As an actor who lasted all the way until the mid-2000s, he was no slouch. But the sheer number of acting credits he amassed in one forgettable film after another made you feel that he was just switching sets.

The year, 1977. The speaker of that iconic dialogue, Anthony Gonsalves. The film, Amar Akbar Anthony. The director, the king of masala, Manmohan Desai. And the dialogue writer, the one and only Kader Khan.

Those lines, and practically every other classic cluster from this bachpan-mein-bichade-bhai blockbuster, made us laugh louder than we had in a long time. We held our bellies. We guffawed. And we returned, just to hear those lines again. And again.

By then, Amitabh Bachchan had cemented his reputation as the hero who could fight off 20 people in a godown, wiping blood off his chin, glowering that famous glower. He had also done a bunch of brooding, intense parts in melodramas.

The only film before Amar Akbar Anthony in which Bachchan’s funny bone was visible was in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Chupke Chupke. What Amar Akbar Anthony did was to give him the chance to cross over to the comic side, and own it. With it, he became the ‘complete star’ and went on to demolish every other pretender to the Number One slot. It could well be that Bachchan got so big because he was at the intersection of a certain time and place in Hindi cinema, but there’s no doubt that a lot of it had to do with the genius of Kader Khan. Khan died in Toronto, Canada on Monday after a prolonged illness. He was 81.