Let's Watch This: An Episode (or Two) of "Little Shop"

NOTE: Please do not take any of the little nitpicks in this review (or any of my other reviews, for that matter) seriously. I write these reviews in the hopes of making people laugh. Those nitpicks are really just dumb little observations that I'm attempting to make jokes out of, not complaints that add to whether or not I like something.

NOTE #2: No disrespect is meant towards anyone who worked on the show I am reviewing today. I'm sure they are all very nice and talented people.

NOTE #3: If you like this show, that is great. Go ahead and like it. I'm not judging you.

I have never seen Little Shop of Horrors - either the original movie from 1960, the musical it was adapted from, or the movie adaptation with Rick Moranis based on the musical. But I do know that it's a pretty spooky movie about a giant Venus flytrap who eats people. And yet, for some reason, the folks at Marvel Productions and Saban Entertainment thought such a film would be PERFECT for a kids' cartoon show!

How exactly do you make a show for kids based on a horror movie (okay, technically it's a horror-comedy, but you know what I mean)? Well, the show's developers, Mark Edward Edens and Ellen Levy, found a way. First, they made the main characters from the film, Seymour and Audrey, into kids, presumably so the audience could identify with them. Next, they reinvented the giant human-eating plant, Audrey II, as a friendly plant named Junior (voiced by Roland Buddy Lewis, with Terry McGee doing his singing voice) who originated from a fossilized seed rather than from outer space. Thirteen episodes were produced and aired on FOX Kids from September to November of 1991. You can currently find episodes of the show on YouTube.

I'm not sure what the mindset here was. I doubt a lot of kids in 1991 were Little Shop of Horrors fans, and fans of the movie were probably turned off by all the changes and the fact that Seymour and Audrey looked nothing like Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene (even Junior doesn't look much like Audrey II). But since, again, I've never watched any of the actual Little Shop of Horrors adaptations, I'll simply have to judge this cartoon on its own merits... or lack thereof. This is the eleventh episode of the show, "Walk Like a Nerd".

The episode starts off with Seymour (Marlow Vella, with Lisa Michelson doing his singing voice) and Junior on the subway, which is filled with all sorts of strange people. Frankenstein's Monster, a guy eating a flower, Igor, a biker with weird flesh-colored spikes sticking out the top of his head...

Is that his hair?

As the train pulls into the station, Seymour sees Audrey (Tamar Lee) walk by and attempts to make small talk with her. She's a sportswriter now, apparently. I didn't know kids could get jobs as sportswriters.

By the way, take a look at the subway train behind them. I guess it's supposed to look like it's covered with graffiti, but it looks more like Jackson Pollock gave it a paint job.

I'm digging Seymour's elephant hat, too.

After Audrey walks off, Seymour realizes that he left Junior on the train and has to follow it all the way to the end of the line. Junior is none too pleased.

The next day, Mr. Mushnik (Harvey Atkin) walks into the shop and finds Seymour begging Junior not to be mad at him. Well, one thing HASN'T changed from the original movie - Seymour works at Mr. Mushnik's flower shop. Even though he's, what, thirteen?

"Why does a nerd like you get to walk around free as a bud when I have to drag a flower pot around everywhere I go?!" Junior complains. He's so aggravated that he launches into a rap song. Why? Because this cartoon was made during the 1990s, of course! And cartoon characters had a habit of rapping in the 1990s to prove that they were hip and cool with the kids, yo!

Is it at least a GOOD rap song? I think you know the answer.

In an attempt to cheer Junior up, Seymour invites him to sleep over at his house. But Junior doesn't do any sleeping. Instead, while Seymour snoozes he reads about altering your molecular structure. Then he grabs a bunch of household appliances - a broom, a washing machine, a toaster - and combines them into some sort of strange device that even Rube Goldberg would be confused by.

If this thing actually alters his molecular structure, I'll eat my hat with a side of hashed browns.

Does the machine work? Well, not exactly. It doesn't give Junior feet. Instead, it sucks him up, puts him through the rinse cycle, sprays Seymour with water, and then... um... somehow puts him inside Seymour's legs? I have no idea how that happened. None of this makes any sense. I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure this is not how molecular structure altering works!

But whatever, Junior is now in control of Seymour's legs. He's so happy to have feet that he launches into another rap song. This time, Seymour does some rapping too. It's just as cringe-worthy as it sounds.

"Hey, you know what they say, Seymour: two heads are better than one!"

So now Seymour and Junior share a body. And that gives Junior the ability to have Junior take control of Seymour's brain and have him say things like "Where do you think books come from?! Trees! They come from poor, helpless trees! Murdered in cold sap!" While everyone else in his class thinks that Seymour has been posessed by the Lorax, Junior forces Seymour to pull books out of the bookshelf and drive the other students into a frenzy. I will say this, for a kids' show this is just as disturbing as the movie likely is. Having a giant carnivorous plant controlling somebody's body isn't exactly much better than a giant carnivorous plant eating people.

However, there are benefits to having a sassy Venus flytrap sharing your body. For example, Junior manages to save Seymour from a thrashing by school bully Paine Driller (David Huband). TWICE! He also winds up as part of the track team, and starts imagining what winning the track meet would mean. I would now like to show you the funniest thing in the entire episode:

Come on, just LOOK at it and tell me it's not hilarious. I think what really makes it is the fact that his head is way too small for his body. Alas, that hilarious image is promptly followed by another awful song.

After that, with Junior's help Seymour manages to break the school's pole-vaulting record and pulls off the shotput so well that an entire building crumbles. But when they try to throw an incredibly heavy weight, Junior is somehow pulled out of Seymour's body. This might make winning the hundred yard dash difficult. Junior tells him that he didn't need him to win the other events, he just needed confidence. Then he uses his vines to tie the other runners' shoelaces together, torpedoeing the "you just need confidence" moral that they were presumably going for.

Despite that, Seymour winds up tripping over his own feet and then getting trampled by the now-barefoot other runners. As for Junior, he doesn't care that he doesn't have feet anymore. He might not have feet, but at least he's got soul.

"You sure you don't want me to eat that Driller kid? He's pretty obnoxious."

