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a 56-film, month-long retrospective of all of Arbuckle's known surviving work, running the entire series twice. Highlights included The Rounders (1914) with Charlie Chaplin and Mabel and Fatty's Simple Life (1915) with Mabel Normand.

Arbuckle is the subject of a novel entitled I, Fatty by author Jerry Stahl. The Day the Laughter Stopped by David Yallop and Frame-Up! The Untold Story of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle by Andy Edmonds are other books on Arbuckle's life.

Episode 10, season 1 of Wilfred, Ryan offers a bottle of wine to his neighbors stating, "It was Fatty Arbuckle's favorite."

The punk band NOFX has a song about Roscoe Arbuckle titled "I, Fatty" on their 2012 LP "Self-Entitled".