Entry 4

Yo!

Ladies and gentlemen, it's official: There will-- I repeat, WILL be a Simpsons Movie. Not a direct-to-DVD flick, like Family Guy, but a full-fledged silver screen feature! It's about darn time, too! For those of you who haven't heard yet, 20th Century Fox's latest computer-animated movie, "Ice Age 2" (better known as "Ice Age: The Meltdown") opened over the weekend, and I personally saw it with a good friend of mine at my local multiplex on Saturday. During the opening trailers shown before the movie, a small 30-second teaser trailer for "The Simpsons Movie" was shown. Fortunately, those of you who haven't seen this trailer yet can check out a very recently released online stream, thanks to the guys at Apple.com. Click HERE to check it out. Nothing spectacular, but I just wanted to mention that several months ago, series producer David Mirkin hinted that they were doing something special with the animation for the movie. He didn't specify, but we do know it's not CG. Though it is going to be, supposedly, "special." Yeah. more like "special ed." You can't really tell when you look at the YouTube stream, but when you see this trailer on the big screen, it almost looks like it has the super-subtle, grainy tones of the first few seasons of the TV show. I'm not sure if this is because the Apple Trailers stream has the clip's true dimensions and when it's stretched out, it looks a little grainy, or maybe that's exactly what the animation's going to look like and the online version is compressed just right to not appear to have any "grainy-ness" in it, but if purposed grainy-ness is, in fact, what they mean by "special," to give the movie a throwback to the early seasons when rumors of the movie first started, read my text, Fox: I AM NOT AMUSED. Now, I don't know about all you other Simpsons fans out there, but I really hope that when the movie comes out they do something else "special" with the movie because if they want MY money, they'd better stick to the visual style they have now. Of course, if they REALLY expect to make significant money off this, they'd better come up with a decent story for a move like this. And please, Fox. For the love of God, don't go with something down the lines of any of those lame storyline ideas from the show. Since there's been way too many in recent seasons to list here, I'll use as a prime example the one that aired just last night. MATADOR GRANDPA?!?!? Come on, Tim Long. You can come up with a better story idea than that. Anyway, here's hoping when this finally comes out on 7/27/07, it doesn't suffer (too badly) from being too little, too late. Sure, it's gonna come out a bit after the 20th anniversary of the Simpsons' first ever TV appearance on Tracey Ullman's show on April 19, 1987, but it still stands to lose out big at the box office if for no other reason that its very, very special competition next summer: Evan Almighty (read: "Bruce Almighty 2"), The Bourne Ultimatum, Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, Indiana Jones 4, Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and the Transformers movie, to name some. Seriously, folks, if there's to be any hope at all of a significant post-movie future for the show, or a "The Simpsons Sequel" further down the line, 2007 is to be a VERY crucial year.

Anyway, as for Ice Age 2, unfortunately, since this is an animated PG-rated movie on opening weekend, the theater was practically full of pre-teens and the reject kids from Barney the Dinosaur, which meant the movie itself, while mildly enjoyable at least in getting an overdue Scrat fix (the first film came out in 2002), the overall moviegoing experience was slightly dampened by the aforementioned kids laughing their heads off at even the corniest jokes, and the whole story arc with the female mammoth thinking she's a possum? Come on, Fox. Was it really necessary to make this movie at all, in hindsight? I mean, seriously. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this, but instead of making a full movie, they should have made at least some web-only short films just about Scrat. no mammoths, sloths, tigers or poorly rendered human characters. Just Scrat. I don't know how, but there's something about that character and his perpetually elusive acorn that begs a regular, "special" series of some kind. But that's just me. More new Bloggage next Monday, 7pm EST/4pm PST sharp!

-D