"Nah, we'd never get away with that in a kids' show..."

Nothing about this episode made sense. How did combining a bunch of household appliances put Junior in Seymour's body? Why did it allow him to take control of his brain? Why was the "Junior wants feet" plotline pretty much forgotten about halfway through? What exactly was the moral here?

Now, this is normally the part of the review where I give my thoughts on the show as a whole. But as I was posting it, I realized, hey, this review is incredibly short. I don't like my posts on this blog to be incredibly short. And you know what THAT means, don't you? It means I'm gonna have to look at ANOTHER episode of this show. Because I'm a glutton for punishment.

So, let's watch the SIXTH episode of the show, "Pulp Fiction". A reference to ANOTHER movie that I've never seen.

Seymour and Junior are going to the Skid Row National Forest, home of the oldest living tree in the world. And here I thought the oldest tree in the world was the Methuselah, located in eastern California. Oh, wait, I didn't, because I had to look it up. Don't say I never do my research!

When they get to the forest... I know I already made a reference to The Lorax, but it looks like the Once-Ler has been here. On the bright side, the oldest living tree in the world is still standing. Junior apparently worships it and tries to strike up a conversation. Silly Junior, trees don't talk. Except the ones in Oz, of course.

"All hail the redwood! King of trees! I shall do your bidding, my liege!"

This leads to ANOTHER LOUSY RAP SONG. Y'know, Junior, just speaking fast to a hip-hop beat does not a good rap make. I obviously agree with what you're saying about how pollution is bad, but there are better ways to get people to wise up than this. You could, for example, make a cartoon or write a book about the dangers of pollution. It worked for the producers of FernGully.

I'm sorry, but you can not in any way make rapping squirrels cool.

A few seconds after Junior's totally hip and fly rap song, yo, the tree is cut down. This makes Junior MAD! As it's being driven off to a sawmill, Junior grabs ahold of the tree with one of his vines, dragging Seymour along as well. When they get to the sawmill, Junior is very nearly burned alive. Fortunately, since the sawmill is entirely automated, there aren't any workers around to crap their pants at the sight of a talking venus flytrap.

All sawmills have a portal to Hades in them. Did you know that?

Whatever Junior's plan to save the tree was, it's a failure. Seymour tries to cheer him up by saying maybe the tree was recycled into a great book. Maybe, but there's also a fifty-percent chance it was used to make another one of those crappy Twilight novels.

Seymour then sings another song that sounds like it's trying to be Schoolhouse Rock but doesn't understand why the songs in Schoolhouse Rock work (for one thing, those songs are well-sung). Then he runs afoul of Pained and his dog, who are delivering newspapers. Upon reading the paper, Junior is enraged by the crap featured in it: a guy faces off against a hundred-pound grasshopper? A prehistoric dishwasher found in Egypt? Heck, the front page story is "SUN RISES". Yeah, and here's something else you might not have known: the grass is green!

"And the guys they've got reviewing movies in here don't know what they're talking about!
No way they actually made a film starring Vanilla Ice! That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!"

"What kind of twisted mind would cut down thousand-year-old trees to print root rot like this?!" Junior demands. "I just made a tree-mendous decision! We're gonna find all the newspapers and take them back to the forest where they belong!" I guess his mindset is that if they plant the newspapers, they'll grow new trees or something? At this point, I'd say ANYTHING is possible in the bizarre world that Seymour and Junior live in.

When people are done with newspapers, they usually throw them out. So it's off to the landfill for Seymour and his amazing talking plant, where Junior... I'll give you three guesses what he does.

Yep! It's another rap song!

Even the dog from that animated Titanic movie is a better rapper than this plant.

Junior's awful rap apparently has the power to control paper, because the newspapers rise into the air and rain down on him and Seymour. Then they actually leave the dump, folding themselves into paper airplanes and inching along like a caterpillar. Instead of going back to the forest, however, the papers all go back to Skid Row. You see, Junior just told them to "go home" - in their minds, "home" is where they were delivered.

Now Skid Row is full of paper - enough paper, as Mr. Mushnik puts it, to "house-train an elephant". Seymour suggests that they all recycle the paper, but apparently everyone in this town is an idiot because they don't know what recycling paper actually is. They use the newspaper as toothpicks, they eat it, they use it as ankle weights, Orson Welles even appears to suggest using it as a napkin.

"No frozen peas jokes, please."

Then the people of Skid Row decide to plant new trees in the national forest. "It's amazing what people can do when they work together," Seymour tells us. Well, I will say this: "Pulp Fiction" was at least better than "Walk Like a Nerd", if for no other reason than because it was less boring and made slightly more sense.

What's the Verdict?

Again, why did anyone think doing a kids' cartoon based on Little Shop of Horrors was a good idea? Even if you try to separate the cartoon from the movie, you're left with very little of substance. The characters are flat, the animation isn't anything to write home about, the jokes aren't funny, and the songs are mostly incredibly lame raps that were probably just as embarassing back in 1991 as they are now. Little Shop has nothing going for it.

TV Tropes compares the show to the 1989 Beetlejuice cartoon, which also aired on FOX Kids and was based off a horror-comedy probably not safe for kids to watch but had the main antagonist from the film as a good guy. I've never seen a single episode of that cartoon, nor have I seen the Beetlejuice movie, so if you're wondering why that show succeeded where Little Shop failed (it had four seasons, was released on DVD, and seems to be looked at more fondly than THIS show was), I couldn't tell you.

Rating: One and a half flowers out of five. Leave the door to this Little Shop closed.

Let's Watch This: An Episode of "Teacher's Pet"

NOTE: Please do not take any of the little nitpicks in this review (or any of my other reviews, for that matter) seriously. I write these reviews in the hopes of making people laugh. Those nitpicks are really just dumb little observations that I'm attempting to make jokes out of, not complaints that add to whether or not I like something.

The day I wrote this review, I originally attempted to write a review of Mega Babies. After so many reviews of cartoons that were simply mediocre, I figured I needed to review something really bad to keep the blog from getting monotomous. Problem is, I really couldn't find anything funny to say about Mega Babies - it was horrible, but all I could think of to say was "This is disgusting!" over and over again. Plus, I didn't want to subject my readers to the gross imagery in the show, but the only way to do THAT would be to do a review with no screencaps, which wouldn't be very visually interesting. So instead...

