Let's Watch This: An Episode of "3-2-1 Penguins!"

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.

I've talked about VeggieTales before, you'll recall, but in that post I didn't talk much about MY personal history with the franchise. I mentioned that I saw Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie in theaters, but that's about it.

My parents introduced my older sister and me to VeggieTales when we were very little. We had the CDs - I distinctively remember having one of those personalized CDs where the characters say your name, that was pretty exciting. We still have two ornaments featuring Bob and Larry on our Christmas tree. And of course, we had at least some of the episodes on... I want to say VHS. So, yeah, we were fans of the show... at least for a few years. I didn't exactly stop being a VeggieTales fan, for some reason we just stopped buying the episodes when they came out. It wasn't until the 2010s that I found out about the post-Jonah VeggieTales stuff like Sumo of the Opera, Lord of the Beans, and Gideon: Tuba Warrior. And it wasn't until the 2020s that I actually found these episodes online and watched them! Well, sort of - in 2017 I was on a bit of a VeggieTales kick and found the "countertop" segments of these episodes on YouTube.

Here's one of the two Christmas ornaments featuring Bob and Larry
that we hang on our Christmas tree every year.

I don't know how many of the episodes we had on VHS. I think we had Where's God When I'm S-Scared?, Madame Blueberry, and one of the Larry-Boy ones. The only one I know for sure that we had was the 2001 Ultimate Silly Song Countdown. Yeah, I remember having a CD but I don't remember which of the episodes we owned. Maybe if the characters in the episodes had said my name, too...

Considering what big VeggieTales fans we were, it's odd that we didn't also get into Big Idea Productions' OTHER series, 3-2-1 Penguins!.

It wasn't for a lack of trying - we had ONE 3-2-1 Penguins! DVD, but that's it. Apparently, everyone else in the world felt the same way - 3-2-1 Penguins! never became a huge phenomenon like VeggieTales. Its biggest claim to fame is being the only thing Big Idea made that wasn't a VeggieTales production.

Much like VeggieTales, this show - created by Jeff Parker, Nathan Carlson, and Phil Lollar - was originally a direct-to-video series, with the first episode released on November 14th, 2000. Eventually, it started airing on TV as part of NBC's Qubo block (which you'll recall also aired VeggieTales during the 2000s as well). In total, twenty-seven episodes were produced, six direct-to-video and twenty-one made for TV.

Each episode had one of two kids going on a fantastic adventure with the four wacky penguins: vain and arrogant Captain Zidgel, Australian-accented First Officer Midgel, incredibly smart Doctor Fidgel, and the kindhearted if dimwitted Kevin. These adventures involved them going to some far-off planet and solving a problem for its inhabitants - a problem that always, ALWAYS had to do with whatever lesson the kid who the episode focuses on has to learn: don't complain about what you don't have, don't be a lying liar from Liarsburg, don't be impatient, that sort of thing.

3-2-1 Penguins! was never able to step out of VeggieTales' shadow. Perhaps the show was merely in the right place at the wrong time. It wasn't until halfway through the 2000s that people became obsessed with penguins. March of the Penguins, Happy Feet, Surf's Up, Club Penguin... people just couldn't get enough of penguins. I remember even Nickelodeon Magazine made a joke about it: "Doesn't anyone care about seals anymore? How about polar bears? It's time for penguins to chill out for a while." I dunno, I don't know how good the ratings on Qubo were, and the direct-to-video episodes apparently sold pretty well, but that really just makes the show's obscurity more of a headscratcher. Nowadays, it seems to be a cult classic of sorts, if nothing else...

So, today, we're going to watch one of the direct-to-video 3-2-1 Penguins! episodes - the very first one to be released, in fact. This is 3-2-1 Penguins!: Trouble on the Planet Wait-Your-Turn.

The episode starts off with the kids, twin siblings Jason (voiced by Mark Marten) and Michelle (Melissa Peterson), being driven to their grandmother's cottage. They're going to be staying with their grandma (Kymberly Mellen) while their faceless parents (Pamela Thomas and Ron Wells) are... I don't think it's specified where they're going, but wherever it is, it's going to be for twenty-seven episodes.

Hey, Jason, Doug Funnie called. He wants his outfit back.

Michelle is very happy to be at Grandma's house. Jason, not so much. He's rather be at Space Camp. So, to lift their son's spirits, the parents give him a video game console and the best game in the world, Bonsai Master 3: Pruner of Destiny (an entire video game about pruning hedges? Sounds exciting. Sort of), before they head off to the airport. Hooking it up to Grandma's TV, which is one of those old-timey pre-rabbit ears sets, takes some difficulty, but Jason manages to pull it off. Wow, how old are these kids? Seven? When I was seven, I had no idea how to hook up a video game console to a TV. Then again, I didn't play much in the way of video games anyway...

Problem number two rears its ugly head after that: Jason and Michelle both want to play the game first. Fortunately, Grandma steps in before they can start "fighting like frogs and dogs" as she puts it. "I'm glad you got a new widget there, but you need to learn to wait your turn!" she claims. "To let someone else go first every now and then! It's called PATIENCE, and it's a virtue!"

Don't worry, Grandma, they're not really fighting. They're just practicing their interpretive dance
moves.

To remind everyone that this is a Big Idea production, Grandma quotes the Good Book: "A patient man has great understanding, but a quick-tempered man displays folly." The kids don't get the point. Weird thing is, there are two controllers, so clearly Bonsai Master 3 isn't a one-player game... so what's the problem? Why are they arguing over who gets to go first at all?

Y'know what else is weird? Why does the grandmother has a British accent but Jason, Michelle, and their parents are American?

I mean, Jason argues that only one of the controllers is plugged in, but can't they
just plug in the other one too?

