Awkward Forced Olympic Tie-In Special, Part 2: Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie!

Well, I’m really late on this one, folks. You could almost make some sort of thematically appropriate memetic statement about my lack of fastness, if you were so inclined. But, let’s not. Let's get right to the point.

That point being the Olympics! The noble celebration of the absurd conceit that fire is more special when it's impractically passed from person to person, across long distances, as a huge middle finger to no less than the great Stephen Fry, who decided in 2011 that there was no greater invention in the history of mankind than the (considerably more practical) lighter. After that, the Olympics inevitably plunge straight downhill when they sadly become preoccupied with all that sports nonsense. It's tragic, really. Clearly, these proceedings needed livening up, desperately, and Sega was more than happy to oblige, by begging Nintendo to oblige them, also. And thus, it was settled: the Olympics were forever transformed into naught but the backdrop for people to live out an increasingly irrelevant rivalry, in a particularly nonsensical way. YEAH!!!

Well, I have nothing against irrelevance or nonsense, either, and so I've generously given Mario Mario and Sonic T. Hedgehog another venue in which they can engage in an EPIC FIGHT TO THE DEATH, via cinema. Didn't that sound like fun? "Hells yeah it does", I assumed you said; and so, last time, I allowed Mario to take the field and show off a film that razed even the nefarious Dennis Hopper's soul. Sadly, though, he only managed to score a disappointing 2.0 from the pasty white American judge. But now, in the overdue second part of this two-part series, Sonic the Hedgehog takes his stab at Pseudolympic glory, as we flash back to the year 1999. The world was on the verge of ending, forever, because Y2K; staring their mortality right in the eye, ADV realised that time was growing ever shorter to fulfil their lifelong dreams of dubbing the two extant episodes of an obscure Sonic the Hedgehog OVA from three years prior, and they solemnly swore to stop putting it off once and for all. And thus, America was introduced to the inaccurately titled Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie!

Awkward Forced Olympic Tie-In Special, Part 1: Super Mario Bros.!

This month, ath-a-letes from all relevant parts of the globe will once again come together to celebrate the spirit of the eternal burning flame of competition, and more importantly, to celebrate the spirit of bringing tourism revenue to a specially selected selfish major city. This year, it's London! And, once again, Nintendo and Sega (well, okay, mostly Sega) have decided that the most effective representation of the diversity of this gathering, bringing together nations from all over the world, is to replace that diverse array of nations from all over the world entirely, and replace them with a broad-but-cuddly Italian stereotype and a woefully inaccurate drawing of a hedgehog. And, while you could easily give in and shell out money for the catchily titled Mario and Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games if you wanted to see who would win at, um, hurdling, and pot-addled swimming, and whatever else it is they do at the Summer Olympics.....wouldn't it be more fun to find out who would win in a duel of movies, for free? Here, in the first of a two-part series, I take a look back to the year 1993, when Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo were chosen, against all logic, to play the Super Mario Bros.!

Of course, to any not-overly-young fan of the Mario games, this film lives on in infamy. Everyone knows that it's a completely inaccurate representation of the games and therefore worthy of scorn! Well, except for Shigeru Miyamoto, of all people, who thinks if anything it tried to get too close to the games, but he was probably high, on drugs, at that time, so let's disregard him. Even the stars of the film hated it, you know! Bob Hoskins regards the film as the single worst thing he's ever done, and please bear in mind that he was also in Son of the Mask. Dennis Hopper, despite getting the theoretically awesome role of King Koopa, also looked back on his experience with the film with disappointment, anger, and terror, directing special ire at husband-and-wife directorial team Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel. But maybe Denny was just jealous, for his relationships inevitably ended in despair. Maybe EVERYBODY is being unnecessarily bitter here, like a shoddily concocted marmalade, perhaps. Isn't it only fair that, like anything else in the world, this film deserves a second chance? An "extra life", if you will? (Please do.)

Belle's Magical World

Ah, Beauty and the Beast, the 1991 masterpiece of the Disney Renaissance that showed just how beautiful animation can be.

Belle’s Magical World was a direct-to-video midquel released on February 17^th, 1998. According to Disney canon, this DVD takes place after Christmas (which you can see in the aforementioned sequel) yet before the fight against Gaston in the original movie.

Everybody who’s known me for long knows that Beauty and the Beast is my absolute favorite Disney film. However, due to my media pack rat tendencies, I picked this DVD up on clearance because I had not yet seen the film, and also because even because of its supposed badness, I wanted to at least own the trifecta of the film I loved so much. Even after purchasing it, I only watched the film halfway before shutting it off out of embarrassment. And now I pick it up again to watch in its entirety to give this treacherous sequel/midquel/whatever the blasting it deserves.

Barbie Princess Charm School

a review


You can tell she’s a princess
She doesn’t need a crown
You can tell she’s a princess
She’ll turn the world around


These lines are from the movie’s opening song, “You Can Tell She’s a Princess.” Whether it’s suggesting that you can tell she is a princess because she doesn’t need a crown, or that her non-crown-requirement is a separate clause from the obviousness of her princessiness...I’m not sure. But in either case, she can turn the world around.

Air Buddies!

Ah, the year nineteen hundred and ninety-seven: perhaps not exactly a spectacular year for the Walt Disney Company. Disney distributed such films as George of the Jungle, part of the unmurderable trend of live-action remakes of old cartoons; Jungle 2 Jungle, a remake of a dismally received French comedy that Disney had dubbed into English and released stateside just a year earlier; RocketMan, starring Master Thespian Harland Williams; and Hercules, which wasn't bad or anything, but it lead to an embarrassing snub from the Greek government, so it's humiliating enough regardless. Arguably the most perplexingly enduring Disney film from 1997 was Air Bud, a modest box office success that launched a direct-to-DVD series, which persists to this day, for some reason. The original film was an unspectacular but sweet tale of a basketball-playing Golden Retriever who helps out a lonely, depressive youth living in the hell that is small town America, by showing him the true warmth and happiness that can only come from owning a basketball-playing Golden Retriever. And those in the audience learned a valuable lesson, too: not only is there nothing in the rulebook that says a dog can't play basketball, there's also apparently no rule anywhere that says you have to actually attend a high school to be part of its school teams or anything. (Plus, the dog was actually the same dog some might remember from Full House, which makes his career after the end of that series officially more successful than Dave Coulier's.)

After filming the first film, of course, the dog died, as dogs are wont to do; but that didn't stop Disney from finding other stand-in Golden Retrievers (and lousy puppetry when the sport of the day required it) to create a series of sequels. As it turns out, Buddy was also capable of playing American football, European football, baseball, and most embarrassingly of all, girls' beach volleyball, which also neglects to have a rule against players being dudes. Apparently, sales were slowing by this point, or maybe they were just running out of sports Americans would recognize - hockey's more the realm of those ultra-foreign Canadians, after all - but, whatever the reason, the important producer-type people realised that a very clever revamp was needed to keep the series afloat. And that brings us to Air Buddies, a not-so-very-clever revamp, which bet a lot on the basic concept that everybody likes puppies, everybody likes dialogue, and as such, everybody LOOOOOOOVES it when puppies have dialogue, especially professional film critics. Plopping this disc into the delicate technological underbelly of my DVD player, I found myself pretending to wonder whether this could actually restore the series to its fondly remembered heyday that I'm pretending existed at some point. Hopefully you'll pretend to wonder that, too, so I won't feel quite so silly answering it. Please?