Teacher's Pet is one of Disney's best 2000s cartoons, I'd honestly put it above their more popular stuff from that era like The Proud Family and American Dragon: Jake Long (not that I don't like the latter, I just think Teacher's Pet is more fun). What really helped it stand out was its distinctive art style: that of Gary Baseman, one of the show's three creators - the other two being Bill and Cheri Steinkellner. Even if you've never heard his name, you have to have seen his work SOMEWHERE. He's the guy who did the artwork for the Cranium games.

In my house, we had Cranium Cadoo.

Premiering on ABC as part of its One Saturday Morning block on September 9th, 2000, the show focused on a nine-year-old boy named Leonard Helperman, voiced by Shaun Fleming, and his pet dog Spot, voiced by Nathan Lane. Leonard already has an embarassing experience at school every day because his mother, Mary Lou Helperman (voiced by Debra Jo Rupp), is his class teacher. But things get even WEIRDER for him when Spot decides he wants to go to school too. Spot disguises himself as a boy named Scott Leadready II and joins the class. Even though he's just a dog wearing human clothes, everybody falls for it... presumably because everyone else in this world is already pretty bizarre-looking. Eventually, Leonard finds out that the new kid is his dog, but reluctantly allows Spot to continue the charade. Hilarity ensues.

In 2002, the show was moved from ABC to Toon Disney. Two seasons and a total of thirty-nine episodes were produced. It even got a movie that served as the finale. In theaters! Which was a box office bomb, but still, even Phineas and Ferb never got a theatrical movie!

For years, only one of the show's episodes - the pilot - was released on VHS or DVD, as a bonus feature on the DVD release of the movie. Aside from that, after reruns went off the air you'd have to look on YouTube or Dailymotion to watch the show, at least until Disney got them taken off YouTube for copyright infringement. Fortunately, the entire series is now on Disney Plus. Which means that I've been able to rewatch the show and rediscover how great it is.

So, what makes Teacher's Pet such a fun show? Let's watch the fourth episode, "A Lick is Still a Kiss", and I'll elaborate a little. This is Teacher's Pet.

It's another glorious morning in the Helperman household. In walks Mary Lou, who has a surprise for the Helpermans' pet cat, Mr. Jolly (David Ogden Stiers). He assumes that she's taking him to the vet and hides in his food bowl. Yes, he's actually able to fit in there. Cartoon physics, everybody.

"I hate Mondays."

The best way I can describe Mary Lou Helperman is that she's Linda from Bob's Burgers done right. I frequently see Linda praised for not being the stereotypical naggy cartoon mom who's much smarter than her husband. Well, Mary Lou ALSO isn't the stereotypical naggy cartoon mom who's much smarter than her husband (in fact, Leonard's father never even shows up). She's ditzy, she's cheery, she's a goof, but she still feels like a functioning member of society whereas Linda is a total moron. When Linda speaks, I often find myself wondering how she's even survived for this long. You don't get that with Mary Lou.

Anyhow, Mary Lou is NOT taking Mr. Jolly to the vet. The surprise is a collar with a bell on it. All the stylish cats are wearing them.

I like that dog clock hanging up on the wall. Where can I get one of those?

"Don't despise me because I'm beautiful!" Mr. Jolly tells the Helperman's surly pet bird, Pretty Boy (Jerry Stiller), after he insults his smell. Alas, the constant ringing of the bell soon gets on Mr. Jolly's nerves. Even the doorbell ringing sends him into a frenzy.

Leonard answers the door, and who should be there but his crush, Leslie (Mae Whitman). She asks if she can borrow a cup of milk. Before Leonard can get her one, he realizes that he's standing in front of her in his pajamas and, like Mr. Jolly, freaks out.

Hey, it could be worse. At least you're not in your underwear.

Spot covers for Leonard while he dashes into his room to put some clothes on. He returns, desperately trying to be cool but I'm sorry, it's really hard to be cool when you're wearing a shirt with pineapples on it. And when your hair is styled to look like a rooster's comb. Unless the "Chicken Run character at a luau" look is what you're going for.

I wonder why Mary Lou has a normal skin tone but her son is as white as a stick of
chalk. Maybe he's just really, REALLY pale?

After Leslie leaves, Spot comments that whatever she smeared on her lips today tasted like lemonade with just a hint of mint. Leonard is still too embarassed by the fact that Leslie saw him in his pajamas. By now, it should be pretty obvious that Leonard is basically the Disney equivalent of Charlie Brown. Complete with him not having a normal dog like everyone else.

Spot's being blue is probably the LEAST strange thing about him.

Later, Leonard and Spot... I'm sorry, Scott Leadready II... arrive at school and see the cool kids hanging out. Scott suggests that they ask them what kind of pajamas THEY wear (it makes sense in context), but Leonard is terrified of even speaking to them. "I just don't know how to hang with those guys, okay? I always feel like, they think I'm the teacher's kid so they don't want to say anything around me, then I don't know what to say, then they ignore me, and I end up feeling like a dork," he laments. Scott urges him to give it a try anyway, and guess what? They wind up talking about Leslie and how shiny her lips are. Leonard tells them that she's wearing pink lemonade lip gloss, which tastes exactly like actual pink lemonade with just a hint of mint. This makes the cool kids very impressed. I guess they really like pink lemonade...

"It's so much cooler than REGULAR lemonade! It's PINK, for Fonzie's sake!"

Now, most of this show's episodes can be summed up as thus: Leonard gets into trouble because of Spot's good intentions. Case in point, Leslie marches up to Leonard while they're in class and demands to know why he claimed that he kissed her on the lips. So now she's mad at him, even after he insists that he never said anything of the sort. Then the other kids in class start spreading a rumor that goes from "Leonard kissed Leslie on the lips" to "Leonard murdered Leslie's pet hippo with paper clips". Scott assures Leonard that it'll blow over by recess... just before Principal Strickler (Wallace Shawn) shows up and drags Leonard to his office.