Alas, Grandma's primitive television set just can't handle the new-fangled video game technology or whatever, and it blows a fuse. So no Bonsai Master 3 for either of them, and Grandma's making them kidney pie for dinner doesn't do anything to lift their spirits.

After being excused (they claim that they're not really hungry because they stopped at Burger Bell on the way there - a reference to the VeggieTales song "His Cheeseburger"), the kids run up the stairs, and Michelle notices four little penguin figurines on a shelf. In their bedroom, Michelle plays with the penguins and Jason lays on the bed being bored... that is, until he takes notice of the door that leads to the attic. In the attic, Jason finds a bunch of space stuff, and Michelle finds a bunch of framed pictures of their grandfather, who it seems was a scientist of some sort. They even spot his telescope, and once again, they both want to use it first. Long story short, Michelle claims that since she's the oldest by five minutes, she gets to decide who goes first. And she decides that Jason should... nah, I'm just kidding, she decides that SHE should go first. This makes Jason MAD! Or at least rather irked.

While Michelle is peering into the telescope, Jason spots the little penguin figurines sitting next to a toy rocketship, and he gets an idea...

"You got your penguins in my science fiction!"

"Well, YOU got your science fiction in my penguins!"

"Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay..."

Okay, we're thirteen minutes in. Where are the penguins? The REAL penguins, not the little non-sentient figurines?

While playing with the penguins in the spaceship, Jason stumbles backwards thanks to a toolbox lying on the floor, and the ship goes flying into a box. Seeing as we don't hear a loud smashing sound, I'm going to assume that the ship and penguins DIDN'T shatter into a million pieces. Instead, the ship bounces out of the box and starts flying around on its own. What sort of sorcery IS this?!

Then the... window in front of the ship (what do you call that?) opens up, and Jason is shocked to discover that the penguin figurines are now sentient... and they have snazzy orange spacesuits on now, too! From what I've heard, it's never made clear if the adventures that the kids go on with the penguins are real or if they're just the kids imagining, but I'm going to assume it's the first one because, let's be honest, it's a lot cooler.

"Jason T. Conrad, we need your help!" one of the penguins tells Jason, who's understandably quite shocked by the fact that the penguin figurines are now ALIVE. Obviously Jason isn't going to fit in the tiny spaceship, but Fidgel (Page G. Hearn) has a way to fix that: a shrinking ray! Or at least I'm HOPING that it's a shrinking ray. It probably is... somehow I doubt they're gonna have the penguin blast the kid with a laser gun.

I was going to have the caption here be "Say hello to my little friend!", but I decided that it's
too overused a pop culture reference.

Actually, it's not a shrinking ray. When he pulls the trigger, out pops a mechanical hand attached to a long rope that grabs Jason, shrinks him down, and pulls him into the spaceship. And Michelle doesn't hear any of this going on, for some reason.

Once Jason is inside the spaceship, it flies out the window - Michelle, amusingly, STILL not noticing a thing - and Jason is formally introduced to the penguins. Zidgel (also Ron Wells) is the one with the pompadour. Think of him as a penguin version of Captain Kirk.

Or a penguin version of Zapp Brannigan, who was ALSO based on William Shatner...

Fidgel is the rockhopper penguin with the goggles. He's the brains of the outfit - to make a comparison to another group of animated penguins, the Kowalski of the bunch.

Is it just me, or does he kind of look like one of the Save-Ums?

Midgel (Greg Mills) is the pilot and engineer. The most interesting thing about Midgel is that he has an accent that sounds like it's both a Liverpoolian accent and a Brooklyn accent at the same time.

In his spare time, Midgel does some freelance work for Linux.

And Kevin (Ron Smith) is... well, he's pretty much comic relief.

He's like a fusion of Rico and Private.

"We've recieved a report on our fax machine that Planet Wait-Your-Turn is in crisis," Fidgel explains. What's the crisis? They don't know, they were low on toner. And just what IS Planet Wait-Your-Turn? Well, it's a planet that appears to be made out of purple Swiss cheese... populated by sentient vaccuum cleaners.

I'm going to repeat that. A planet that appears to be made out of purple Swiss cheese, populated by sentient vaccuum cleaners.

Yeah, I have no idea what I just typed either.

Somehow, this STILL isn't as bizarre as Ned's Newt.

The vaccuum cleaners are all standing in line, for some reason, and they keep cutting in front of others. "Kind of odd behavior for a planet called 'Wait-Your-Turn'," Midgel points out. I do love it when a character in what I'm reviewing makes the funny observations for me. "They're all cutting in line! They're, they're BARBARIANS!" Zidgel declares. When Fidgel asks why everyone is cutting in line, a vaccuum cleaner explains that it all started when President No-I'm-the-President pushed his way into office (and yet, he STILL sounds like a better president than Donald Trump).

Another vaccuum cleaner, who sounds almost exactly like Larry the Cucumber, tells the penguins that they didn't call them about the cutting in line problem. They called about the heat. Why is it so hot, hot, hot? According to the penguins' satellite viewing system, the planet itself is impatient too! It's broken out of its normal orbit and is trying to cut in front of the other planets in its solar system! Fidgel adds that there's some sort of "cutting in line bug" that's infected the entire planet - the same bug that was introduced to their environment by President No-I'm-the-President.

"This whole situation really SUCKS!"




Get it? 'Cause it's a planet of sentient vaccuum cleaners?

But wait, there's more! In taking itself out of its normal orbit, the planet is now heading directly towards its sun. "Yeah, but at least we're ahead of all the other planets," a vaccuum cleaner points out. And if Jason and the penguins don't get out of there, the cutting in line bug will infect THEM too! They'll become obsessed with being first for everything... which Jason more or less already was, so...

