The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is Doogal.

This one will require some explanation: Once upon a time, there was a French puppet animation series called Le Manège enchanté. It ended up getting picked up by the BBC for a dub. However, they considered it too difficult to translate properly, so they just made their own scripts that kinda sorta followed what was happening on screen. It wound up being a huge hit, big enough that people blew a gasket when Auntie Beeb decided to mess around with the time slot. It was huge, but not enough to get any meaningful American release. As a result, I'm not familiar with it. In 2005, however, the Weinstein Company somehow managed to pick it up for American distribution. However, in the spirit of Harvey Weinstein's habit of simultaneously bringing interesting stories to the world and completely butchering them in the name of profit, he made a new dub for the film (despite the fact that a perfectly decent dub with the likes of Tom Baker, Jim Broadbent, Joanna Lumley, and Robbie Wiliams already existed.) He only retained two voice actors from the original dub, Ian McKellen and Kylie Minogue, and even the latter had to re-record her lines in an American accent. So, how did the new dub fare?

• The script is full of random pop culture references that add nothing. If you thought the reference humour in Shrek was distracting, just watch any given minute of the movie. I'll just give a list of properties referenced in ONE scene later in the post.
  
• When the script isn't just referencing much better movies, it's just banal shit that most decent writers would cut. Apparently, this script was written by Butch Hartman, but he claims that anywhere between 80-97% of what he wrote ended up getting rewritten by other writers, who kept clashing to the point where it all ends up as a massive clusterfuck.
  
• Judi Dench plays a narrator that just narrates the obvious. Kind of like what I think the original version would have been like, but more banal.
  
• Kevin Smith voices a random moose who was silent in the previous dubs, just saying stupid shit and farting.
  
• The actors who already did get a voice end up getting poorly matched, like Doogal getting voiced by the kid from Elf (whose acting is horrible enough that, when he says 'Look at Me' it took several takes for me to be sure he didn't say 'Fuck It') , Ermintrude the operatic cow being voiced by Whoopi Goldberg (whose voice and new dialogue is clearly better suited to soul than opera, but she still does songs from Carmen), and Jon Stewart having a really non-threatening voice for the villain (especially when his rival is voiced by Ian "Gandalf" McKellen).
  
• Dougal, whose name was spelled properly in the original, was given the phonetic spelling in the movie.
  

Also, in the making of featurette that I somehow managed to see before the feature film, Jon Stewart said: "Harvey Weinstein called and said 'Do this film' and I fear him, as most do, and I said 'Yes. Please don't hurt me.'" Yes, that was in official promotional material that made it on the DVD. That speaks volumes about the final product.

And properties referenced during the skeleton fight (a single 90-second scene):

• The Shining
  
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
  
• Pirates of the Caribbean
  
• The Whassup? Commercial from Anheuser-Busch.
  
• Bone Thugs n Harmony
  
• Dawn of the Dead
  
• The Matrix
  
• John Woo
  
• Wu-Tang Clan
  
• Possibly Homestar Runner if the "Hey, I'm Steve" line is actually a reference to Eh! Steve
  
• "Can't Touch This"
  
• Karate Kid
  

Don't believe me?



The rest of the film is only slightly less reference overdosed. Seriously, I think this may be the new contender for the Megatron Award for Bad Comedy when I cover this round of films for the Deep Hurting Project.