Flash

Via: Cartoon Brew

Normally I try to stay away from speculation about a film, especially one that looks like its gonna be a stinker. However, sometimes this principle can be incredibly hard to stick to and I’m afraid today is one of those days.

What film has pushed me over the edge? Why it’s none other than Yogi Bear.

For months now we’ve been seeing more and more clips of this film being leaked (or indeed, promoted) on the internet. Cartoon Brew (and it’s readers) have been almost visceral in their contempt for the film. I don’t blame them either because those guys have some serious passion for cartoons, and seeing a classic one such as Yogi Bear get treated in such a way is disheartening to say the least.

This post isn’t so much a statement of my thoughts as a collection of other’s thoughts. (You probably don’t want to hear my thoughts, which delve waaaay to much into existentialism for this time of the morning anyway).

As mentioned above, most mainstream sites and bloggers have held no punches in their commentary. The main aspect that irks them is the hybrid nature of the film and the way that Hollywood has deviated from the nature of the original cartoons, focusing instead on fart jokes and other low-brow attempts at comedy, which, as a European, have never held that much sway with me to begin with.

As ever, the excellent, Hanna-Barbera blog, Yowp, has some great points relating to the direction that Dan Ackroyd and Justin TImberlake (how he got this gig I do not know) received during filming. If anything, I’d say this has as much to do with the quality of the film as anything else. Ackroyd may well be able to do an excellent impression of Jellystone’s most famous resident, but if he’s told to go in a different direction entirely, then that kind of ruins everything.

As a fan of classic cartoons, I know it can be extremely hard to see someone almost take a wizz all over your childhood memories. What people seem to forget is that they are exactly that, memories, and everyone has different ones. In the grand scheme of things though, if you’re making a film, there’s more often than not some executive breathing down your neck, and a film like Yogi Bear reeks of their meddling. There have been cases in the past of writers disowning their scripts as a result of the finished film being almost entirely different from what they originally wrote. That’s not what I’m saying necessarily happened to Yogi Bear, but it is a possibility.

At the end of the day, Yogi Bear was made to cash in on nostalgia, which as J.J. Sedelmaier has noted (sorry, can’t locate the source) is a powerful aphrodisiac. There’s nothing we can do except not going to see it, and from what i can gather, I am not alone in that sentiment.