Nickelodeon Should Be Ashamed

Glenn Reynolds pans the Hey, Arnold! movie,

But forget the lame plot. The animation sucked; the drawings all looked faintly blurry all the time. It wasn’t even up to Hanna-Barbera standards. And it wasn’t bad projection — the previews were sharp, and so were the titles. It was just crap.

That ain’t even the half of it.

I spent several years reviewing films and videos for the local Gannett paper and I thought I had seen some real dogs in my time, but this movie was so godawful retched that it defies all logic. I would rather be forced to watch The Punisher repeatedly than have to sit through Hey, Arnold! again.

And I’m a huge fan of the television show. My daughter and I were both anticipating this movie and I rearranged plans to take her to see this movie.

The animation was so bad it made me want to vomit. As Reynolds notes, the previews and other promotional materials gave the impression that the movie was going to be of professional quality (like the Rugrats movies have been) but instead Nickelodeon simply use their in-house facilities to do a 70 minute or so episode of the show and then printed that on film stock.

But what looks great on my 36 inch television looks like wretched crap on a movie screen. Didn’t they test screen this dog to anyone?

Reynolds also disses the plot, which was one long anti-gentrification screed. But more than just the plot, the movie lacked completely the quirky atmosphere that makes the television show so much fun. There is a lot of ambiguity in the characters and situations in the show (which is one of its strengths — it avoids the moral platitudes and mini-lectures that adults always want to insert into kids’ shows), so it was weird seeing this simplistic black-and-white morality tale. Much of the time the movie looked like what Hey, Arnold! might be if the idiots responsible for Fern Gully took over the show.

Nickelodeon should be ashamed of itself for unloading this piece of crap film on unsuspecting fans of the show.