Movie Review: The Wild Thornberrys Movie

Klasky Csupo was doing extremely well in Nickelodeon around the 2000's. They had 4 successful TV shows with Rugrats, The Wild Thornberrys, As Told by Ginger, and Rocket Power and they released two financially successful movies that made over $150 million dollars. Their name meant quality, creativity, and classic animation back then and it seemed that they couldn't do any wrong. Their next announcement was their next movie based on another of their cartoons. On December 20, 2002, The Wild Thornberrys Movie debuted in theaters.



As I mentioned in my The Wild Thornberrys review, I don't like the show saying that it was boring, overrated, and has mostly annoying characters. So I didn't see the movie when it came out in theaters. But when we decided to do the tribute, I had no choice but to see the movie. Does this movie make me change my mind of the series or does it confirm my dislike for it? This is The Wild Thornberrys Movie.

The movie begins in East Africa where the introduction is a more different take on the intro from the TV series. Then we cut to the Thornberry family leaving to shoot footage of the elephants for their nature show while Eliza, Debbie, Donnie, and Darwin stay near the Comvee. Nigel's mother Cordelia from England is visiting the family taking in on the African safari. Eliza and Darwin leave the Comvee to hang out with a cheetah mother and her cheetah cubs. While they were playing, a helicopter appears out of nowhere and kidnaps one of the cheetah cubs named Tally. Eliza rushes and tries to capture the cub while hovering over the helicopter grabbing the net, but with no luck. The kidnapper pushed Eliza out of the copter. Eliza is saved due to Nigel and Marianne catch her with the Comvee. With Eliza being scolded by her parents for the reckless thing she did, Cordelia suggests that she would be sent to an all girls' boarding school in England to straighten her out. Eliza refuses, but her parents agree to do so. Nigel and Eliza have a father/daughter discussion that ends with him giving her a necklace. Darwin was disappointed when he learned about it, but Eliza had no choice but to go.



The next morning, Eliza leaves for the airport and arrives in England. While trying to adjust to her new surroundings, she meets up with her roommate Sarah Wellington. Sarah is a very snobbish girl who wishes for Eliza to keep away from her space and stuff. While adjusting, we see Darwin get out of Eliza's suitcase and disguises himself as a schoolgirl with Sarah's clothes. When their serving dinner, Darwin heads downstairs, but Eliza recognizes him right away and tries to hide him from the other girls. But Darwin make a huge mess and starts a food fight. With it, Sarah gets extremely messy and filled with food.



Then the other girls ask questions about Eliza and hears stories about her travels around the world. Sarah grows jealous with Eliza getting a huge amount of popularity among all the other girls. That night, Eliza dreams about the witch doctor who gave her her powers Shaman Nnyambo that she has to save Tally because she's in serious danger. Eliza wakes up and begs Sarah to pay for her trip back to Nairobi. She accepts and the next morning, they arrive in Nairobi. While taking the train, they see a hippo severely injured and captured with a net. They left the train and find out that the hippo was almost captured by poachers. Eliza and Darwin walk near the train tracks to get back to East Africa.



All of a sudden, a trailer drives by and two people named Sloan and Bree Blackburn help the hippo out. They are animal conversationalists who cared for the hippo and called an animal resort center to pick it up. Eliza and Darwin then continued on their journey. Meanwhile Debbie was at the Comvee looking over Donnie and sees her grandparents parachuting from a plane to find Eliza to take her back to school. The next day, Eliza makes it to the sahara where Tally was kidnapped to find clues. They meet up with Donnie and they continue to look around. That night, they meet up with Sloan and Bree and they talk about their love for animals. Eliza felt closure to them since it seems that they understood her love of animals.



