Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-review by Professor Popinjay

I had seen the 1977 musical before. In fact I had some long lasting trauma from it. You never know what will affect a kid but when they have no concept of what is going on in a scene and can’t effectively articulate inquiries to help understand, it messes with them. There’s a scene where this snake oil salesman is practicing some questionable dentistry and all manner of wires and tools are sticking out of a dude’s mouth. The salesman gets interrupted and hands to the “patient” a weight and explains that a horrific thing will occur should the man let the weight sink. To me at my young age it was like a scene from the film SAW. I didn’t know it was supposed to be funny.

Ever since that fateful day I avoided this film like the plague until years later when my wife encouraged the family to watch it together. My knee jerk reaction was to ask if she thought the kids could handle that movie as I remember it being rather horrific. She thought I was being silly so I explained. Then we watched it. Yeah, she gets it. With no context that scene is more horrific than funny.

But the songs are fun (except for “Brazzle Dazzle Day” which goes on too long and is kind of cringy) and the story is cute. And you can’t beat early Don Bluth animation. Elliot the dragon has Don’s unmistakable characteristics and charm. The scene where they put a real life net over the animated dragon is very impressive for its time and really sells the believability that this animated dragon actually exists in this live-action world. In fact the interactions between real boy Pete and animated Elliot are all pretty believable.

Regarding the song that went on too long… I know it’s a musical. Every once in a while though, a musical will have a song for the sake of having a song instead of a song that furthers the plot and/or character development. The term “Big-Lipped Alligator Moment” has been coined by YouTuber The Nostalgia Chick, and its definition encompasses this odd occurrence perfectly. My biggest pet peeve in films are scenes, songs, and humor, just being tacked on because we gotta fill time, we haven’t had a song in awhile, or the film is just too serious and needs some levity. It never feels right and always hurts the film in my opinion.

Jim Dale as Dr. Terminus (the snake oil salesman) and his partner played by Red Buttons are actually pretty great in retrospect now that I understand they were supposed to be funny. In fact they kind of steal the show. An elderly Mickey Rooney seems to have been let loose on the location as well and scurries all over the set doing standard Mickey Rooney things, chewing on scenery, rummaging through bins of old props for who knows what. It’s all pretty entertaining. All in all this film was pretty enjoyable when it was not traumatizing me.

The 2016 version was not a musical and was surprisingly bereft of any Mickey Rooneys, all of him having passed away just two years prior. I remember very little of this film except my takeaway was “cutting down trees is bad.” I live in the Pacific Northwest. My family is a bunch of loggers. There are so many trees here, the whole of civilization could be housed with lumber from here and in the time it would take to harvest that much lumber enough trees would have regrown to do it all over again and we would still have MULTIPLE horizon-spanning forests reaching as far as the eye can see. We literally can’t log it fast enough.

I know a villain is dependent on the perspective of the protagonists but the villains in this film should not have been evil loggers, they should have been idiots irresponsibly setting off fireworks and tossing cigarettes out of car windows. Even a cgi fire breathing dragon was careful enough to live in that forest without burning it to the ground in minutes. But I’m not here to talk about dangers to the ecosystem and Oregon’s economic infrastructure. I’m here to talk about movies and this one, it seems, was forgettable. A few pointless songs tacked on might have improved it, or I don’t know, maybe get Jim Carrey to play an updated Dr. Terminus and stick to the original plot.