Father of the Pride was DreamWorks Animation's attempt at creating the next Simpsons. Jeffrey Katzenberg thought up the idea on a visit to Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden in Las Vegas. It stars a family of white lions: the bumbling dad Larry (voiced by John Goodman), the closer to Earth wife Kate (voiced by Cheryl Hines), the teenage daughter Sierra (Danielle Harris), the young son Hunter (Daryl Sabara), and Larry's father-in-law Sarmoti (Carl Reiner). Larry is part of Siegfried and Roy's show. So it's kind of like The Lionhearts, but for adults - right down to only getting one season. And this was the 2000s pre-Kung Fu Panda DreamWorks Animation, which had a habit of being pretty hit-or-miss... sometimes you'd get the first two Shrek movies, other times you'd get Shark Tale or Bee Movie. So there's a red flag right there.
The series debuted on NBC in the August of 2004 after heavy promotion during NBC's coverage of the Summer Olympics. DreamWorks had high hopes for it, but it failed for a couple of different reasons...
1) There had been so much advertising for the show that by the time it actually aired, audiences were tired of it.
2) Before the premiere, Roy was attacked by one of his tigers, which made DreamWorks and NBC reluctant to go through with the show, but Roy and Siegfried urged them to go for it. Despite that, after what had happened audiences weren't very comfortable with watching a cartoon about Siegfried and Roy's lions.
3) Many airings of the show's episodes were interrupted by updates on the 2004 presidential election.
4) The show was very expensive and time-consuming to make. Each episode cost an estimated minimum of $2 million to produce.
5) The Parents Television Council launched a campaign against the show. Why? Well, even if the show was intended for adults, it was still a DreamWorks Animation production and advertised as being "from the creators of Shrek", which could've resulted in parents assuming the show was family-friendly and letting their kids watch it.
6) The show itself got negative reviews besides all of this.
So the show wound up getting cancelled after one season. A few years back, I decided like an idiot that I would watch the show and see if it was any good. I watched two episodes: one focused on Larry and Kate assuming that their daughter was taking catnip, which was apparently a drug for lions. The other had Donkey from Shrek showing up for some reason (and yet, as far as animation studios participating in self-promotion goes, it still doesn't make me cringe as much as Ralph Breaks the Internet). I was tempted to do a review of the latter episode, but instead today we'll be watching the episode "And the Revolution Continues".
The episode begins with Larry watching home movies of Sierra when she was a cub, much to Sierra's embarrassment. After demonstrating for first-time viewers that her personality is that of every other teenage girl on TV, Larry mentions that Siegfried and Roy are taking him, Sierra, and her mother out to dinner that night.
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| I'm not comfortable with the fact that they made the daughter lion so curvy. Did they really want adults to be attracted to a character that A) is a lion and B) is a teenager? |
Uh... I don't get it. Florida State... that's a college, right? Is it known for being easy to get into? Huh?
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| Boy, Kimba the White Lion has really let himself go... |
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| Then again, I like John Goodman too but even he couldn't keep people watching this show... |
Once they're seated, Miguel and Tulio... I mean, Siegfried and Roy tell the lions that Barbara Streisand is coming to town, and they're going to put on a private magic show for her. To celebrate, they have ordered for the lions a bust of Barbara Streisand's head made out of salami. From what I can gather, the main joke of this scene - and pretty much every scene with Siegfried and Roy in it - is that Siegfried and Roy act like idiots and have funny accents. So if you don't find either of those things funny, my advice for you is not to watch this show.
By the way, despite how involved they were in the show Siegfried and Roy didn't voice their animated counterparts. Instead, Siegfried is voiced by Julian Holloway and Roy is voiced by Futurama voice actor David Herman (he's the voice of, as Professor Farnsworth would say, WEEEEEEEEEEEEEERNSTROM!).
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| Look at this. It looks like a mannequin you'd find in a Las Vegas gift shop or something... |
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| No, I don't know why Hunter has a Cone of Shame. Maybe they explained that in the first episode. |
Sarmoti leaves Hunter with some darts to establish what an unfit babysitter he is while he goes over to the bar and flirts with a lioness (voiced by Jennifer Coolidge). After she claims that they can't date because he's afraid of commitment, he decides to do some lying and claim that he's raising his grandson all by himself. It works.
Once Emerson is safe and sound at the lions' place, he dubs Larry an idiot for buying beer that comes in a six-pack because the plastic rings are dangerous to sea life. "We need to engineer a campaign to cut these plastic rings before they're disposed of!" he says.