Between this, A Goofy Movie, and Chicken Little, it seems that Disney really likes
casting Wallace Shawn as the voice of principals.

For the crime of spreading a rumor - the fact that the other kids in his class spread the rumor as well is completely ignored - Leonard is threatened with being expelled and sent to the School For Losers. Scott tries to defend him, but it doesn't seem to be doing any good. Leonard points out that he didn't say that he kissed her, just that her lip gloss tasted like pink lemonade, but Principal Strickler thinks there are only two ways he could know that: one, he kissed her, or two, he uses the same lip gloss. The only way Leonard can prove his innocence, he claims, is by showing up tomorrow with the lip gloss in hand.

Furthering Leonard's embarassment, now the class is talking about how Leonard wears his mom's lip gloss. Scott tells them to stop with the rumor-spreading and gives a big speech about how it hurts people. Back home, Leonard and Scott search for the lipstick in Mary Lou's makeup drawer while Pretty Boy mocks humans for not just secreteing like birds do.

"I was an angry bird before the app made it cool!"

Mary Lou doesn't have pink lemonade lip gloss, and a trip to the drugstore leaves Scott and Leonard empty-handed as well. So they go to the grocery store, where Scott buys a salmon ('cause it's pink), some lemons, vegetable oil (for the gloss), and minty bubble gum. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most supermarkets have lip gloss in stock? There's usually a whole aisle for body products. Heck, why doesn't Scott just ask Leslie if he can borrow her lip gloss? Seems a lot easier than making it from scratch.

So how does their homemade lip gloss turn out? Well, it does this to Scott's lips...

Disturbing, but still not as disturbing as Mega Babies.

"I guess I'll just have to go to the School For Losers," Leonard groans. But Scott isn't giving up yet. He remembers that Leslie has the very lip gloss they're looking for. So does he go to her house and ask if he can borrow it? No, no, that would be too obvious. Instead, he and Leonard carry a ladder over to her house, allowing Scott to sneak into her room via the window and steal the lip gloss. But Scott can't help taking his sweet time, and he hears the doorknob turning. Uh oh...

Thinking quick, Spot takes off his clothes and just acts like a dog. Leslie is very surprised to see Leonard's dog in her room, but at least he and Leonard aren't in even bigger hot water. As for Mr. Jolly, he's saved from having to hear that infernal ringing when Pretty Boy helps him remove the collar and dumps it in a trash can. But now he thinks it's too quiet, so Pretty Boy has to dig through the trash and find the collar. "Cats! Next time, leave 'em off the ark!" he shouts.

Leslie returns Spot to Leonard and makes it clear that she still hates his guts. On the bright side, Spot managed to grab the lip gloss on their way out, which means that Leonard can prove his innocence. Principal Strickler dubs him cleared, preventing Leonard from being sent to the School For Losers, and that night he tells Spot that he's learned a valuable lesson: NOT to never ever repeat what his dog says again, but to never answer the door again wearing cowboy pajamas. The next day, Leslie apologies to Leonard for everything... and sees Leonard in his firetruck pajama bottoms. But, aside from that, all's well that ends well... until Leslie realizes that her lip gloss is missing. Unless Spot somehow managed to return it to her house before she finds out, she might come to the conclusion that Leonard stole it.

Don't worry, Leonard. You're still not as much of a loser as the Leonard from The
Big Bang Theory.

What's the Verdict?

I wouldn't say this is the BEST episode of Teacher's Pet, but if you're just starting to watch the show, it's a good way to dip your toes in.

There's so much to love about this show. First of all, it's funny. Very, very funny. Most of that obviously stems from the delightfully hammy performances that Nathan Lane, Jerry Stiller, and David Ogden Stiers give, but the writing is incredibly sharp. The animation is well-done, with Gary Baseman's distinctive art style giving the show a unique look and allowing for some out there visuals without being too disgusting or disturbing.

...well, for the most part.

And the characters? Spot could've easily been another Newton, this annoying wacko who frequently causes problems for the kid and gets away with it. But two things help Spot avoid falling into that category. One, he has good intentions, and two, he usually fixes his mistakes. Leonard makes for a nice, sympathetic lead, and the other characters are fun as well (particularly Pretty Boy and Mr. Jolly).

So, yes, I recommend giving Teacher's Pet a watch if you haven't already. Now, whether or not you should watch the MOVIE as well, I don't know. I haven't watched it since 2004. Most of the internet seems to like it, though. Just start with the series, okay?

Rating: Five firetruck pajama bottoms out of five. After watching one episode, you'll sit up and beg for more.

The History of "Robots"

This edition of The History of... is about an animated movie that I have a pretty complicated history with.

I first found out about Blue Sky Studios' Robots when my family went to see Shark Tale in theaters. In the lobby, there was a banner featuring the characters from the movie. And... uh, to be honest, the characters freaked me out*. Not the villains, who are supposed to be a bit creepy, I mean the good guys. I'm not sure why, they just DID. So as a result, I avoided the film for years. Learning that the DVD had a short film starring the character with a large posterior called Aunt Fanny's Tour of Booty didn't exactly put the film on my "to-watch" list either.

I started warming up to the film after hearing people praise it online and watching the Blockbuster Buster's (extremely negative) review of it. That was, I think, 2014. It took me until 2022 to actually sit down and watch the film for myself. And y'know what? It was pretty good! It's no Ice Age, but what is? I feel silly for avoiding the film for so long now, honestly.

So, to make up for my misjudging the movie, let's take a deep dive into its production process and history. I normally only do this for films that were box office bombs, which Robots wasn't, but apparently there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff to talk about and the film's a Cult Classic, so what the heck?

Concept art of Rodney's parents building him.

So how did Robots get started? Well, instrumental in the film's creation was its producer, William Joyce - no stranger to working with animated robots, as he also created Rolie Polie Olie. He first became aware of Blue Sky Studios' work when he saw Joe's Apartment. Remember that movie? It wasn't animated. It was about a guy named Joe who moves into an apartment that he discovers is filled with friendly talking cockroaches. Blue Sky Studios animated the cockroaches for the movie.

