Timothy Killeen
I recall a slapstick film from back in the mid-1960s with the title The Great Race. In it, the quintessential hero (the Great Leslie, dressed in white, of course) is challenged by a despicable and traditionally melodramatic villain known as Professor Fate, who proposes an epic over-ground automobile race from New York to Paris, travelling the long way across Siberia. Despite a massive pie fight, promoted at the time as the biggest one ever, and Fate’s many scurrilous attempts to cheat along the way, things work out in the end, although not without extensive damage to the iconic Eiffel Tower!