I woke up at nine this morning for two reasons. Any other morning I’ll wake up to watch a new episode of “Curious George” on PBS, followed by a rerun of “The Golden Girls” on Lifetime. This morning, out of curiosity, I changed my schedule to catch “The Golden Girls”, followed by what I thought was the premiere of Cartoon Network’s new series, “The Land Before Time.” Turns out that they’ve shown it already before, but oh well.
Here’s a little history about me. As a wee lad, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie “The Land Before Time.” As the years went by, I’d become a closet fan of Don Bluth, the film’s director and director of many other classics that went on to have convoluted sequels. I’d even started on watching the DTV sequels as they came along. As any parent these days will tell you, there aren’t any more entries in the kiddy film genre than “The Land Before Time” and it’s currently eleven sequels, but after I turned twelve and had just finished watching the fifth film “The Mysterious Island,” I’d lost all hope in the series’ returning to the shining beauty of the first film.
Among the problems that the sequels faced were the choice to make them musicals with the some of the most annoying music ever written, the steadily weakening plots, the mysterious lacking of compelling elements, the animation becoming less and less rich, and that bittersweet spot of darkness that the original had getting progressively sugarcoated for preschoolers. The plot element of Littlefoot being led on by the spirit of his mother who remains in his heart forever is completely forgotten in the sequels and, as far as I know, hasn’t been referenced once. The films had become a shadow of their former greatness and would never rise again.
I remember years ago, working at Safeway, watching as a mother bought a copy of “The Land Before Time VIII: The Big Freeze.” The cover featured Littlefoot and all his friends covered in snow and smiling, all blissfully unaware that dinosaurs were cold-blooded and would probably freeze to death pretty easy in the snow. Dan, the checker at Safeway, commented slyly on this front cover, “Do you really think they’d be smiling like that if they knew they were about to become extinct?”
I’ve secretly been waiting years to be able to tear the series to shreds, and now that I have the opportunity, I’ll do so as much as I please, so just bear with me here folks. Last years, after I watched the advertisement for “The Land Before Time XXVXXIII: The Indeterminable Roman Numeral,” a funny thought hit me. If they have so many convoluted storylines that would probably fill up twenty minutes if they just cut the crappy music out, why don’t they just make a TV series out of it? Technically, that had already happened with “Dink, the Little Dinosaur,” a 1989 Hanna Barbera series which overflows with similarities to TLBF, but it’s not quite the same thing here. I mean an actual TV spin-off of the movie series. I guess I should stop thinking about certain things, because they seem to happen.
This brings me to this morning when I awoke with curiosity just to watch this show and see if they’d improved any or my long time disliking for the series was justified. I guess they must have improved on something because I can finally say that what I saw was…watchable. I will say that the attention to animation quality seems to have improved by a longshot. The image is clear, vibrant and very smooth moving. The only nitpick I have with it was the color scheme. Whereas the color scheme of the first film seemed to focus more on naturalistic coloring with a lavish variation on colors used, the style carried over from the film series to the TV show has lost the naturalism and gone with plain bright colors. After the show, I was left with a craving for Fruit Loops. I kid you not.
Another nice thing about the TV series is that they’ve decided to make Chomper a regular. Chomper, the friendly little sharptooth who was introduced in the second film only to disappear until the fifth and never be seen again until now, was the only redeemable quality of the sequels that I can look back on fondly. To me, he showed that if a group of Technicolor dinos from different species’ could get along, so could one of the ever demonized “sharpteeth” the series had. He’s one of the few newer characters who carries the heart of the original film. Kudos to the show creators for making the decision of keeping him for the show.
Among other few new characters is Ruby, another kid dino of undeterminable species who looks like she could be Chomper’s emo punk big sister. I don’t know where she came from or why she lives in a cave near the Great Valley with Chomper in this series, but my opinion on her is actually really neutral. Then there’s Redclaw, the sharptooth outside the Great Valley who unleashes a perfectly non-frightening reign of terror on the dino folk in the Mysterious Beyond…with his ever intimidating RED CLAW! Boo. Scare you? Didn’t think so. He’s an average villain though, considering the path that this franchise has taken. Once again, neutral opinion on this character.
Troubles that I do have with the show lie immediately with the voice cast. I understand that the first film’s child cast has either grown up or died tragically (
Sad, but true) but I think they can probably do better. Much of the cast does either a good or alright job following the voices of their predecessors. I see
Anndi McAfee still voices Cera after ten years on the job. At the age of 27, she still does a good job. It’s the girl that voices Ducky that bothers me. Her voice is just too low, but that’s what happens to most kids as they grow into adults. And when I first heard Spike’s voice, I thought that the bullet that took poor Judith Barsi’s life should have been saved for whoever is poorly doing Spike’s grunts and moans here, but then I discovered that it was veteran voice actor
Rob Paulsen and thought perhaps he could be spared for his contributions to the animation world. But still, how hard is it to find a voice actor who can play a mute character like the original voice actor did?
In any case, I think perhaps aside from the series’ faults, I’ll keep waking up to it in the morning. Don’t ask why I’m doing this at age 22, I couldn’t honestly give you a straight answer. Perhaps after my recent breakup, my inner child needs to watch some of his former heroes back in action, but I’ll stick with it a few more episodes to see how it goes. They still have the crappy songs in the series, probably because it’s a cheap gag to fill up time, but I’ll either stomach them or just change the channel for a minute. We’ll see what happens tomorrow morning, though.
Wow, that certainly was a long blog. Sorry about that, folks.
