Fat
Albert (the cartoon) came along a few years after I’d lost interest in Bill
Cosby. As a youngster I sat glued to the turntable listening to Cosby records,
but when his portly creation and the gang came along I was over Cosby and, hence,
I went into Fat Albert more-or-less as unfamiliar with the cast of characters,
as my children were sure to be. This is just a personal illustration of the logistical
conundrum that this doomed comedy finds itself in. The humor in Fat Albert is
decidedly juvenile, and since the demographic group that the film is aimed toward
are as out of the loop as myself, the film really unfolds before a largely clueless
and estranged audience.
I
would suppose that most adults have, at least, a nodding acquaintance with Bill
Cosby’s ode to his North Philadelphia childhood-inspired cast of cartoon
characters. Albert’s booming catch-phrase “hey, hey, hey” has been
etched into our collective conscience, but beyond that, the only vague memory
I could conjure up was the episode where the kids stuck some bubble gum on the
head of the tall skinny one in order to retrieve their basketball from the sewer.
Hence the only real chance Fat Albert had at connecting with “any” audience
would be if it were expertly written in such a way as to transcend it’s lack
of a core audience. Fat Chance.
Quite
unfortunately, the screenplay is not only unable to connect the kids to this long-forgotten
shtick, but it’s so dreadfully awful that it fails to do anything more than
throw it’s hat in the ring for “worst movie of the year” honors.
Fortunately the year is young and by the time such dubious honors are awarded,
perhaps people will have forgotten about this disaster altogether.
The
unlikely plot of this milestone in miscalculation revolves around a Philadelphia
tween named Doris who is struggling to find her identity and is not the most popular
girl at school. In the most implausible of twists, the friendless Doris happens
to be watching a Fat Albert cartoon one afternoon following a particularly bad
day at school and her lonesome tears drop upon the TV remote - which magically
fetches the cast of cartoon deadbeats into the real world. (The implausibility
I’m mostly speaking of here, is that she was actually watching a Fat Albert
cartoon). For their part Fat Albert and the gang, now fleshed-out in the real
world, seize the opportunity to be “real boys” by vowing to see that
Doris is soon swamped with friends.
Had
this film been released at the height of Fat Albert’s popularity it probably
would have been a harmless, modestly successful film - that might even be a cult
classic by now. Sadly (and I mean sadly) this poorly timed and misguided fantasy
is so utterly lacking in laughs, and overall smarts that it’s really hard
to fathom how it ever managed a green light. Without the Cartoon Network familiarity
enjoyed by Scooby Do for example, what chance did it really have?
SNL’s
Keenan Thompson plays the obese Albert and does his best to recreate his “hey
hey hey” days, but really has no chance of pulling anything redeemable from
this wreckage. He develops a crush on Doris’ foster sister and at a party
attempts to win her favor by improvising a little rap? Why shouldn’t he be
a natural at rap, since it didn’t exist in the era he has come from? The
creators try to wring jokes out of tired bits, where kids from the past are left
dumfounded by cell-phones and other modern amenities. “B-how-b-riginal.”
The
saddest thing about Fat Albert is the painful lengths that it’s creators
(including Joel Zwick) have gone to faithfully recreate these characters, and
how futile their effort ends up being in the face of an audience who literally
know nothing of them. This kind of nostalgia only works when those who are witnessing
it hold the characters dear to their hearts. Alas, the various quirks and eccentricities
that a “Weird Harold” or “Mushmouth” might have held to a
long lost generation are entirely lost on most of the movie goers on planet earth.
Even
the potentially hilarious scene in which the “real boy” Fat Albert shows
up at Bill Cosby (Geppeto’s) house falls just as flat as the rest of the
proceedings. The only recent film that I can think of that could even hold a candle
to this misbegotten mess, would be last year’s Garfield, but even that copy-cat
isn’t an accurate comparison. File Fat Albert under trying to find a needle
in a “Hay Hay Hay” stack.