In the book The Art of Robots, William Joyce said, "They created a Busby Berkeley-style dance number featuring cockroaches. It was incredibly inventive and broad, yet completely believable, and I thought, 'If these guys can be this original, funny, and clever, I've got to see what else they can do.'" Thus, he met up with Chris Wedge and they began developing an adaptation of his 1993 book Santa Calls. A test animation of that was produced, but nothing came out of it.

I think I've actually read this book. I found it at a local library.

So instead, they started thinking about robots. They didn't have an idea for a story and characters yet, they just thought it'd be cool to have a film with an all-robot cast. "When we started to draw them, or even look at the pop culture history of robots, the only robot that was really interesting to look at was the robot from Metropolis. Everything else was basically a soup can," William Joyce said. They went to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which was having an exhibition about robots, and that gave them the inspiration not to do "what everybody thinks as the [look of the] future", but something "deeper" and "simpler". They started looking at machines.

Here's the best way I could put it: y'know how, in my Did You Know? post about WALL-E, I mentioned that Andrew Stanton said they wanted to "play with both really high-end technology and really low technology"? His exact words were, "WALL-E, I always call a tractor, EVE, I always call sort of like a Porsche. She's the highest, most expensive, no expense spared kind of project that the Buy 'n' Large corporation could use to make a probe droid... WALL-E is much more 'nuts and bolts' and you can kind of get how he works from afar." The filmmakers of Robots wanted the characters to be less EVE and more WALL-E. Basically, everything in the movie looks like it was made from household appliances. Rodney resembles an Evinrude outboard motor, one building looks like Chris Wedge's waffle iron, and another is a coffee pot.

Concept art for Rodney.

As the film's art director, Steve Martino, put it, "In the typical cartoon, you'll have a jet-propelled robot, and all his mechanical apparatus is hidden. All you'll see is smoke as the robot takes off. We thought it would be more fun to strip away the coverings and show the real mechanics. So if somebody is going to fly, put him in a pod, spring-load it, and fling him across the city. That way the audience gets to see the setup, the anticipation, and the result."

The robot world was organized into three distinct sections based on three distinct periods of technology: the steam era, the combustion era, and the modern era. The steam era, based on the Industrial Revolution, is the Chop Shop. The combustion era, based on early automobiles and engine-driven objects of the twentieth century, is the neighborhood where Fender and the Rusties live. The modern era, with its streamlined materials and the mechanisms mostly hidden under composite metal, is Bigweld Industries and the robots who run it.

After that, the search began for the film's writer, someone who "worked from character first". They eventually read the play Fuddy Meers and thought that its writer, David Lindsay-Abaire, would be a good choice. Chris Meledandri, one of the higher-ups at Blue Sky, said, "David was the one that really got our Robots story started. He wrote a sweet, funny draft that nailed a lot of the tone I had in mind for the movie." Specifically, Chris wanted the film to be a musical with the tone of a 1930s screwball comedy. David Lindsay-Abaire watched those movies, came up with a lot of funny lines, and even wrote a song. Eventually, however, it was decided not to make the film a musical. Blue Sky wouldn't make their first musical until Rio. David was joined by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. While they previously worked on City Slickers and A League of Their Own, this was the first animated film they wrote for.

Concept art for Rodney's arrival in the creatively named Robot City.

It's not easy creating an entire world from scratch. Chris Wedge said, "It was very intimidating at the beginning, because for a long time we had no idea what the limits of the world were and how fantastic we'd be able to make it. But as the work collects, the movie world starts to talk back to you. It's really a process of discovering things. You wade into the pool first, and then everyone jumps in."

So, who was the hardest character to design? Believe it or not, Rodney. According to William Joyce, it took two years for them to get his design down. As he put it, "He's an amiable ordinary fella, he's not Arnold Schwarzenegger and he's not Tom Cruise. We didn't want him to be too muscular or perfect. We wanted the audience to be able to put themselves in his shoes instantly and easily." Cappy and Ratchet were pretty hard, too.

Concept art for Piper.

Aside from that, designing the characters was pretty easy. ANIMATING them was another story. "This is the hardest thing I've ever animated," animation supervisor Mike Thurmeier lamented. "You don't get anything for free. The models look great as static images, but there's no flab jiggling around or tails and ears to follow through. You have to work incredibly hard to get a really good expression or mood." They wanted to make the robots really feel like they were made of metal but still have them be warm and expressive. Using that old technique of squash-and-stretch was difficult, for instance, because metal doesn't squash and stretch much at all. Early animation tests just looked too stiff and mechanical. "We knew we had to find a way to break the rules without breaking the character," co-director Carlos Saldanha explained. To help with that, the riggers built hidden extension rods into the characters' arms, legs and spines, allowing the characters to make goofier poses without making it look like metal was stretching.

Giving the robots detailed textures was hard, too. The traditional method of texture mapping, where 2D images are painted and then put on the 3D models, wasn't working, so they developed a new procedure to create a multi-level texture - for example, a core metal base topped by corrosion, primer, paint, and oxidation. To create the Chop Shop workers, the filmmakers created libraries of existing body parts that could be mixed and matched to create "Franken-bots".

Here is the original animation test for the movie (the director character here had his character design reused for Jack Hammer in the movie):

Robots was first announced to the public at the American Museum of Natural History's IMAX theater in June 2003. In addition to Ewan McGregor, Halle Berry, Mel Brooks, Drew Carey, Amanda Bynes, Stanley Tucci, Jim Broadbent, Dianne Wiest, Harland Williams, Jennifer Coolidge, Paul Giamatti, and Dan Hedaya, it was also mentioned that D.L. Hughley, Jamie Kennedy, and a pre-Modern Family Sofia Vergara were among the voice cast. I don't know which characters they were supposed to voice, or why they wound up leaving the film. There was also, strangely enough, no mention of Robin Williams or Greg Kinnear - maybe they joined the film after that?

"[Joyce's stories] have a golden era of Hollywood nostalgia to them," Chris Wedge said. "The robots aren't futuristic or spacey transformers. They ooze personality and personify objects that we know in our world, whether a car, an outboard motor or a washing machine."

