Ringkasan Film

"Underdog" was a delightful low-budget 1960s television cartoon series, created by Total Television, a major contender in the Jay Ward "Rocky & Bullwinkle" school of animated TV satire. The crudely-drawn characters, brought to life by voice talent superstars such as Wally Cox and Alan Freed, were simplistic, even pathetic, and wholly lovable. So cheap and threadbare was the production, its very existence was a metaphor, an "underdog" of the TV cartoon genre.

What Disney has done with this abominable remake is to take every single element that made the original series endearing and toss it out the window, superimposing the absolute worst in current cinema to create a bloated, ugly, unrecognizable mongrel.

The original Underdog was a strangely-drawn dog, most likely a beagle. In a vapid attempt to make it more realistic, the remake "improves" this charming conceit by substituting a boring, real beagle. To add insult to injury, the beagle's mouth is animated via those horrible CGI tricks that have cursed "talking animal" movies since BABE.

A huge part of the original Underdog's charm was his pathetic, fey, nerdy voice, with Wally Cox's efforts embodying the lovable geek outcast persona which was essential to the character's sympathetic nature. The remake Underdog talks like a teenage airhead, with a raspy, arrogant, smart-ass vocal character that makes you immediately hate him.

Thanks to more second-rate CGI rubbish, Underdog can fly. Wow. Underdog's arch-rival, Simon Bar-Sinister was one bizarre dude, easily likable and loathsome at once; Peter Dinklage's redux is just another lame action-hero stereotype, and as homo-erotic as Topher Grace in SPIDERMAN 3.

This is arguably the most ill-conceived remake project since LEAVE IT TO BEAVER and FLIPPER, although Hollywood remakes of TV series have, with remarkably few exceptions, been bad ideas from start to finish. Updating vintage pop culture to mirror the bland, soulless modern day cultural environment is a concept doomed from the start, and only Hollywood would dare something so blind and self-destructive. Image someone in the fine art world taking a Van Gogh painting and pretending to "improve" it by Photoshopping all the crude spots out! They would be tarred and feathered and run out of town! Yet Hollywood gleefully takes beloved cultural icons and gruesomely dismembers them until they are little more than familiar corpses (think THE HONEYMOONERS, WILD WILD WEST, DRAGNET, etc.) One of the few remake series to escape this violent fate was the Brady Bunch movies, which fiercely maintained the vintage look and feel of the original TV series, and merely superimposed some tawdry sexual content, to brilliant effect.

UNDERDOG, the remake, should have been a cartoon, indeed, a BAD cartoon, with goofy drawings, weird voices, and a boss soundtrack, a lovingly retro experience and not the soul-dead live-action mutation that it is. The question is, if the goal is to take everything out which made the original lovable, why bother remaking it? Is the name value alone sufficient to warrant such a crass, cynical move? Of course, for every person who mourns the death of cinema with every new flop like this, there will be another goon who grunts, "This movie looks freaking awesome!" But surely, this witless piffle merely confirms what many movie-lovers already know, and drastically dwindling box office receipts confirm: Corporate Hollywood is terminally ill, and poisoning our culture to death. It is high time to put it down. Don't go to the theater, don't rent the video, don't buy the DVD, don't even mention that a movie like this exists. Ignore it completely. Watch old movies. Make a stand.