My God that was all kinds of awful. I was expecting it to be bad, but they had the original cast so I thought there might be some redeeming points. Not a chance.
The plot was horrendous and the actors sounded like they were doing bad impersonations of themselves.
Napolean uses some acne cream that makes him angry, so he enters a secret fight club/thunderdome run by Rex (of Rex-kwan-do). At the end he fights Kip. I guess LaFawnda went back to Detroit.
Fox is showing a second one later tonight, and I’m a glutton for punishment, so I’ll give it one more shot.
Our newspaper reviewer said it wasn’t funny. The TV previews weren’t funny. I didn’t bother watching.
The movie wasn’t funny so much as quirkily intriguing. The pleasure, such as it was, lay in watching various slightly odd but still relatable characters deal with odd but still plausible situations. It’s the kind of thing that requires the whole-body nuances of an actual live human. Even the most sophisticated animation is achingly stiff in comparison, and just doesn’t work for a “Napoleon Dynamite” kind of story. It was doomed to total failure before production even began.
That’s a good point, Gary. The dance scene in the movie worked because we were seeing a real person, with lots of unique body language, move in a way that we hadn’t previously suspected he could move. If that had been animated, it wouldn’t have nearly the same impact.
Same with Kip’s transformation; it would have been a dull gag animated, but with a real person, it was a minor jaw-drop moment.
I would only watch it for Sandy Martin (Nap’s grandmother and one of my favorite character actresses), but sounds like it’s not even worth it for that. I thought the movie had its moments but didn’t understand all the raving about it.
I only saw one of the episodes (with the Scantronica 3000) because football overrun threw off my DVR, but I kinda liked it. It’s got an absurd bent to it, much more cartoony than the movie (obviously, but the adjective still works). I’ll give it a go.
Wow, Fox is just getting more and more desperate to have an animated show, other than the Simpons that isn’t made by Seth Macfarlane. I watched 15 minutes of this crap, that was only because the Simpsons ended at 8:45 and I didn’t want to get into anything else before Downton Abbey.
It’s as though during the six or so years since the movie was in theatres, a team of writers has been cranking out scripts for this show full-time. The powers that be finally started animating episodes, but they’re doing it with the new season seven scripts. The writers are very burnt out.
I don’t understand why this movie was turned into a cartoon that came out 7 1/2 years after the movie. Was there some pent-up demand I wasn’t aware of? Was there some reason to think this is the show America was clamoring for? I don’t get it. I didn’t think the movie was awful or anything, but just didn’t find it that interesting or worthy of the hype it briefly enjoyed.
I loved the movie, but when there were rumors of a sequel I hoped it wouldn’t happen because I knew lightning wouldn’t strike twice for this kind of thing. I watched some of the cartoon last night and agree that it was awful. There are no words to describe how bad the writing was. The jokes were stale. If they had the entire original cast, why not do a live action show? Not that it would have helped any.
This pretty much says it all. I liked the movie for the same reason. I wanted to like the cartoon, but it’s even worse than I had thought. Not only is it animated, it’s characters and scenarios are just way too wacky.
I didn’t think it was that bad. I watched the first one, then got distracted by the movie “Ray” on Ion, and missed the second one.
The first ep had at least one line that made me laugh: “Outta my way, fence!”
If you look at it like a throwback-type cartoon-- in the same style as the old Laverne and Shirley, Happy Days, Mork & Mindy, Ghostbusters, Pac-Man, WWF, etc. cartoons-- it’s not bad. The whole thing with the movie was that everyone in Napoleon’s world was painfully behind the rest of the country. I see this as sort of like that. A parody of those cartoon versions of movies and live-action TV shows. Cheesy, over-the-top and bad, but somewhat aware that it’s pretty cheesy and over-the-top and bad.
Maybe my opinion will change with time, but I didn’t think it was horrible. I love the movie, fwiw.
I loved the movie, but the ~10 minutes I saw of the cartoon were awful. It was the episode with Napoleon and Kip fighting in an arena.
I think the movie was about quirky misfits getting through life the best way they knew how, and rapid-fire jokes on an animated show just don’t convey that.
I’ve seen much of the movie, but only in sporadic bunches, and didn’t really care for it. Napolean’s mannerisms and voice made me laugh a bit in the movie, but not so much that I’ve ever felt compelled to sit and watch the whole thing. That said, I saw the first 10-15 minutes of the cartoon (the one with the zits and fighting), and I thought it was funny. I can’t recall what the specifics were, but something with Napolean and the coach was really funny. I’ll come back in a week when the episode is on Fox’s website.