I watched the DVD commentary of the film to see if it gave more information about the film's development that wasn't online, but there wasn't a lot. I did find out a couple things, though. For instance, at one point the film's plot was apparently going to be "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington meets The Three Musketeers meets Robin Hood", but with robots. Also, Rodney's name was "Dart" for a while.

Concept art for Fender, Crank, Diesel, and Lug.

John Powell was brought in to do the film's score (he would go on to do the scores for several other Blue Sky films). The filmmakers told him that they wanted to have the music sound like it was being done by the "Robot Philharmonic". "Part of the trick of putting a movie together with a theme like this... is to try and make everything feel connected," Chris Wedge explained on the DVD commentary. So instead of strings and violins, they used brass instruments. And who was brought in to help John with the score? Blue Man Group! Remember those guys? I think they're still a thing, but they were super-popular in the 2000s. Fitting that they were involved, seeing as they're something that freaked me out a lot when I was younger too (no offense to any members of Blue Man Group reading this).

Some of the music heard in the movie was replaced after scenes were done, though - apparently the higher-ups at FOX wanted more pop songs in the film.

I don't remember THIS scene being in the movie.

Since there are a lot of comedic actors in the movie, there was a lot of ad-libbing. ESPECIALLY with Robin Williams. Y'know the scene where Rodney and Fender try to sneak into the Bigweld Ball, and Fender is posing as the strangely-accented valet of  "Count Von Brokenzipper"? Robin did the scene about eight times, in eight different dialects. Fender's iconic "Singin' in the Oil" song was ad-libbed by Robin as well.

Perhaps the hardest part of making the film was the editing process. Apparently, there is a director's cut, but it's never been released. Among the stuff that got cut was some more development for Cappy and Lug, an extended version of the scene at the Bigweld Ball, there was an entire character cut out of the film, too - Dr. V. Needle, a mad scientist robot who was going to give Bigweld a lobotomy under orders from Madame Gasket.

A screencap of Dr. V. Needle.

To promote the movie, there were, of course, tie-ins. The first one to sign on was Sunbeam - if you bought a specially-marked Sunbeam toaster oven, toaster, mixer or iron, you could get a toaster oven that imprinted Piper's image onto your toast, or a cookie cutter in the shape of Rodney. There was also a contest where kids ages five to sixteen could write an essay about a hypothetical invention that could make things easier for their family, with the grand prize being a four-day trip to New York City, five hundred bucks, a tour of Blue Sky Studios, and the chance to meet the film's director. Robots also got its own cereal, and you could get toys of the characters in boxes of Kellogg's cereals and Burger King Kids' Meals. There were Robots Pop-Tarts, U.S. Postal Service put Rodney and Fender on its cancellation stamp, there was even a limited time flavor at Cold Stone Creamery called "Rodney Copperbottom's Crazy Crackling Cotton Candy Concoction".

I never ate these, so I have no idea how they tasted.

Unlike with Quest For Camelot, all that promotion paid off. The film made $262.5 million dollars on a $75-80 million dollar budget. Reviews were mostly positive. The main reason for Robots' obscurity is that, unlike Ice Age or Rio, it never got a sequel. An article from around the time that the film was released on DVD claimed that Chris Wedge was considering doing a sequel, but nothing came out of it. Probably for the best, honestly... Blue Sky's sequels were not their best work. I often find myself wishing that Ice Age had just been a standalone film.

If you can find Robots on a streaming service, give it a watch. You'll have a good time.

Sources:
- https://web.archive.org/web/20210418223204/https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/06/10/foxs-robots-revealed
- https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/robots-pushes-animation-envelope-20050916-geirtp.html
- https://www.chiefmarketer.com/robots-the-movie-brings-150-million-in-promotional-tie-ins/
- The Art of Robots

* I know, it's tremendously ironic that I thought Robots had creepy character designs while I was in the lobby waiting to go see Shark Tale. Nothing in Robots is as creepy as Will Smith Fish.

Let's Watch This: "Frog Kingdom" (2013)

NOTE: Please do not take any of the little nitpicks in this review (or any of my other reviews, for that matter) seriously. I write these reviews in the hopes of making people laugh. Those nitpicks are really just dumb little observations that I'm attempting to make jokes out of, not complaints that add to whether or not I like something.

NOTE #2: No disrespect is meant towards anyone who worked on the movie I am reviewing today. I'm sure they are all very nice and talented people.

NOTE #3: If you like this movie, that is great. Go ahead and like it. I'm not judging you.

There are probably better things I could be doing with my time than watching direct-to-video schlock like this. But I knew the job was dangerous when I started this blog... okay, "dangerous" isn't the right word, but you know what I mean.

This is another animated movie from another country that we, the United States, found out about and said, "We want it." Directed by Nelson Shin and Melanie Simka, the film was originally released on December 28th, 2013 in China, but took until June 30th, 2015 to be released in the US.

Frog Kingdom is, as you might have guessed from the disclaimers at the beginning of the review, crap. Why do I say that? Let's get the review started, shall we?

It's a beautiful morning in the city of Frogville. The frogs of Frogville are all getting ready for the Froglympics, which are (as its name suggests) like the Olympics but for frogs. The ruler of the frogs, the creatively named Frog King (voiced by Keith David), is not pleased to learn that his daughter, Princess Froglegs, has run off again. Sorry, Frog King, but she's a princess in an animated movie. Being rebellious is kind of mandatory for her.

First complaint: the lip-syncing in this movie is really off. I know those are the risks you take when you give an animated movie from another country an English dub, but it's very distracting.

I'm gonna try not to make too many Amphibia references, but I find it funny
that Keith David voiced an amphibian king in this movie and then voiced an amphibian
king in that show too.

Why has Princess Froglegs (voiced by Bella Thorne) run off? Because the winner of the Froglympics gets to marry her, and she doesn't want to get married. Her solution? She and her best pal, Bestie (Dallas Lovato)... I guess whoever wrote this English dub wasn't very creative when it came to names... will enter the Froglympics disguised as males and win it themselves. Call me crazy, your highness, but I don't think you're gonna fool anyone into thinking that you're a guy. For one thing, you're wearing a dress.