When Debbie finds out that Donnie is missing, she borrows the family motorbike to search for him. She stumbles upon an African tribe where she asks the tribe members for help. None of them knew English and were willing to help except for a teenage boy. Debbie tries to communicate with him, but with no luck. However his willingness to help convinced Debbie to bring him along for the ride and she starts calling him Boko. Meanwhile, Donnie sneaks into Sloan and Bree's RV and looks around. Eliza and Darwin retrieve Donnie, but find Tally in a cage in the corner. Eliza then finally realizes that Sloan and Bree were the ones who kidnapped Tally and shot the rhino. While trying to get Tally out of her cage, Sloan and Bree find out that Eliza knows their secret of them being poachers. They reveal their plan of building an electric fence to kill all the migrating elephants to steal all their ivory. Sloan threatens to tell Eliza how they knew of their tasks, but Eliza stays silent. They then see Debbie in their cameras and Sloan has a plan. When Debbie asks Sloan if they've seen Donnie, Sloan grabs her and drags her near a cliff. Eliza runs out and tells him her secret of talking to animals. The spell is removed and Eliza loses her powers. Sloan and Bree run away and frees Debbie. The group drift on a log in a river while Debbie tries to put the pieces together of all of Eliza's actions. When she learned of Eliza's sacrifice, she gives her a sisterly embrace. When the log nears a waterfall, they all escape before the log falls.



Boko shows up with Debbie's motorbike and rescues them. That night, the poacher's plan commences with them activating the electric fence. Eliza makes it to one of the elephants and tries to communicate with it, but with no luck. Sloan orders his men to detonate explosives nearby to lead the elephants to its path and they continue to walk to the fence. Eliza then learns about kicking an elephant behind the ears and it responds. Sloan orders his men to detonate another set of explosives and most of them continue down the fence. Eliza then throws her father's necklace at the fence and they start walking away from it.



Sloan grabs Eliza from the copter about to drop her into the river when the shaman grants her powers back. She orders the elephants to attack and they grab the copter before it takes off. The officers then arrest Sloan, Bree, and his henchmen and the movie concludes with everything restoring back to normal.

When the movie first came out, it was a huge success. While it wasn't as financially successful as the first two Rugrats movie, it was critically successful. At the time, it was the highest rated movie that Nickelodeon ever aired with it being 80% according to Rotten Tomatoes. As for me, it was okay. The first half was extremely padded with the pointless plot of Eliza going to the boarding school with her leaving it moments later and underdeveloped moments in which Nigel and Eliza had father/daughter time. But then, things start to get interested in the second half with the inclusion of Sloan and Bree and the nice twist of Eliza losing her powers. You feel sadness when Eliza loses the one thing that made her unique and special, which is a surprise since I felt that she used that power in the wrong way in the TV series. In the movie, while she did make the mistake of not watching the baby cubs long enough, she worked hard in getting one of them back. It's sort of similar to the plot of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, but without the worthless padding in the first half of the movie. To me, it felt like a longer episode of the TV show. Nothing really special to it. If you're a fan of The Wild Thornberrys, I'd say check it out. If you're not, then take it for what it is. It's not too bad.

That's all for now. Tune in next time as we go into the year 2003 with Rugrats' spinoff show All Grown Up!



Hope to see you around Old School Lane soon. Thanks for reading.

-Patricia

Announcement about possible Rugrats revival

Over the years, there were petitions on getting the classic 1991 Nicktoon being revived. While there were rumors about Rugrats coming back, it wasn't confirmed. Now the Nickelodeon executives have been showing interest as of lately and many people's dreams may be coming true. Is Patricia excited about it? You would be surprised.

Old School Lane's Nickelodeon Tribute: Nickelodeon Robot Wars/Scaredy Camp

Around 1987, there was a new competitive sport that formed around Denver, Colorado involving two people building robots to fight one another in a huge tournament against other people and their robots. That was called "Critter Crunch". Then around 1991, a man named Marc Thorpe, a designer for LucasToys division of Lucasfilm organized Robot Wars, a televised program about a group of people building robots for battle. As time went on, more and more robot combat tournaments formed. The popularity slowly grew into a major cult following and became more mainstream when another TV program named Battlebots debuted on Comedy Central around 2000. When I was in Willvolution, one of the members of the site was involved in robot combat with a group of his friends. Nickelodeon decided to make a kid version of Robot Wars and called it Nickelodeon Robot Wars which debuted on August 25, 2002.