"People, don't you understand what happens when you get too close to the sun?!" Jason asks. "You'll BURN UP!" In fact, several of the planet's trees have already burst into flame. Everybody makes a run for the ship, but they're all too busy trying to get onto the ship first to actually, y'know, GET ONTO THE SHIP. Jason gives a big speech about how waiting your turn is good. And it is. Especially if it's waiting your turn to do something that isn't fun, like get a shot or clean the sink.

Why does a vaccuum cleaner need teeth? Do sentient vaccuum cleaners eat?
Do they have digestive tracts?

"Having to go first all the time only leads to trouble! Like getting burned up by the sun!" Jason says. "Now, the consequences are not always so extreme, but good things come to those who wait." And when he offers to let someone else go first, it destroys the cutting in line bug and causes the planet to return to its normal orbit. I was expecting everything to be resolved by EVERYONE on the planet offering to let whoever it was behind htem go first, but that would probably take a very long time and the planet would likely have made contact with the sun by the time they were finished.

Incidentally, President No-I'm-the-President was at the front of the line when the planet abruptly stopped. He is now slowly hurtling through space and nobody cares. The new president? President After You... who I'm guessing is supposed to be a caricature of somebody. Bill Clinton was the president when this episode came out, so maybe it's him?

Was Bill Clinton ever a brunette?

Everyone thanks Jason and the penguins for saving them all. And what was it that the vaccuum cleaners were waiting in line to see? Why, a telescope, of course! A telescope that allows them to peer at Michelle, who's spying on them through HER telescope! Oh, the irony!

Jason and the penguin take off in their rocket ship, and as they're flying through space we suddenly cut back to Jason playing with the toy rocket back in the attic. Was it real? Was it all in Jason's head? We may never know.

I've gotta ask, though... if it WAS all in Jason's head, why would he imagine a planet full of sentient vaccuum cleaners? Like, earlier we saw the grandma using a vaccuum cleaner, but Jason and Michelle were already upstairs when she was using it so he didn't see her using it. What exactly is going on in Jason's mind?

"Hey, Jason, you're not gonna believe this... there's an entire planet full of sentient vaccuum
cleaners, and they're all lining up to look through a telescope back at me!"

"Oh, I believe it..."

The episode ends with Jason and Michelle saying their prayers before going to bed - with Jason suggesting that maybe next time Michelle learns something too. Don't worry, Jason, the next episode is indeed focused on her.

We cut to outside the cottage, and as the camera pans up at the moon, the spaceship flies by, further making it ambigious as to whether or not the adventure really occured. If they did, I'd love to see the reaction of the first astronauts to encounter a planet full of sentient vaccuum cleaners.

What's the Verdict?

3-2-1 Penguins! is, in my opinion, pretty good. Not as good as the best VeggieTales episodes, of course, but it's a charming show in its own right. Much like having talking produce re-enact stories from the bible, the idea of what's basically Star Trek with penguins sounds like a really silly premise for a cartoon, but Big Idea pulled it off with their usual brand of good-natured snark and quirkiness. My main complaint about this episode is that it takes forever for the adventure with the penguins to get started - I mean, I know WHY, it's the first episode so they have to set up the plot, but surely you could have at least skipped the kidney pie sequence so we can get to the penguins sooner.

The animation... well, it's typical early 2000s CGI. It certainly doesn't look like PIXAR, but it's still much more appealing on the eyes than something like Arthur's Missing Pal. The characters are fun, and most of the jokes are funny. So yeah, as a whole I'd recommend seeking 3-2-1 Penguins! out. Or at least showing it to your kids, even if they already know that waiting your turn is good.

Speaking of waiting, you'll have to wait another whole week for my next review. And remember, if you're impatient, there's a good chance you'll get burned up by the sun. See you next time!

Did You Know? - Fun Facts About "Madagascar"

Welcome to another edition of a series that I like to call Did You Know?. Inspired a little by the Nostalgia Critic's "What You Never Knew" series, this series will allow me to share with you some interesting tidbits, behind-the-scenes information, and fun facts about an animated movie or TV series. Because I like sharing new information with people.

I can't believe Madagascar is twenty years old. I remember how I first found out about it - my family went to see Shark Tale in theaters (I don't know what we were thinking either), and at one point during the previews, I had to go to the bathroom. I walked back into the theater just in time to see the end of the teaser for the film. I sought out the teaser online after that.

The first film is a huge guilty pleasure for me. I feel like I should hate it - it's a film made by 2000s DreamWorks, which means that it's filled with celebrities who don't have much if any business doing voice-acting and unfunny pop culture references that have nothing to do with what's going on. And don't get me wrong, it's a very flawed film, but there's still a lot to like about it. The characters, even the ones that aren't given much to do, are great - the Penguins steal the show, of course, but Alex and Marty's friendship is definitely the heart of the film. And when the film is funny, it's genuinely really funny, and the dramatic and heartwarming moments work well too. The two sequels, while also flawed, are in my opinion even better.

The three Madagascar movies (I know there's technically four, I'm focusing on the three main films in this post) have a lot of fun facts about them that I would like to share. You probably already know that there are references to Planet of the Apes and The Twilight Zone (hot take: that "It's a cookbook! IT'S A COOKBOOK!" joke wasn't funny). You might also remember the "Madagascar Mania" tie-in with Denny's (I remember seeing that ad while watching Cartoon Network... or maybe it was Boomerang, I'm not sure). But did you know any of THESE things?

Concept art by Jordi and Carlos Grangel.

1) How did Madagascar come to be? In a recent interview with Animation World Network, co-director Eric Darnell revealed that Jerry Seinfeld had a hand in creating the idea: "I think part of it came from the relationship Jeffrey Katzenberg had with Jerry Seinfeld and this idea of doing something that would involve Manhattan and New York City. Jerry began developing the idea, and then he went on to work on what became Bee Movie. But we really fell in love with the idea: what if you take four New Yorkers, born and bred, rip them out of their New York home, where they've been their entire lives, and drop them into a savage jungle? How would they survive? And what if these New Yorkers were not people, but zoo animals?"

