by Michelle Klein-Häss
As I write this piece, Hercules is sinking into the sunset, and the mighty publicity machine that is Buena Vista is beating the jungle drums for the latest live-action feature derived from a cartoon: George Of The Jungle.
George was not the best cartoon to have come out of Jay Ward Productions: that honor of course goes to Rocky And Bullwinkle, aka Rocky And His Friends. And apparently it is not the last cartoon to get the live-action treatment...movies based on Dudley Do-Right and Mr. Magoo are right now in pre-production. However, all this begs a very important question: Why?
The answer seems to be the almighty buck. The hideous Flintstones live-action feature was a big hit, and true to Hollywood form people jumped right on the bandwagon and started raiding the animated memories of our childhoods. The resulting roll is indeed a tawdry one: Casper. Space Jam. And now George Of The Jungle.
What the hell is going to be next, folks? A live-action ScoobyDoo, complete with trendily computer-animated Scooby and Scrappy? Speed III: Speed Racer? Jim Varney starring in a live-action Huckleberry Hound? Howard Stern as Bullwinkle? You can spin all kinds of hideous ideas, and I hope that nobody from the major studios gets any ideas from this.
Why don't the same people so quick to plunder cartoons for live-action ideas just go to the talented animation community and make full-length animated features? The costs of animation are coming down. For example, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America cost only $10 million to make, and in the first week alone the movie made back its costs threefold. Certainly a feature-length Dudley Do-Right, to give but one example, could be done with the same sort of TV-style production plan that brought the Little Weinerheads to the silver screen and cost less than location shoots in rural Canada and prosthetic chins for the leading man.
Sure, Bill Scott would be no longer available to helm such a feature...he is unfortunately not with us anymore. But one of the key voice actors, the great June Foray who portrayed Nell, is still very much with us and very vital. And the same nostalgia which sustains the idea of a live-action Dudley Do-Right could sustain an animated movie, particularly if the writers involved wrote UP to an adult audience rather than DOWN to a kid's audience. After all, the genius of Dudley Do-Right, Rocky And Bullwinkle, Fractured Fairy Tales, Peabody And Sherman and all the rest was in the very adult and often irreverent and subversive humor of the stories.
This trend of remaking classic cartoons as live-action features has got to stop. But unfortunately the only way this could happen is if movies like George Of The Jungle become crashing bombs, not only at the box-office, but also in sell-through video. Often, family-oriented movies which don't perform well at the box-office wind up making back their investment in video.
It really is up to you, the consumer. If you keep away from these travesties, they will cease to be commercially viable. If you still hold your nose and pay your money, the horror that is the live-action remake will keep on happening, until all our memories of the Saturday Mornings of yore will be forever spoiled by cheesy, unfunny movies.
If you have a rebuttal to this editorial, send it to mhass703@2cowherd.net. We'll be happy to post it here.
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Page last updated 1/15/1998
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