The show would follow the competitors, which mostly contained kids with their parents, as they would talk about their robot and how they would build them. Then as time went on, we would get to a battle between the robots. Each episode had a couple of battles, but some would spread to other episodes. The robots would be placed in a arena filled with many hazards to damage it more such as the Disc of Doom which would spin a robot to disrupt the controls, The Drop Zone where a heavy object such as a giant hammer would be dropping in a certain spot in the arena, and much more. The robots would have a few minutes to fight one another and the robot who survives, wins the round. 

Nickelodeon Robot Wars was cancelled due to low ratings on October 6, 2002, less than two months after it aired. Next to the 2002 reboot of Wild & Crazy Kids, it's currently the shortest lasting game show in Nickelodeon history. I can understand that robot combat is not for everyone. Some find it exciting, some found it boring. Most kids who saw it were confused to what it was and that something so bizarre could even exist. As for me, I enjoy this sport. It's very creative, filled with ingenuity, and very action packed. As for Nickelodeon's version of Robot Wars, it's pretty decent. Sure, some of the hazards had to be omitted such as flame pit, the fire jets, the buzzsaws, and the constant swearing, but it was shown on Nickelodeon. What do you expect? As time went on, robot combat slowly died away from the mainstream audience and went back into the underground territory where it's still hugely popular to this day. But now this sport is coming back in a new way in the form of the 2011 movie Real Steel and Syfy's Robot Combat League making fighting robots cool again. 

If you're a fan of robot combat tournaments, I would say check it out. But definitely watch the original Robot Wars since it has more hazards and action.

The next game show that debuted on Nickelodeon was based on another fad: scaring people in real life scenarios. Horror movies such as Friday the 13th and The Blair Witch Project made kids go into the woods or a camping ground where the unexpected was around the corner. It was dark, mysterious, spooky, and scary. Not since Are You Afraid of the Dark? there was a scary and thrilling show on Nickelodeon. That is until Scaredy Camp debuted on October 27, 2002.

The show was about a group of kids in a summer camp called Camp Lindenwood. At night, the host of the show Emma Wilson, the daughter of Weakest Link host Anne Robinson, would tell the story of an urban legend based on the camp. At the end, they would have to find clues based on the legend that they learned about. We would get to see the kids looking for the clues in the dark, scary camp in which as time went on, spooky things would be occurring. Really, not much to say about the show. The show lasted for less than a year until it ended on August 16, 2003. It was extremely difficult to find episodes online since it hasn't been on the air since 2007 and hasn't aired on Nickelodeon ever since. The show was a very interesting concept and had a really spooky atmosphere. 

I commend these game shows since it wasn't a reboot of an old game show and it was outside the box of what was a typical Nickelodeon game show was at that point. It was nice for them to take risks, but those risks were their downfall. It didn't find an audience and nowadays, it had been hugely forgotten. It's a shame too because if people would've have given it a chance, maybe more unorthodox game shows for Nickelodeon would've came out. Unfortunately, this would be the first indication of people's disinterest in game shows for kids.

That's all for now. Hope to see you around Old School Lane soon. Thanks for reading.

-Patricia

Old School Lane's Nickelodeon Tribute: Wild & Crazy Kids (2002 Reboot)

Due to the critical failure of Double Dare 2000, Nickelodeon hasn't had a game show in a while. Since Slime Time Live, the afternoon time slot that would play games and vote on what shows to see, was hugely popular among the millions of viewers tuning in. However, for the older teens who grew up with Nickelodeon back in the 90's, they weren't impressed with Slime Time Live since it was similar to U to U and Nick in the Afternoon with Stick Stickly and were starting to miss their favorite childhood shows from that time period. The Nickelodeon executives decided to give game shows another chance with another reboot of an older game show. Instead of a Nickelodeon game show from the 80's, they decided to do a reboot a game show from the 90's with Wild & Crazy Kids. The reboot debuted on July 29, 2002.