The other co-director, Tom McGrath, added, "It's a classic fish-out-of-water story. New Yorkers going camping. And New Yorkers going camping already feels funny. Originally, the story was about civility versus savagery, which is still a component of it, but it could be a very dark, unrelatable theme. We eventually found a theme that was more like, 'Don't eat your best friend.' Then, as we developed the movie, it became more about not letting the location define who you are. Home is where the heart is. It turned into a friendship story: as long as they were together, it didn't matter where in the world they were. That's why all the movies became kind of a travelogue built around that lesson."

2) Melman was originally going to be an okapi. They decided to make him a giraffe instead because more people know what a giraffe is than an okapi is (apparently, people were more aware of what one is by 2013, because the Valentine's Day special Madly Madagascar features an okapi as a minor character). Also, he was originally named Henry.

Concept art for Melman (then called Henry) by Buck Lewis.

3) The actual Central Park Zoo does not have lions, zebras, giraffes, hippos, or chimpanzees. It does have penguins, though. If you want to see lions, zebras, and giraffes in New York, you'll have to visit the Bronx Zoo (there are no hippos or chimpanzees there either, sorry).

4) The inital plan for the film had the animals being liberated from their cages by an animal rights group.

5) When the film was announced in 2001, Madonna and Jason Alexander were mentioned as being part of the cast (presumably, they were going to voice Gloria and Melman respectively). Ricky Martin, Adam Del Rio, and Mel Gibson were also attached to provide voices at one point. For whatever reason, all five of them wound up leaving the project at some point. Jennifer Lopez was also considered to voice Gloria, then Gwen Stefani was cast... then she left the project in 2002.

6) Melman wearing tissue boxes on his feet at one point in the film is a reference to Howard Hughes, who did it for the same reason as Melman - to keep germs away.

Concept art by Yoriko Ito.

7) King Julien's role was initially very, very small - originally, Maurice was going to be the leader of the lemurs, and it would've been his idea to have Alex help them against the foosa. Julien was just a minor character with only two or three lines who was questioning why they should have a lion help them. Then Sacha Baron Cohen got the part (and in case you're wondering why they brought a celebrity in to voice a character with only two or three lines, need I remind you that Zootopia 2 had Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson voicing a character who just screams and nothing more?) and did a lot of improvising, and the filmmakers liked it so much that they made Julien a more prominent character.

8) Editor Clare Knight was the one responsible for the film's use of "I Like to Move It". According to Eric Darnell, "We had the lemurs a little more cool, kind of loungy, almost like jazzy lounge lizards. Clare brought in this really fun number, and at first your instinct was, 'No, that's not who the lemurs are.' But as we listened to the song and brought it to Sacha, he totally embraced it and wanted to sing it. It completely redefined the character for the better."

9) Tom McGrath and Eric Darnell initially wanted Robert Stack to voice Skipper, but he passed away. Thus, Tom decided to voice Skipper himself because everyone really liked his scratch track for the character. Tom's voice for Skipper is sort of a combination of Robert Stack, Charlton Heston, and "maybe some Peter Graves every once in a while."

Concept art for Marty and Melman (who was still called Henry at this point).

10) Speaking of the penguins, they were very nearly cut from the film because they were only in one scene. Specifically, Jeffrey Katzenberg told them to take the penguins out, so they did, and then they had a test screening where a studio executive asked where the penguins were, resulting in Katzenberg saying that the penguins were "working out pretty good" and telling the filmmakers to put  them back in. According to Tom McGrath, "A way to give them job security was to embed them in the story, so we thought, 'OK, they can inspire the zebra to escape the zoo and then they're forever in the story and they can't be cut!'"

On top of that, the original plan was to have Alex, Marty, Melman, and Gloria's crates fly off the ship during a storm at sea. But a storm at sea is kind of cliched, isn't it? Tom McGrath thought so too, and he said, "I was in a restaurant, thinking about what to do with the storm. I thought it would be great if there was an animal revolt. When we first put them in the film, people were saying, ‘What’s with the penguins?'"

11) Okay, enough about the penguins for now. On the side of the pay phone that Alex uses when Marty escapes the zoo, there's a note reading "Room for rent, EAST Village, $10,000/mo, call Tom & Eric". This, of course, is a reference to Tom McGrath and Eric Darnell.

12) Madagascar is often brought up as one of the first CGI-animated films to have its characters move in a more "cartoony", squash-and-stretch style way. According to Eric Darnell, "We'd talk about animation style in the film, so we set out from the very beginning this very broad style with squash-and-stretch. But its difficult to do in computer graphics because you basically have a virtual puppet that you have to construct before you begin animation. All the controls and capabilities have to be built into this puppet before you start. With hand-drawn animation, if you want to draw a guy thats normally six feet tall and stretch him out to be 12 feet tall, or flatten him on the ground, you just draw it that way. And you're done. To design a puppet with those kinds of capabilities was a big challenge for us, because we wanted to be able to do that, too."

Animator Jason Schleifter said, "I think as a whole our department really started to push smear frames and stretching characters like crazy where it was warranted. We worked really hard to keep the characters on-model when striking a pose, but inbetween poses oh, man, we were going nuts! You'd have fingers stretch five times their normal lengths, eyes bulging all over the place. I even did a shot where a fossa hits the ground and when he does his eyes actually smack into each other, then stretch out so they're 2-1/2 times their normal distance from each other, and then rattle back. It happens so fast it's subtle, but boy does it add a nice punch to the action."