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| Suddenly, I have a craving for seafood... |
By morning, Sierra has whipped up posters for arctic drilling, medicare, cloning, and other issues like that. "You know, kid, you've got a SPARK!" Emerson tells her. "You can really change the world!" As Larry comes over and picks up the TV remote, he says, "You know how I heal the world? With laughter!" Well, that's great and all, but how about actually SUPPLYING THAT LAUGHTER? Because so far, I haven't laughed at this show ONCE.
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| Please eat him. Please. Do it, Larry! |
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| They also mention Al Gore at one point. That's not really interesting, but I couldn't think of a funny comment to make here, so... |
That night, Larry is woken up by Emerson and Sierra holding some sort of rally against the bar and its not having any aquatic access or whatever. There's a zebra who sounds like Bender from Futurama, and he suggests that they torch the place.
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| I was gonna make a joke about Marty from Madagascar here, but the zebra sounds so much like Bender that I couldn't resist making this joke... "BITE MY FURRY BLACK-AND-WHITE [CENSORED]!" |
Larry tells the Bender-voiced zebra and the other animals that they all need a hobby and to get the heck out of his house. Then Sierra reveals that she's not going to school anymore because blah-blah-blah political crap. Larry tells her that she has to go to school because, in his own words, "Trying to stay awake while the teacher says boring stuff builds character! END OF DISCUSSION!"
As for Larry, he's decided to take Emerson to the Mirage Aquarium.
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| Meh. I prefer the Living Seas at EPCOT. |
He tosses Emerson into the tank. Siegfried and Roy, meanwhile, are hanging out with Barbara Streisand... and apparently the Mirage Aquarium doubles as the restaurant from before's lobster tank or whatever, because she spots the lobster and announces that she wants him for dinner. And no, they didn't get the actual Barbara Streisand to voice herself either (Jeannie Elias does her voice here).
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| What exactly is the point of having a celebrity appear on your show "as themselves" if you're not going to actually ask the celebrity if they'd like to voice their caricatures? What, did they just pick Barbara Streisand's name out of a hat or something? And weren't they at all afraid that she might see the show, get offended, and sue them? |
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| I'm not even going to tell you how the rest of this scene goes, because there's no way that I can keep this blog PG if I tell you about the joke that comes next. |
Siegfried and Roy arrive with Larry at the villa where Barbara is staying, and Larry puts his plan to save Emerson into motion. He signals Snack to cut the power, resulting in another appearance from Dick Cheney. While Siegfried and Roy are (what else?) acting like idiots, Larry frees Emerson, who promptly battles a hungry Barbara. Blah blah blah, stuff happens and Sierra thinks that her dad is awesome for saving Emerson. Emerson, by contrast, isn't grateful at all, and this makes Sierra realize how much of a jerk Emerson is. She throws him into a storm drain and that's the end of that plotline. I hope Danny DeVito at least got a nice paycheck.
Then we cut to Hunter and his friends playing with the Lord of the Rings action figures. Kate has forced Sarmoti to dress as Gandalf. He offers to buy the kids some beer, but Hunter tells him that there's no alcohol in Middle Earth. Sarmoti says, "Crap." And then the episode ends.
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| I had no idea that Sarmoti auditioned for Gandalf! Clearly, they made the right choice in casting Ian McKellen over him. |
This sucked. For one thing, there's no reason for this to star animals - my best guess is that we're supposed to find it funny that a lobster of all things is arguing about politics, but it's not. It's just stupid. Siegfried and Roy are not funny, they're ungodly annoying. Grandpa Lion is not funny, he's an unlikable jerk. I can tolerate the other characters fine, even if they're just blatant stereotypes. The animation is blah. Every joke falls flat. The cliches are blatant. John Goodman and Danny DeVito are clearly trying their hardest but they can't make anything good with this script. It's just... who was this supposed to appeal to? I don't think an adult would want to watch a computer-animated lion make raunchy jokes, and it's certainly not appropriate for kids. Even if the show hadn't been protested, I don't think it would've become as popular as something like The Simpsons or Family Guy. I guess it was an interesting experiment for DreamWorks, but it's unappealing, unfunny, and just unpleasant.
Side note, apparently DreamWorks Animation and Jeffery Katzenberg really want to forget that this show ever happened, at least if TV Tropes is to be believed. So even they don't feel any pride over Father of the Pride.
On the bright side, the theme song is an awesome cover of "Viva Las Vegas" by John Goodman. So there's that.
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