And who names a frog "Froglegs" anyway? I've never heard of a person named
"Humanarms".

As Froglegs and Bestie explore the market, we are introduced to our OTHER lead character, Freddie (Cameron Dallas). He and his tadpole buddy Boogie (Nathan Barnatt) are selling wings - not chicken wings, since chickens are much too big for frogs to cook and eat, but rather insect wings. Then ANOTHER character shows up - a frog riding on a turtle who dubs himself Prince Froggie Ababwa. No relation to Prince Ali Ababwa, of course. He's here because he wants to compete in the Froglympics, but Freddie tells him he has no chance.

"But I've faced the galloping hordes! A hundred bad guys with swords!"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you sent those goons to their lords. Now make like a fly
and buzz off."

Freddie and Froggie get into a fight over Freddie's pet housefly, who Froggie wants to eat for breakfast. Eventually, Froggie takes Boogie hostage and threatens to make him go "swirly down the toiley". Wait, is he going to drag him into a human household, climb up a human's toilet - which would be much larger than him - and flush him? Or is he implying that frogs have little frog-sized toilets? Either way, Freddie tricks him into letting Boogie go, and they make a run for it, Froggie in hot pursuit aboard his surprisingly fast turtle.

As for Froglegs and Bestie, they arrive at the Froglympics and sign up. Their flimsy disguises actually work, with nobody even questioning how these two frogs supposedly grew facial hair. "Let the qualification round begin!" the Frog King shouts. First, we get some frog boxing, an event easily won by this amphibian who has clearly been taking frog steroids.

I know simply putting the word "frog" in front of words like "boxing" and
"steroids" isn't funny. If YOU can think of a funnier joke to make here, I'd
love to hear it.

Next, it's time for frog ping-pong... with the ball being an EYEBALL. Okay, ew. Why are they using an eyeball? Is it a FROG's eyeball? Where did they even get it?

We also get frog pole-vaulting, frog fencing, and frog archery, but the Froglympics are suddenly interrupted by an evil toad and his toad minions with their machine guns and bees, but their interrupting the games is interrupted - interruptception! - by Freddie, Boogie, and Froggie. "I guess Prince Ababwa lost his magic carpet when he divorced Princess Jasmine," the announcer suggests, saving me the trouble of making another Aladdin joke myself.

Froggie continues to chase Freddie and Boogie around, and as a result Freddie manages to win the frog high-diving event. This makes the toads (remember them? They're still here) MAD! They head back to their evil lair to tell their boss, a snake, about it. Why does this snake want to ruin the Froglympics? Because he wants revenge on the Frog King and Queen for... something he's not going to tell us about. Sheesh, they were spitting out exposition left and right a few minutes ago, but now they can't be bothered to give us a LITTLE backstory? 

By the way, one of those toads is clearly a poison dart frog... which are, as their name suggests, frogs, not toads.

Snakes get no respect in animation. Yeah, some of them are venomous, but you
shouldn't paint ALL snakes as evil just because of a few bad apples.

The Frog King gets a letter from his daughter telling him that she doesn't want to get married so she's getting out of there ASAP. So he assigns a frog named Inspector Noggin (Gregg Sulkin) with finding her. And what does Inspector Noggin do? He makes a reference to Pinocchio. Yeah, something tells me this guy is gonna be about as competent as Inspector Gadget (see? I can make pop culture references too. Doesn't make me funny).

Then we cut to all the contenders in the Froglympics marching onto the field. A photo op has been set up where they can kiss a painting of the princess and get a photo of it. This irritates Froglegs, especially when Freddie makes the painting kiss his butt. So she throws the camera at him and calls everyone out for thinking it's funny. Good on ya, Froglegs.

"She's muh waifu!"

And believe it or not, Froglegs STILL has everyone fooled with her pathetic disguise. Even after she almost calls herself the princess, nobody - not even Noggin - puts two and two together. The frogs in this movie are so stupid, it's practically offensive to real frogs.

Then a lizard shows up and gives Freddie a flyer for some sort of "froggy boot camp". He, the frog who's clearly on steroids (Drake Bell), Prince Froggie, the Richard Simmons Frog, Boogie, the frog with sunglasses and what looks like a mowhawk (Brandon Hudson), and the frog with six eyes (which is just as if not more disturbing as them playing ping-pong with an eyeball before) are all on board with that.

Seriously, WHY does that one frog have six eyes? And why are four of his eyes
in his STOMACH?

Froglegs mopes about how there's no way she can beat those other frogs... I dunno, I think she could at least beat the one who inexplicably has six eyes... and then she and Bestie decide to go to the boot camp themselves. A boot camp which, according to Bestie, looks more like a five-star hotel. Problem is, the rooms are all booked up, which means Froglegs will have to share one with... take a wild guess...

"U MAD, FROGLEGS?"

After another unfunny sequence involving Noggin, the frogs wake up the next morning and meet Captain One-Eye (Rob Schneider), your typical drill sergeant who doesn't know the meaning of the phrase "use your indoor voice". But hey, he DOES feed them an extremely large breakfast, so he can't be all bad.

In fact, all he seems to have them do is eat and sleep. I've never been to a boot camp, but I'm guessing none of them are actually like this.

"I want to see those plates cleaned, you maggots!"

That night, Freddie does some sleepwalking and walks into the strange tarp-covered thing that we saw some lizards wheeling into the camp in an earlier scene. When he enters the machine, he finds himself in... Happy Feet?

"Cute and cuddly, boys! Cute and cuddly!"

After Freddie's acid trip, it's revealed that the machine's purpose is to trap frogs in blocks of ice. We previously saw the snake use this machine on one of the toads. Suspicious, isn't it?

Fortunately, being frozen in a block of ice doesn't prevent Freddie from continuing his sleepwalk, and by the time he wakes up the next morning, the ice has melted. So, yeah, I'm not sure what the point of that was. Anyway, Froglegs demands to know why Captain One-Eye is trying to fatten them up. Instead of answering, he force-feeds her cheesecake, and she kicks him. So he punishes them all by dragging them out to the desert so they'll be nice and crispy for the lizard he's totally not going to feed them to. Yeah, spoiler alert: he's in league with the snake. I don't know why the snake needs to go through all the trouble of having them fattened up and baked in the sun when he could just show up, grab them in his coils, and gobble them up one by one, but just go with it.