And Tom McGrath claimed, "We wanted to do something, animation-wise, that was more than what youve seen in 3D and to have a 2D sensibility, much like animation in the Forties: Tex Avery, Warner Bros. Because of the advancements we were able to do squash-and-stretch broad animation, and have this in a stylized world thats really believable in 3D."

13) And he does mean "stylized". "There were careful considerations in the design of this world that Kendal Cronkite had worked on with the simplification of things, and caricatured," Tom McGrath explained. "There were no straight angles. Everythings slightly off-skew. We called it Wack Factor. When things got to crazy we pulled it back. On Antz, when they surfaced the environments, they'd do it with photographs. They would photograph textures and use those. In Madagascar, it was all art. It was all hand-painted designs that were stylized that every surface was treated with. As opposed for using photos, the surfacing was all hand-painted."

Concept art for Alex.

"The artists in the surfacing department had a blast," Eric Darnell claimed. "Because they could invent every surface, every texture, for the surface of a leaf, the bark of a tree. Everything then could fit into this design paradigm that Kendal and her team devised. They just had a great time. They felt they had a creative input. What's up there on the screen is theirs. The majority of the plants that you see in the film are actual plants that are from Madagascar. But they're also very designed and stylized and fit in the style of the film. Even their organization and arrangement inside the frame and the environment, it's very different than how they would occur naturally, as we try to create this stylized fantasy of a jungle based on the Malagasy rain forest."

14) Jeffrey Katzenberg contributed to a lot of the film's jokes. For example, Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath thought of having that old lady beat up Alex, and Jeffrey suggested having her also kick Alex in the groin and mace him. And when the scene where the characters were all doing spit-takes ("You don't swallow it. It's just temporary 'till the plumbing's done.") wasn't getting the laughs the filmmakers were expecting in test screenings and they were getting advice that maybe it just wasn't a good gag, Jeffrey claimed, "No, the problem is, you don't have ENOUGH. You need two more big spits." And it worked!

Concept art for Madagascar itself.

15) Dana Carvey turned down a role in the film. I don't know which character they wanted him to voice.

16) The scene where the penguins arrive in Antarctica and discover that it, in Private's words, "sucks" was suggested by Bob Saget (who also voices a mnor character in the film - that one zoo animal who shouts at Alex and Marty to shut up because "WE'RE NOT ALL NOCTURNAL, YOU KNOW!"). It was originally going to be the film's stinger - for those unaware, that means the scene after the end credits. The filmmakers decided that they wanted the penguins to come back into the story, so they moved it.

17) Look closely at the patch on the suit that the ship captain is wearing - apparently, the name of the boat is "S.S. ACT II".

Food tie-ins for the film - maybe you remember seeing the Madgascar fruit snacks?

18) Remember how Mason and Phil escape the zoo because they've heard Tom Wolfe is giving a speech and they want to fling their crap at him? According to a behind-the-scenes bonus feature, the line was originally "I saw in the Times that Donald Trump is speaking at Stony Brook." Ah, remember the days when Donald Trump was just a punchline and not our president? Good times...

In the German dub, Tom Wolfe is replaced with Hilary Clinton. In the Hungarian dub, it's simply a lecture on evolution. In the Russian dub, they want to visit a lecture on "anarchy in the society". Speaking of foreign dubs, in the Hungarian dub Marty wants to go to Miami instead of Connecticut (probably harder to get to via train, unless you live in Florida already), and in the Korean dub, Melman assumes that they've wound up in Hollywood as opposed to San Diego.

19) The look of the jungles on the island was inspired by the paintings of Henri Rousseau.

A billboard for the film.

20) At some point in production, there was a reference to The Lion King in the movie - specifically, Maurice made a comment about the "oval of life". For some reason, this line was removed, but it's still present in the junior novelization.

21) Madagascar was released on May 27th, 2005 - the very same day that The Longest Yard, starring Adam Sandler, was released. Why is that noteworthy? Because both movies feature Chris Rock as a main character.

22) 2010 saw the launch of a live touring stage show adaptation of the first film that I believe is still being performed every so often today. Here are some photos of some productions:

Not exactly Shrek the Musical, is it?

23) Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa was originally going to be called "Madagascar: The Crate Escape". Presumably, somebody pointed out that at no point in the second film do the animals wind up in crates (unlike the first) so they gave it a new name.

24) In the second film, Young Alex is voiced by Ben Stiller's son, Quinn Dempsey Stiller, and Young Gloria is voiced by Jada Pickett Smith's daughter, Willow Smith. According to Eric Darnell, "You can’t coach [Quinn]. Ben was doing most of it, he was trying to get stuff out of his son and the most valuable stuff we got was things like when he didn’t want to sit in a chair and he was like, 'No, I don’t wanna…' and we had the mic on him and could use it when [young Alex] gets thrown into the crate.  So we really weren’t able to coach a performance out of him as much as we were able to follow him around with a mic and get what you would get following any toddler around."

For those wondering, no, Young Marty and Young Melman were not voiced by the kids of Chris Rock and David Schwimmer - Young Marty was voiced by Thomas Stanley and Young Melman was voiced by Zachary Gordon, who would go on to play Greg in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies.

25) Once a month during production on Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, the crew would act out scenes. "We put wigs on the layout artists. The animators got involved," Tom McGrath claimed. "We did 60 percent of the film in this high-school play type of video. In the first movie, we locked off the camera to reduce rendering time. It felt a lot like postcard shots. With this one, we had more processors."

Concept art for Alex's father, Zuba.

26) What was the hardest thing to animate in the second film? According to Scott Peterson, the film's effects head, "Grass - that was a big one. The African plains are vast, big vistas, where you can see a couple of miles out. Our challenge was to fill those plains with grass and do it in a way we could manage. We designed a tool for the layout department that would distribute grass by positioning geometric chunks of it in a shot. From there it went to the surfacing department where they handle its density: how it clumps, how scraggly it looks. They add accent grass and come up with the overall texture.