There were few differences between the original and the reboot. One of them was that instead of three hosts consisting of teenagers, it had one adult host named Mati Moralejo. Another difference was that they constantly changed the colors of the teams from red, blue, orange, green, black, yellow, and purple. The final thing was that they had different games that rarely was rehashed from the original game show. Other than that, it was the exact same thing. Similar to the original, it had the same kids competing, the same rules, and the same setting of taking place mostly outside playing crazy, over-the-top sporting events. Also in the mix were celebrity guests such as Olympic skyer Bode Miller and Spy Kids co-stars Daryl Sabara and Alexa Vega.

The reboot lasted even shorter than Double Dare 2000 as it was cancelled due to low ratings on September 16, 2002, less than two months after it debuted. The reboot of Wild & Crazy Kids currently is the shortest lived Nickelodeon game show in history. Overall, I can understand why it was cancelled and why no one watched it. In my review of the original Wild & Crazy Kids, I said that my main gripes about the show were the three forgettable hosts, the crappy cinematography, and the messy games trying to capture the popularity of Double Dare. While the cinematography is much better and some of the games are pretty cool, it was pretty much unrecognizable. Unlike Double Dare 2000 in which they played it way too safe and didn't bring anything new to the table, the reboot of Wild & Crazy Kids was absolutely nothing like the original. There were no slime, no pies, and no gross moments. It was pretty much all extreme games. Also Mati Moralejo is even more bland and forgettable than the original hosts and that's saying something. I have to say that out of all the Nickelodeon game show reboots, this is probably the worst. This was a pointless and unnecessary reboot. I don't recommend checking it out.

That's all for now. Tune in next time as I take a look at two other forgotten Nickelodeon game shows from 2002: Robot Wars and Scaredy Camp.

Hope to see you around Old School Lane soon. Thanks for reading.

-Patricia

Old School Lane's Nickelodeon Tribute: The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius

With the huge financial and critical success of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Nickelodeon decided to make it into a TV series. John A. Davis came back to create The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius which debuted on July 20, 2002.



The show took place after Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius in which in involves Jimmy Neutron (voiced by Debi Derryberry) doing crazy experiments alongside with his best friends Carl Wheezer (voiced by Rob Paulsen) and Sheen Estevez (voiced by Jeff Garcia). All of a sudden, the experiment would go horribly wrong and it's up to Jimmy to save the day.



What's interesting about this show is that, unlike the majority of animated Nickelodeon movies that would become a TV series, the majority of the main voice actors came back to do it. This becomes a plus because most of the time it would be major celebrities voicing the main characters and they would have to hire voice actors to impersonate them. But this is not the case: with the exception of the villains King Goobot and Ooblar (voiced by Patrick Stewart and Martin Short), most of the people who voiced the characters were voice actors. Also, when watching this show, it's nice to know that there's continuity in it. It's very well established that this series takes place after the movie since they do bring back King Goobot and Ooblar despite the fact that they're voiced by dsifferent actors. Not to mention that they bring in new villains to the show such as absentminded Professor Calamatous, his good looking daughter Beautiful Gorgeous, the spoiled rich kid Eustace Strich, the alien trio Zix, Tee, and Travoltron, Grandma Taters, The Junk Man, and more.

While that all seems nice and dandy, the show has some major flaws. One thing, the majority of the episodes are extremely monotonous. The same thing happens on every episode: Jimmy invents something, the invention goes wrong, Jimmy doesn't know what to do, he solves it by something he learned a few minutes ago, and problem solved. I understand that in the first movie he made a lot of mistakes was because he was a kid. He didn't listen to his mother's warning and he went through the consequences of almost losing the entire town of Retroville's parents to Poultra. But he learned his lesson and fought to stop King Goobot from accomplishing his goals. He was more relatable that way because we already had Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory to be the child prodigy. He was a stick in the mud and didn't have time for anyone else, especially friends. He concentrated on his experiments  Jimmy was the slight opposite. While he was a child prodigy, he was still a kid. He had friends, he didn't like girls, he liked sugary snacks, and he invented things that a kid would like. However, that's pretty much thrown out the window with the animated series.



