Bargain Bin Reviews: The Adventures of Scamper the Penguin
By: Brian Cotnoir
Hello all welcome to
the first posting of a new series here on “Asylum for Nerds” called Bargain Bin
Reviews. What I will essentially be
doing here is taking a look at obscure and/or foreign straight to video/DVD
animated films (mostly made for children).
For the First Edition of this New Series, I chose to review “The Adventures of Scamper the Penguin”,
which isn’t the original name of the film.
This film was a joint collaboration between Japanese and Soviet Union
film studios in 1986 called “The
Adventures of Small Penguin Lolo”.
Now for the American English release they changed a few things around
like the characters names, and edited out a few scenes in order to make the
film more “Family Friendly” and they
gave us this pile of garbage.
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| Aren't you two adorable. You'll fry up nice for dinner tonight |
The
film is the story of a little penguin chick named Scamper, whose always
scampering around and unintentionally getting into mischief (hence why he was
given the name Scamper). Scamper’s
family is always telling him not to wander off, but he does anyway, and one day
he and his best friend Snowflake, and they get washed out to sea. While floating out at sea they are captured
by a group of Russian poachers who are planning to sell them to a zoo. Now Scamper, along with Snowflake, and a
Macaroni Penguin named Louie have to find a way to escape and return home to
their families before the poachers can sell them to a zoo.
So yeah this movie is definitely intended for
a very young audience. I’d this is an
ideal film for anyone under the age of seven.
However, if you’re like me (and way over that age) you’re going to
notice a lot of flaws with this film.
First of all there is enough cutesy, whimsy, magical awe that if this
film were any sweeter, it would give us all diabetes! The songs are moronic and idiotic! The songs
are pretty much just singing about everything that’s happening on screen. With lines like “they walk with a waddle/and are shaped like a bottle/they really look
absurd”! It’s almost like if Alan Menken
huffed paint-thinner for 3 day straight and then said, “I’m going to write a
song like Randy Newman”. That’s how bad
the songs are! And the dialogue isn’t
much better; not only does it sound like it was written for 6-year-olds, but it
also sound like it was written by
6-year-olds. All the characters do in
the film is state the obvious and ask obvious questions. Even the narrator is just describing what’s
happening in the scene. It’s almost like
they don’t want you to have to think or ask questions!
The characters are all stupid.
Again, they’re all very playful and cutesy to the point of nausea, but
also the American voice actors all sound alike.
Almost as if it were 3-4 people doing the voices of every character, a
quick search of IMDB shows that most of the cast had no voice acting experience
before this, and only a couple of them did anything after.
As for the animation, I was surprised
at how decent it was considering it was made towards the end of the Soviet
Union, when I’m sure they had almost no money.
The animation was very clean and the movements of the characters weren’t
choppy at all. The animation is actually
the only positive thing I have to say about this film.
So on a scale of 1-to-10, I’d give “The Adventures of Scamper the Penguin” a 3. The songs are bad, the dialogues, bad, and the
main characters just make you want to throw up.
If you have a child who’s under the age of 7, they’ll probably like this
film, any one older than that, will probably think it’s babyish and boring.
I hope you all are
excited about this new segment as I am, and be sure to join us next time on “Bargain
Bin Reviews” when I will be reviewing a childhood favorite of mine: “Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines”.
In case you're curious as to how bad "Scamper" really is
