Review of Yogi Bear (2010) by Shiira — 21 Dec 2010

Crap like "The Yogi Bear Hour" and other William Hanna and Joseph Barbera crimes against animation(save for their stint with MGM) are the foremost reason why some people today still insist on pigeonholing "cartoons" as being strictly a medium for children.

All that junk which inundated the airwaves on those Saturday mornings of yore can be attributed to Hanna-Barbera's maiden voyage("The Ruff and Reddy Show") into television(following a successful run helming "Tom and Jerry" shorts).

Their second offering, "The Huckleberry Hound Show", made its debut in 1958, and right away, the Jellystone National Park bear became the program's breakout star, paving the way for future successes such as "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" and "The Jetsons", and other like-minded production companies who imitated Hanna-Barbera's cut-rate animation methods, which more than often, married the cut-rate imagination of their banal premises and storylines.

The only means of justifying, as it turns out, such ephemeral programming, is through compartmentalization, in which the aging Generation X-er views a show like "The Yogi Bear Hour" purely as a nostalgic trip, divorced from any sort of critical language that would delineate the shoddiness of the overtly commercial enterprise, one whose sole purpose was to peddle sugary breakfast cereals to little kids.

As art, even the venerable Flintstones, were not gr-r-r-r-eat, even by Adult Swim standards. On "The Simpsons"(which was the first prime-time animated program since Fred and Wilma left the air in 1960, creator Matt Groening seems to express a love/hate relationship with Hanna-Barbera's body of work through the cartoon-within-a cartoon, "The Itchy and Scratchy Hour", an ultra-violent homage to the feuding characters' predecessors, "Tom and Jerry", the crowning artistic achievement in a chequered past for these problematic animators.

But is it homage? Maybe not. In each episode, the mouse(Itchy) eviscerates the cat(Scratchy) so thoroughly and in such graphic detail, the evocation to the MGM shorts hardly looks like a loving one, but instead, takes on the appearance of being a desecration; a rebuke, perhaps, to the sell-out that followed when the collaborative team transitioned themselves from the big screen to the small screen, where they proceeded to infantilize the art form in the superceeding decades to follow.

Groening seemingly pisses on the one accomplishment that Hanna and Barbera can hang their hats on, in which Bart and Lisa, once every feline snuff short reaches its inevitable solution, laughs, or rather, gets the last laugh, as if mocking the children's programming pioneers, who once launched a Yogi Bear offshoot in outer space(the short-lived "Yogi's Space Race", which capitalized on the "Star Wars" phenomena), and laughed all the way to the bank.

And now, six years after a certain talking dog last got the big-screen treatment(2004's "Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), the talking bear undergoes the same computer-generated transmogrification process, as well, a consolation prize of sorts for missing out on the three-strip Technicolor process.

Similar to his canine stablemate with the speech impediment, the smooth-talking bear with a propensity for thievery has never looked better, but despite the makeover, the twenty-first century edition of this allegedly loved bear finds himself stuck in the same one-note narrative that rued the earlier models and their respective programs("Yogi's Gang", "Yogi's Treasure Hunt", and "Laff-A-Lympics, where the Yogi Bears squared off with the Scooby-Doos and the Really Rottens), which are best left forgotten on the popular culture trash heap.

The only entertainment that can be imparted from this live-action version of "Yogi Bear" is the thought of Justin Timberlake(the epitome of smarm in David Fincher's "The Social Network", playing Napster founder Sean Parker) doing his Boo-Boo voice-overs in the sound booth, since it's pretty clear, as evidenced by the shortage of laughs(Anna Faris, notwithstanding), that neither he nor Dan Ackroyd were allowed to improvise.

Like Trix, "Yogi Bear" is for kids, but alas, herein lies the paradox: it's for kids who grew up. After all, the last original Yogi Bear cartoons ran in the mid-eighties. Since then, the aforementioned "Simpsons" happened.

"Spirited Away" happened. "The Triplets of Belleville" happened". "King of the Hill" happened. "Mulan" happened(minority opinion). "Ratatouille" happened.

More sophisticated than your average cartoon-watcher(the kids of Generation X, who may not know who Yogi is), the now-mature viewer may wonder why a frog-mouth turtle would impress national park patrons more than a talking bear(who can maneuver a jet-ski like a Go-Go) when Jellystone nearly closes due to a mayor's machinations to rezone the land.