Then it goes to the lighting department. They had to develop tools that would regroup those chunks of grass into layers that make it easier to render large amounts of geometry. The surfacing department had to come up with a way of changing the grass' density -- have it very detailed when it's close to camera and more coarse as it get further away, but do it in such way that the audience doesn't notice the transition. We spent some time implementing that, making it efficient and coming up with intuitive controls for them to set up. On the rendering side, one of the ways we fixed the 'buzzing problem' [between the grasses' differing textures] was from a trick I learned at SIGGRAPH. It was the same one they used to fix King Kong's fur, which was to make the grass transparent as it gets skinnier -- it makes it blend better."

27) A couple of DreamWorks' other films have cameo appearances from the franchise's characters. For example, Roddy's owner in Flushed Away has an Alex doll:

Mason and Phil are seen on a newspaper at one point in Turbo:

And Gloria makes a cameo in How to Train Your Dragon... being carried by a dragon presumably to be eaten:

28) Some early plot summaries for the third film mentioned that Alex, Marty, Melman, Gloria, the Penguins, the Lemurs, and the Chimps would be joined in their quest to get back to New York by a performing llama. There aren't any llamas in the actual film, so I don't know if there WAS a llama in early script drafts or if the plot summaries were inaccurate (probably the latter).

29) Gia was initially going to be an albino jaguar kept in a cage at the Monaco casino. She would've been freed by Alex and joined the zoo animals in the ensuing chase (in the book The Art of Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, you can find storyboards for the car chase scene featuring Gia among the animals in the car). The filmmakers decided it'd fit the story better if Alex met her in the circus.

Concept art for the third movie by Travis Koller.

30) Look closely at the multiple hunting trophies on Captain DuBois' wall. Among the animals she's hunted down are Nana's dog from the Madagascar Penguins: A Christmas Caper short (released theatrically in front of Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit), a larger version of King Julien's gecko buddy Stevie from the first movie, that fish from the second movie who screamed when the watering hole went dry, and Eggy the duckling from the Penguins of Madagascar TV series.

31) At the end of the third film, when DuBois and her crew are in crates on a ship headed for Madagascar (yeah, sorry about the spoiler), take a look at their crates. Stenciled on them are "Freedom Fries", "Freedom Dressing", "Freedom Toast", and "Freedom Dip Sandwiches". For those unaware, this is a reference to the House of Representatives' decision in 2003 to start calling the French fries served in their cafeteria "Freedom Fries" in response to France refusing to support Iraq.

32) Character designer Craig Kellman modeled Stefano's face after his own.

34) Marty's (in)famous "Afro Circus" song was ad-libbed by Chris Rock - he was originally just supposed to hum that usual circus music, but he made up his own lyrics. So if you hate that song, you now know who to blame for its existence.

Concept art by Samuel Michlap - you can see the albino version of Gia among the characters here.

35) Finally, I found an interesting tidbit in an interview with Eric Darnell for the second film. Now, as you probably know (if not... sorry again about the spoiler), Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted's third act has Alex, Marty, Melman, and Gloria making it back to the zoo... but they realize that they actually prefer being free and traveling the world, and that when they were with the circus, they were already home. So they, the penguins, the lemurs, and the chimps join the circus.

But back in 2008, Eric had this idea for the third (or fourth, I'm not sure if the plan was for three or four films at this point) film's ending: "I have this idea of them back in the zoo and Marty saying something like, 'You know, we never made it to Connecticut,' and so the last shot would be a freeze frame of them jumping over the wall for one more adventure."

Sources:
- https://www.awn.com/animationworld/survival-funnies-lion-zebra-and-wack-factor
- https://www.awn.com/animationworld/madagascar-escape-2-africa-what-next
- https://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2008/Volume-31-Issue-10-Oct-2008-/Home-is-Where-the-Art-is.aspx
- https://www.skwigly.co.uk/behind-the-scenes-of-madagascar/
- http://am.animatedviews.com/Madagascar.html
- http://legacy.aintitcool.com/node/15457
- https://www.razorfine.com/news/film-news/madagascar-2-the-interview/
- https://www.awn.com/animationworld/madagascar-20-qa-tom-mcgrath-and-eric-darnell
- https://animationscoop.com/interview-madagascar-back-in-theaters-for-20th-anniversary/

Seriously, twenty years of Sacha Baron Cohen singing "I Like to Move It Move It". It doesn't feel natural.

Let's Watch This: An Episode of "Nerds and Monsters"

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.

Pop quiz: what kind of person gets treated the lousiest in television? Not just ANIMATED television, ALL television? You might think it's the mime, because it's generally agreed that mimes are terrifying. Or it could be postal workers, who are stereotyped as being grouchy and ready to snap at any moment. But nope, the one kind of person that is despised, the butt of practically every joke, considered worse than pond scum, by people who write for television shows, it is the NERD.

These are nerds. Scientific name Geekus Wimpus. It's pretty easy to identify a nerd: they usually wear glasses, bow ties, and a shirt with at least one pocket on it. Their hobbies include watching Star Trek, posting in internet message boards, and doing well in school. For some reason, the television industry thinks that these are things to be mocked. Name a cartoon show - ANY cartoon show - and I'm sure there was at least one joke at the expense of nerds in it, if not a character whose entire shtick is that he's a nerd.

And surely I do not need to mention the enormous, nerdy elephant in the room, do I? The show where a good chunk of the jokes are just "LOL they're nerds, laugh at them"?

Let's be honest, Sheldon is the only reason to watch this show.

