I should be able to get out an update for Monday the gosh eleventh, unless something stupid has already happened.

———————————————————————————

I was going to speak today about some of the election day signs I had seen recently but news with more bearing on society has come to my attention: Another Air Buddies sequel.

You might be aware that “Air Bud” was a real dog who could do a simple trick that involved jumping and assisting an already tossed ball through a basketball-themed hanging hoop, and a more impressive trick that involved tolerating John Stamos. You might also recall that through a trail of events too stupid to be analyzed without special protection (imagine a solar eclipse of inanity; you cannot take it in all at once without taking permanent damage) , a fictionalized version of Air Bud begat 5 offspring dogs who could legitimately play all manner of sports and also talk, which these days is no longer in itself an adequately impressive skill for a fictional dog to have.
Consider that the Air Buddies first appeared in Air Bud 3: World Pup, released in 2000. Or don’t, and I will in your place. The original Air Bud dog was 9 to 12 years old when he became dead. The air buddies are now older than their father was at the time of his death, but are still puppies. Never mind that Air Bud was dead before Air Bud 3 entered production, and these puppies must then be children of the replacement Bud. That does not matter.

oh pog, does anything matter?

What matters is that these puppies could speak human language, play every sport, and never got old, and that wasn’t enough. Now, these dogs are superheroes, with [additional] magical powers, and costumes to match.

These dogs have secret identities. Nobody must know that these 5 talking dogs with magical powers that are puppies permanently are in reality the 5 talking dogs that magically can play sports and also never mature into adulthood. Because that would compromise the safety of their families of non-magical, regularly-aging dogs (even the replacement Bud stopped appearing after 2008’s Snow Buddies, which is ironic considering all the puppies that did not survive production). Mysteriously, their new powers such as the ability to create dogsized clothing, since letting anyone else do it would give up the secret identities) are granted by rings, but nothing is said of the other mystical devices that grant the power for pawed quadrupeds to comfortably and effectively equip jewelry designed for human fingers that do not regularly bear one fourth of the owner’s weight.

This film carries the insipirational message “you don’t need super powers to be a superhero,” despite the premise conspicuously and deliberately contradicting that.

Its true power is making a 3d-animated movie titled “epic” in 2013 seem original and inspired by comparison, so that I don’t even acknowledge it for three paragraphs, although super buddies tempt fate by making certain to use the word anyhow. Or maybe that is simply a condition for gaining financial backing now.

You know (for if you did not previously I now alert you), after five Police Academy movies they stopped making money. The problem with those is that they didn’t target a demographic that would gladly watch the same movie repeatedly, over and over until the sun turned into a prune. A demographic whose choices are commonly made for it, whom nobody is concerned about insulting or utterly blotting out the intelligence of. The formula is perfect: a parent, or a friend (enemy?) of a parent will see a movie like this and buy it with no thought and imagine a child will want to watch it. One less gift to buy later, right? It will not be vetted for quality or originality, ever, and this can be repeated every single year, even though no child should stay that easily entertained for so many years as to risk running out of these. But that could be pre-911 thinking on my part; the more kids are raised on limitless quantities of trash, the more likely they are to grow into adults who think trash is good, which is very good for business, because trash is easy to create. Those people who made all the hacky Cinderella and Lion King sequels must feel like idiots now, wasting all that time and effort redoing the same schlock repeatedly but with different sets of characters in different environments when but 1 done with minimal effort would suffice.

This is the seventh Air Buddies film, which does NOT include the first Air Bud series, which included five films . This also does not include the two Santa Paws films [that we know of], which are themselves spun off from the air buddies spin off series. Almost all of these were directed by somebody named Robert Vince, who seems to have literally come from nowhere.

Outside this series, he directed four movies with chimpanzees as main characters (three of them about a chimpanzee who can also play every sport, while the fourth one is a ninja) plus a single movie about a dog who neither speaks nor plays sports, but does fulfill another standby of the nobody cares if a g-rated movie is dumb genre by having kids keep the dog a secret from their parents for [maybe a] reason. They probably keep the dog a secret because he can’t talk or play sports.

As best I can figure out, these all make heaps and beeps of money, but criticism is subdued because they aren’t released to theaters, and are “for kids” anyway, though that Smurfs sequel still made a profit of 200 million dollars, and that was 200 million dollars LESS than the first one. There is literally no financial incentive to make a movie –or any manner of product– for children that is not idiotic, tacky and proud of itself.
If you add in 3 Beverly Hills Chihuahuas and Raise the Woof, The Disney company has, since 2006, put out twelve talking dog films. Talking dog movies are nothing new, but there has never been this much nothing new at any previous point in history. I exclude Bolt, because that is legally a cartoon, in which it is not significant that a dog speaks, though it also carries the message that you don’t need super powers to be a hero, and also does not consider the dog’s speech to be a super power. I consider a “talking dog film” to be one in which real dogs, or computer puppets meant to be thought of as real, are presented as if they speak English and do extraordinary deeds in situations that are meant to be remotely plausible. Three of theses were released just in 2012. There are adolescent-age children growing up who think this is normal. They have no memory of a time when there wasn’t a new canine enunciation fest every single year. Additionally, there are five editions in a Tinker Bell series, with 2 more already in production. The sixth was going to be released this year, but was shoved aside to make room for Planes (about talking, celebrity-voiced airplanes), a spinoff from the Cars series (about talking, celebrity-voiced cars), which Disney doesn’t even own, and also aims to have its own series.

What does all this mean? It means that I need to stop bringing my camera into Wal Mart. Even if I only go in there three times a year it is statistically probable that there will be a “new” bad talking dog movie for sale and I will have to write about it. Even this website object is an uninspired sequel. No more talking dogs!

Now if’n you ask Ol’ Roy, this is a classic example of what happens when you try and sweep a cat under the bridge. Early to bed, early to bird, after all. It’s the elephant in the corner, if you will.

I will not. I want you to leave.

If you want a ballpark figure, birds of a feather weather wisely. Unless you’ve been living under a duck, it’s high time of month. Ol Roy’ll tell ya.