Fortunately, after Captain One-Eye leaves to fix up some frog-marinating sauce, Freddie discovers that the desert is actually a beach. There's water close by. And thus, everybody has some fun in the water. "Ain't nobody gonna be servin' frog legs today! Not on MY watch! This ain't no French bistro!" Froglegs snaps.

Apparently there exist little frog-sized speedboats. Who knew?

The snake is very angry when he finds out that ain't nobody gonna be servin' frog legs today. Speaking of frogs getting eaten, Froglegs and Freddie run afoul of some "venus frog traps" and after that they randomly start to like each other. They even go for a ride on the back of a bat.

"I can show you the world..."

Next, the snake gives One-Eye some of his venom and tells him to use it on all those puny frogs in Frogville.

"Oh, right. The poison. The poison for the frogs. The poison chosen specifically to kill
the frogs. The frogs' poison... that poison?"

"Yes! That poison!"

It seems that all the frogs have to is SMELL the venom and they're out like a light. Fortunately, Freddie's pet fly finds him and Froglegs and goes all Lassie to tell them that the other frogs are in danger. Oh, and Noggin is there too. He has a whole army with him, and he thinks those two frogs on a bat might know something about the missing princess.

They manage to save the other frogs, but will be they able to save themselves from the snake?

The animators of Rango never should have allowed these guys to copy their homework.

Most of them get away, but Freddie isn't so lucky. The other frogs want to make a run for it, but Froglegs gives a big speech about loyalty and bravery and blah-blah-blah. Meanwhile, Noggin builds a robotic duplicate of the princess so the games can go on as planned. Wow, who knew frogs were so good with technology?

Back with the snake, he gives us some explanation as to why he wants revenge. Years ago, a mighty war was raged among the kingdom of frogs, led by his parents. But the frog king and queen took them down. Then he hypnotizes Freddie, as snakes in cartoons are known to do.

We cut to the Froglympics, with everyone, even Freddie, there. Froglegs realizes that One-Eye is controlling Freddie and demands, "What did you do with that frogolicious frog?!" Oh, and the robot may or may not be evil now too, because it lures them into a trap.

Hello, nightmare fuel.

After Froglegs manages to KO the robot, they have to deal with crocodiles. One of them eats Freddie. "Even though I hated you, I still loved you," Froglegs sobs. But what's this? Freddie getting eaten by the crocodile snaps him out of his trance... I don't know how, in case you were wondering... and he emerges from its mouth.

They go back to the Froglympics just as One-Eye is being dubbed the winner. Noggin now thinks that One-Eye is the princess in disguise. Jeez, this frog makes Patrick Star look like Albert Einstein. But the Froglympics aren't over yet - the event wraps up with a friendly game of Frog Quidditch (the fact that it's a knockoff of Quidditch is even lampshaded). By the way, I notice nobody finds it at all weird that the robot princess is competing in the game. If she was allowed to compete all along, why did Froglegs even need to disguise herself?

"Eat your heart out, Michael Jordan!"

Froglegs wins the game, which means that she won the entire Froglympics. Ha! Suck it, One-Eye! But then the snake shows up... wow, he sure took his sweet time getting there to enact his revenge... and he's all "I'M GONNA EAT YOU ALL!" and has One-Eye suck the frogs up into his weird machine that freezes frogs in blocks of ice. Freddie, Froglegs, the king, and everyone not already stuck in an ice block fights him in a battle scene that I'm sure was intended to be cool but is hard to take seriously when the characters say things like "It's time to pay the froggies!" and "You're a bad, bad king!".

So what was the point of hypnotizing Freddie again?

After a fight that goes on for what feels like an HOUR, Froglegs manages to trap the snake in his own ice block machine, freezing the stupid serpent solid. I suppose I should say "I WAS FROZEN TODAY!" here, but I won't.

Now that the snake has been defeated, Froglegs reveals that she's the princess. "I'm sorry. Your life is yours to live as you wish," the Frog King tells her. "You can marry who you want." Boogie hooks up with the robot princess... even though A) he's a tadpole and B) she's a robot. And Freddie and Froglegs... actually DON'T get married yet. Freddie heads off to do some more wandering, but says he might return. Huh. That's something I wasn't expecting them to do. Okay, I'll give 'em credit for not going the cliched route...

What's the Verdict?

...but that doesn't mean I'm going to give this a positive review.

Frog Kingdom blows. It doesn't even feel like an actual movie, it feels like a gag dub of a movie you'd find on YouTube. The lip-syncing is extremely off, characters frequently speak without even moving their mouths at all, and most of the dialogue is cringe-worthy. I didn't even mention half of the stupid jokes in this film. There are references to Superman and Indiana Jones and even Vanilla Ice of all people. Yes, yes, I know what these things are, it's still not funny.

The plot is disjointed and stretched out far too long - so many scenes and plot points are dragged out, then resolved in the blink of an eye (Freddie getting eaten by the crocodile? Yeah, that was totally needed) or even discarded without explanation (Freddie getting captured by the snake and Froglegs urging everyone to help save him... only for the snake to hypnotize him and just let him go off-camera). The characters suck too. Froglegs is just another generic tough, rebellious princess who don't take no crap from anyone. Freddie is just annoying and can't go five seconds without making a stupid wisecrack. They barely even have a romantic arc. The villain is tremendously lame, between the goofy voice and the incredibly stupid lines he spews out you can't take him seriously at all. He feels like a teenager in high school trying to be scary as he's stealing your lunch money. Everyone else is either dull, annoying, or gross.

Combine all this with some mediocre voice acting and character designs that range from okay to ugly and you've got another film that's not worth your time. Maybe this was better in the original Chinese, I don't know, but somehow I doubt it. Ah well, at least there weren't any sequels...

You have got to be kidding me.

Rating: One lilypad out of five. Hop away.