It seems that nowadays, with stereotypical "nerdy" things like sci-fi, gaming, and technology becoming more mainstream, people have realized that nerds are not something to be mocked, but rather our equals. Heck, look at me. I'M probably a huge nerd. You'd likely have to be to write an entire blog post about the history of an obscure Disney animated film from 2004. In other words, if you're a nerd, be proud of it. Don't let the jokes that shows like The Big Bang Theory make about how pathetic nerds are let you feel bad about yourself. You don't need six-pack abs, a sports car, and a love of professional wrestling to be considered cool.

Okay, okay, you want to hear about the actual cartoon now, don't you?

Nerds and Monsters focuses on three nerdy kids named Dudley Squat (voiced by Tabitha St. Germain), Irwin Chang-stein (Vincent Tong), and Becky Hooger (also Tabitha St. Germain)... and also a dumb jock named Stanley "Stan" Grissle (Ty Olsson). The kids get stranded on an island populated by monsters, led by the purple-skinned long-horned Zarg (Brian Dobson), who see them as a threat to their way of life. The show was created by Josh Mepham, Kathy Antonsen Rocchio, Greg Sullivan, and Vito Viscomi and premiered on YTV in March 2014. I'm not sure if it aired on TV in the U.S., but it has been avaliable on many streaming services, such as Hulu and Tubi.

Two seasons, consisting of each one consisting of twenty episodes (and each of those twenty episodes consisting of two segments, making for a total of eighty in all), of the show were produced. Reception towards it seems pretty mixed online, for every fan of it there's somebody who finds it lousy. Which side of the fence will I fall on? Well, we're going to watch the fifth episode of the show, which consists of the segments "Are You Gonna Eat That?" and "Monster BFF", to find out. This is Nerds and Monsters.

The episode starts off with Zarg sleepwalking - or rather, sleep-using another monster named Skur (Ian James Corlett) as a hammer. Why? Because he's dreaming about using Skur as a hammer, of course. To put a stop to this, Skur tells Zarg that the nerds have stolen his inner tube, resulting in Zarg dashing out of his cave and running into Becky, who's out searching for the island's nocturnal fauna - which in turn results in them falling over a cliff.

Ew, she's grabbing him by the nose hairs...

Discount Eduardo says that Becky has saved his life. Usually, in cartoons, saving somebody's life means that they become your servant and drive you crazy waiting on you hand and foot until THEY save YOUR life, in which case you're even. But don't worry, they're not doing THAT cliche here. Instead, according to "monster law", Becky must now EAT Zarg.

Becky says that she can't eat Zarg because she's a vegetarian animal lover (does Zarg qualify as an animal?), but if she refuses to eat Zarg, then HE gets to eat HER. I'm not quite sure how "monster law" works, but something tells me the monsters don't quite know either. Nonetheless, Becky pulls Zarg to safety, and now she has to eat him in some big public ceremony.

And I'm gonna try not to make too many Big Bang Theory jokes in this review, but I have to point this out... Irwin looks a lot like Howard Wolowitz.

Seriously, the big nose, the hairstyle... just take off the glasses and you've got an
animated Howard!

"Just cover him with ketchup! That's how I eat food I hate!" Stan suggests. "Broccoli, liver, tomatoes..." Yes, like all jocks in cartoons, Stan is a few sodas short of a six-pack. Now that I think about it, jocks don't really have it much better than nerds in television, do they? Apparently, you can't be smart AND good-looking at the same time...

Irwin's idea is for Becky to just ignore the problem and it'll go away. Of course, that didn't work with his back acne... gross. But Dudley says that he can make it so Becky craves eating nothing but Zarg. How exactly he plans to do that, we'll have to find out later, as we promptly cut to Zarg bathing in soup broth. Hmmm, usually how this gag works is that the character who wants to eat the other character tricks them into relaxing in a hot tub or something that's actually a giant pot of soup. I guess Zarg wanted to skip right to the punchline.

"Hey, chicken broth is good for my complexion!"

In walk Zarg's nephew Lyle (Brian Drummond), the one monster on the island who DOESN'T hate humans, and his parents, Urp (Lee Tockar) and Durn (Michael Adamthwaite), who share the same body. I like how they didn't go the usual "creature with two heads" design for them but rather had Urp's face be on Durn's stomach. Although this does raise the question as to whether or not Urp's mouth doubles as a belly button.

(NOTE: this joke was originally supposed to be me wondering how they digest food, but now that I think about it, they probably have a digestive tract just behind Urp's face)

"Uncle Zarg, this is so silly! Becky won't eat you if I ask her not to!" Lyle insists. But Durn says that every monster knows from the day they're hatched that someday, they'll be eaten. According to Urp, it's the circle of life. And it moves us all... through despair and hope... through faith and love... okay, I'll stop.

Meanwhile, Dudley tells Becky that he can erase her fear of meat - or "carnophobia", as he calls it - from her mind with hypnosis. Since this isn't a Disney movie, there aren't any pythons around to do the job, so instead Dudley, Irwin, and Stan have set up a large spinning wheel for her to stare at. Instead of hypnotizing Becky, however, it hypnotizes Irwin and Stan... who now think they're chickens. I gotta ask, what exactly is so funny about people acting like chickens? Is it because chickens aren't particularly intelligent (actually, they're smarter than people think)?

There's also a joke here about Stan crapping his pants. Nyuck nyuck nyuck nyuck nyuck.
Sarcastic laugh.

Next, Dudley thinks that they can reprogram Becky's brain. This involves building a sculpture of Zarg entirely out of produce.

It reminds me of that genie made of produce from The Tale of Despereaux...

That doesn't work either, but it seems that Becky has decided to eat Zarg after all: it's either that or she gets eaten herself. Besides, maybe he's chock-full of proteins and vitamins.

