CURIOUS GEORGE: THE MOTION PICTURE

I have just been made aware of the Curious George movie coming out next year. It piqued my curiosity, since I loved the character and my almost-4-year-old son likes them too. So I went to the Moviefone website to view the trailer. The page has a little headline for the movie info: "The King of "curious"ity!" Do you idiots understand how puns work at ALL? I mean, the writer of that line thought he was making a creative literary leap by connecting CURIOUS to CURIOSITY. So, hackles up, I took a quick look at the trailer.

I was greeted by a grotesque abomination of Mr George. The monkey has now been rendered to look like some kind of Anime mutant child. He was clearly given a healthy dose of 21st century "attitude" that kids must have in their cartoons these days. On the bright side, it looked fairly well animated. On the down side...everything else. Ok, I'm being harsh. It looks like a decent kids movie. The problem is that they tinkered with a well-loved character. That never works. Let me repeat that...THAT NEVER WORKS! STOP DOING IT! We are treated, in the trailer, to Curious George drinking a latte and belching, followed by the Man With the Yellow Hat (who no longer smokes pipes) saying, "This is AWEsome!" Yes, I know, this is all perfectly acceptable behavior for cartoons. But I maintain it is NOT OK for Curous George and the Man With The Yellow Hat to enter the 21st Century. Make a movie about one of the bajillions of books he's done instead of inventing new, wacky, modern adventures.

Oh, that reminds me of a funny joke I heard: Donald Rumsfeld tells George W Bush that two Brazillian soldiers were killed in Iraq. Dubya says, "Holy cow! That's unbelievable! Exactly how many is a Brazilian?"

Anyway, the trailer concludes by telling me that the film boasts "magical" songs by Jack Johnson. Color me skeptical. That it claims to have the voice talents of WILL FREAKING FERREL among others. I'm sorry, but I really can't stand the guy. He ain't funny, folks. Face it. The emperor? NO CLOTHES! So yeah, WF plays Mr. With The Yellow Hat. After watching the trailer again, I realized he did a decent job. The Man is a non-character. He's the* straight man to George's manic monkey. So I guess he can't do too much harm. That got me thinking, why hire him at all? Why pay the million or so he probably got and not hire some talented voice guy who nobody knows? Is his voice talent really better than anyone elses? Ok, Ok, we all know it's the fact that he's a name actor. But seriously, who in their right mind is gonna go, "Hey, dude, wanna go see that new Will Ferrell movie?" Well, that goes without saying, but I meant that the hypothetical person was looking at a Curious George ad at the time. But I guess someone smarter than I also thought that Angelina Jolie had JUST the right voice to play a fish in Shark Tale, so what the hell can I possibly know? George's voice is that annoying, uvula-crushing cartoon/muppet voice that Elmo from Sesame Street, Treelo from Bear in the Big Blue House, Stitch from Lilo and Stitch and Nibbler from Futurama all use.

My final gut-wrenching discovery was that, through IMDB.COM I found out that the tagline for the film will be "Show me the monkey!"

Well, here ya go. Happy?