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The internet is abuzz this morning with various degrees of complaint about the Yogi Bear trailer, and with good reason — it indeed looks terrible:

It’s a CGI-fest starring Dan Aykroyd for some reason that’s likely to insult the intelligence of sub-one-year-olds. This seems unarguable. But rather than just blindly complain about how it’s molesting our childhood or whatever, honestly, what were people expecting from a Yogi Bear movie?

Let’s discuss after the jump:

Yogi Bear is a 50-year-old cartoon about a bear based on a Honeymooners character and named after a Yankee who wears a tie and steals picnic baskets and gets chased by a ranger who always ends up getting messed up. Is a dumb-looking film adaptation really murdering the source material? What did we expect, Paul Thomas Anderson hijacking the project and turning it into some dark, avant-garde meta-animation? Granted, the trailer does look exceptionally stupid, but let’s not act like if the Yogi Bear cartoon came out today, we’d actually care about it.

The nostalgic outrage reminds me of when the Inspector Gadget movie came out and many 80s-kids — myself included — whined about how bad it looked and how they were ruining a cartoon we loved growing up. Obviously I still have fond memories of that show, but seriously, every single episode involved Gadget misunderstanding everything in some impossibly ignorant way, then bumbling through the case as Penny and Brain solved everything on their computer book behind the scenes (very prescient with that computer book, huh?) Sure, the movie was dumb, but it’s not like they butchered Catcher In The Rye, they just updated a thing that I was too young to think was stupid to a time when I was no longer too young to think it was stupid.

We can complain about the actual Yogi Bear trailer itself, and the laziness of the CGI and the voice acting, and about this golden age of Hollywood brand-pilfering, and be completely right to do so. But c’mon people, it’s not like they’re ruining The Flintstones (already done) or Looney Tunes or The Muppets — just because it’s based on an old thing doesn’t mean that old thing wasn’t also kinda stupid. It’s a bad-looking movie, but really, this film isn’t destroying our childhoods, it’s just the product of completely standard Hollywood laziness.

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Related posts:

1. Yes, This Is The Actual Tagline For Yogi Bear
2. Fear this: Dan Aykroyd as Yogi Bear
3. Stupid People Doing Stupid Sh*t: Old Man Attempts “Hip” Dance
4. Headline Of The Day: The Bear Fugitive
5. Yogi’s Gang: When Saturday Mornings Became Green