"Excellent! Now start with my feet and work your way up!" Zarg says, showing off his disgusting toenails.

Well, there goes my appetite.

Despite her disgust, Becky attempts to bite one of the toenails... which tickles Zarg, causing him to fart. Apparently, monsters fart when they're tickled. Wow, I'm learning much more than I ever needed to know about monster biology today!

"Nope, I can't do it!" Becky declares. "Zarg, I want to honor your monster customs, but I can't eat food that can eat ME!" Other people don't seem to have this problem - believe it or not, there are people in this world who eat LION MEAT. LION MEAT. Why would anyone do that? My rule is, if it's not an animal I haven't already tasted (so, a chicken, a turkey, a pig, a fish, a lobster, a shrimp, or a cow), I won't eat it. I don't care how good alligator supposedly tastes, they're too cool an animal to be eaten.

Dudley and Skur both offer to eat Zarg instead, but he swats them away and demands that Becky chow down. Why doesn't HE just eat HER? "Monster law" says that he can do that, doesn't it? Well, anyway, Becky makes a run for it and jumps aboard a log floating downstream. She thinks she's safe, but discovers that the river has man-eating plants, piranha/alligator hybrids, and - you guessed it - a waterfall.

"This is the worst log flume ever!"

Zarg saves Becky before she can go over the falls. He saved her life, which means that once she's done eating him, he can eat HER. It takes him a second to realize that would be impossible. So instead, Becky eats the produce statue of Zarg from before and Zarg eats a replica of Becky made from meat. Also, Stan managed to find some ketchup (which apparently grows on the tail of another monster on this island, so getting it wasn't particularly easy) and gives it to Becky.

Putting ketchup on watermelon? If I still had my appetite, I'd be oddly curious as to how
that tastes...

Next segment...

This one starts off with the nerds playing "Charades", then after that Stan suggests they play football. But through a combination of Stan playing too rough and the nerds' being nonathletic wimps (because it's impossible for a nerd to be good at sports, that's just common knowledge), Dudley, Irving, and Becky don't have much fun. Poor Dudley is even subjected to a wedgie, as nerds in cartoons often do.

Question: where are these kids' parents? There must be "MISSING CHILD" posters all over
their hometown...

Because Dudley, Irving and Becky suck at sports, Stan heads off to have some REAL fun: uprooting trees and sending them flying through the air! He eventually comes across a monster named Vink (Michael Daingerfield), who is ALSO tremendously strong and not particularly intelligent. They're a perfect match!

Boy, this Dirty Dancing remake is a lot stranger than the original...

While Stan is off having fun with Vink, Dudley builds a "Stan-Proof Suit" out of logs so they can have fun with Stan minus the pain. Vink, meanwhile, brings Stan back to the monsters' turf, and this does not make Zarg happy. Before the episode gonna go all The Fox and the Hound on us, Vink manages to convince Zarg to let him keep Stan: but only if he promises to feed it and never pick up its crap. I think these monsters have confused a friend with a pet. All pets are friends, but not all friends are pets.

I wonder why so many pink cartoon characters are dimwitted. Vink, Patrick Star, Pinkie Pie, Gumpers from Pet Alien...

Anyway, Dudley comes across Stan, who shatters Dudley's wooden suit with just a pat on the back. "Well, on the bright side, I can finally relieve myself," Dudley says. He's also not too pleased to find out that Stan is friends with a monster, even though Vink, despite his enormous strength, seems pretty harmless. Well, maybe "harmless" isn't the right word... he doesn't seem MALICIOUS at all. Stan insists that hanging out with the monsters is better than hanging out with the nerds because they "don't talk about stupid stuff like math", they eat with their hands, and they don't shower. All he has to do is play the "don't you want me to be happy" card and Dudley agrees to let him stay with the monsters.

I sure hope monsters can't get pink eye. That would suck for that yellow monster with
the eighteen eyeballs...

Later on, Skur catches Dudley and brings him before Zarg. Uh oh, it looks like Stan will be torn between his new monster friends and his fellow human being. Especially since Zarg says that he's going to EAT Dudley. But first, he gives Dudley to Vink so he can tenderize him first. We get another fart joke... classy, fellas... and Vink carries Dudley into the forest, Stan running behind him. Long story short, Stan manages to save Dudley and bring him back to the nerds' side of the island, and it turns out that Dudley let Skur capture him to prove that Stan wouldn't be safe living with the monsters.

Then we cut to poor Vink crying over the fact that Stan isn't around... only to immediately befriend a squirrel/spider hybrid. Huh, usually this sort of story ends with everyone realizing that the two characters of different species CAN be friends. I guess the moral here is that giant monsters aren't good friends? That seems racist towards monsters...

What's the Verdict?

I'm gonna give this cartoon something that I haven't given a cartoon since my first review of Sidekick - a "YOU TRIED" stamp.

Nerds and Monsters has a unique premise, and I like the designs of the monsters and the Dr. Seuss-ish look of the island. The voice actors all do a good job, and the animation is decent. And they refreshingly don't do too many "LOL they're nerds" jokes. Too bad the jokes we DO have here aren't funny (there's waaaaaaaaaay too much toilet humor) and the characters aren't particularly interesting. It's not an awful show, but at best I'd say it's mediocre. Maybe I just chose one of the weaker episodes to review, I don't know. If you like it, go ahead and like it, but I wouldn't recommend watching Nerds and Monsters.

Well, another day, another cartoon I only find mediocre at worst. I know mediocre cartoons don't make for particularly funny reviews... it probably doesn't help that I go into a lot of these obscure Canadian cartoons with low expectations. I couldn't even think of a funny way to end this review.

Y'know what? Here, have a video I found on YouTube of The Big Bang Theory with the laugh track removed. It really highlights just how nasty the characters are to each other: