During a recent appearance on Mick Garris's podcast Post Mortem, JASON LIVES: FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VI director Tom McLoughlin (who named a character in that film after Garris) mentioned that after JASON LIVES he had brought up the idea of a crossover between slasher Jason Voorhees and stoner comedy duo Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong to FRIDAY THE 13TH sequel producer Frank Mancuso Jr. This isn't something that would have struck me as being newsworthy, since McLoughlin has mentioned several times over the years that he thought having Cheech and Chong encounter Jason was a more viable crossover option than FREDDY VS. JASON. Several major outlets picked up the story over the holiday, though, so apparently knowledge of McLoughlin's crossover idea wasn't as common as I thought.
On the podcast, McLoughlin said,
[Frank Mancuso Jr.] wanted me to do another film after we did (JASON LIVES). And I said, ‘What are you thinking? I don’t know what it could be now.’ And he said, ‘Well, what do you think about Freddy (Krueger) and Jason?’ And I go, ‘But Freddy’s at New Line and the guys at Paramount have [Jason].’ And it’s like, ‘Well, we’re going to try and see if we can work something out.’
So, I started thinking about that, going, It doesn’t make sense. I mean he lives in one realm and — you know, I take this stuff very seriously, what realm a monster’s supposed to stay in. And he came back, he goes, ‘Eh, forget it, it’s not going to work anyway.’
And I said, ‘You know what? You guys own Cheech and Chong. What if we do Cheech and Chong-meets-Jason? They’re like camp counselors or something. It’s like, ‘Hey, man, I saw Jason out there.’ ‘No, man, that’s a myth.’ But he said, ‘You know what? No.'"
Jason has slashed his way through plenty of stoner characters over the course of his career, from a Chong-alike and his girlfriend in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III to a character reminiscent of Silent Bob's buddy Jay in FREDDY VS. JASON, but it could have been fun to see him go up against the ultimate stoner team. "CHEECH AND CHONG MEET JASON" could have been the ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN of the 1980s – just with a copious amount of marijuana added into the mix.
It's a silly idea, and I probably wouldn't trade FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD (which also has a stoner character) for it, but maybe it could have kept the series going at Paramount for a while longer. Instead, they handed the franchise over to New Line Cinema after the eighth film was released in 1989, and since then we've only gotten four more F13 movies – including FREDDY VS. JASON, which finally happened in 2003 without the involvement of Mancuso or McLoughlin.