Jimmy in the animated series is a lot more conceded and a lot more in-your-face when it comes to his intelligence. He feels like he's the smart one in his group of friends and that everyone around him is useless. As I mentioned in my top 20 worst Nickelodeon male role models, Jimmy has became very unlikable in the TV series. When you have a main character that is this unlikable in a kids' show, why should we root for him when he saves the day?  It's hard, isn't it? Unfortunately, as much as that is a bit harsh on Jimmy's part, it's true. Carl and Sheen are useless when it comes to the bad scenarios with Jimmy's experiments. While I do understand that there has to be a comic relief in any show for kids, but having two is overkill. While it is true that they're comic reliefs for different reasons, Jimmy really needs another person's help when it comes to dealing with his experiments. Carl and Sheen hang out with Jimmy all the time and they should be a little bit knowledgeable with what to do with science. Sure, Sheen would be a huge stretch, but at least he knows pretty much everything about Ultra Lord, his favorite superhero. He can be smart when he needs to be, which is extremely rare. Carl is innocently stupid. He's a sick, chubby kid who loves llamas. However, the show has proven that Carl is the dumbest in the group, which is a bit unfair. I really like the character, but he never had a chance to shine and show his full potential. He's kind and sweet, but a bit useless. If you would have cut out Carl as a character, not much would be different in the show. But then again, most of the men on the show are complete morons. It seems that it's the women in this show seem to be more capable of saving the world more than the men which enhances the stupid old cliche of women being smart and men being stupid that you see in most kids' shows.

Another huge flaw is the first few seasons. There is no incoherent plot in the majority of the first few episodes. As mentioned previously, it's very monotonous of doing the same thing over and over again. As time goes on, things start to get interesting when the villains start to appear. Other than that, some of the episodes are a huge snorefest. You're just waiting for something interesting to happen, but in the end, you're going to get the same thing over and over again. The later seasons are better, which I must give props to. The TV movies involving with The Fairly Oddparents are the best things that the show has ever been involved in. While the show was created by two different people, for some reason, they really work. Except the third movie, that one sucks.



The final nail in the coffin involves with the final season. The episodes of the final seasons were mixed up and shown in an incorrect order. The TV movie special involving Jimmy meeting up with his major villains Professor Calamatous, Beautiful Gorgeous, Eustace Strych, Junk Man, Baby Eddie, Grandma Taters, the alien trio, and Goobot was shown before they even introduced Grandma Taters or Baby Eddie. Kids watching this the first time around would be confused. Also, they showed the final episode "Lady Sings the Blues" in the incorrect order as well. They showed the final Jimmy Timmy Power Hour as the last episode of the series. Inconsistency is thrown out the window in a time in which it was the most important. That is unacceptable.

The show lasted for 4 years until it ended its run on November 25, 2006. I stated a lot of flaws in the show that might make people who grew up with it as kids very angry, but I'm sorry. I just see a show that has too many not to ignore. While it was one of the most popular Nicktoons in the 2000's, it just doesn't do it for me anymore. I'm really disappointed and heartbroken by it because it had the potential to be a more relatable version of Dexter's Laboratory, but it doesn't do that unlike the movie. While the animation is decent and the voice acting is fantastic, this is a show that is a little bit too hard for me to recommend checking out with the exception of nostalgia.

That's all for now. Hope to see you around Old School Lane soon. Take care.

-Patricia

Old School Lane Casual Chats Episode 9: British TV Shows with Kieron a.k.a. Gurning Chimp

In this episode of Casual Chats, special guest Kiernon a.k.a. Gurning Chimp from Manic Expression discuss about British kids' shows, TV shows, and the overall culture. Please excuse the bad streamline of conversation. It was a bad connection on Skype.

Manic Expression Podcast Plays: Little Monsters

Kevin and I had written a new podcast play series based on teenage monsters going to school learning to be scary to continue their family's legacy. Kevin, myself, and a few members from Manic Expression helped a lot in getting this done! I hope you guys enjoy it!