I first saw the cult classic at a midnight movie showing for a dollar. The poster and plot description was none too riveting, so we assumed it would be a boring movie but whatever, it was a night out. Ten minutes in, we were rolling in the aisles with the other five people in the theater. The clumsy characters, awkward silences, and empty terrain combined to make the perfectly unexpected comedy.
Well, the gang’s all back in the new animated sitcom Napoleon Dynamite, as part of Fox’s Animation Domination line-up. I was rather skeptical at first; Fox is trying so hard to keep up with the times, they’ll add any cartoon to their primetime. Not to mention the movie’s most endearing qualities were the slow build-up to all the jokes and the random silliness cutting through the silence. To translate such humor to a cartoon, where everything has to keep moving to jam-pack enough punch lines to fill twenty minutes, could only smell disaster to either the new show or the cult franchise as a whole.
Once again, my expectations were, fortunately, wrong. While the show does move much faster than the movie, and the jokes are way more off-the-wall (Napoleon smashing a sink and Tina the llama gulping down a whole rooster), the characters are still endearingly aloof, simple, and monotone. The entire original cast has returned, including Jon Heder as Napoleon and Efren Ramirez as Pedro. Even the film’s director Jared Hess is back on board along with The Simpsons writer and producer Mike Scully. The only complaint I have about the production cast is no LaFawnduh; the creators want to show Kip with his past failed Internet relationships before bringing back his future wife. Also the now cliche one-liners such as “Dang it!” and “Sweet!” are used whether they’re funny or not, making the self-reference rather tiring.
All in all, I think the animated series will be much like the movie: a mixed bag of Love It or Hate It. It’s different enough from the movie to where some cultists may not like it but original from other primetime toons in that it’s family-friendly. College students may turn it off and watch Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. But children in junior high, high school, even elementary school students who are normally alienated from their parents during Family Guy or American Dad can now join the adults in the living room. The humor is funny for everyone without being vulgar, offensive, overly-violent, or sexual. It could flop worse than Uncle Rico’s football career back in ’82, or it could set new trends for primetime television. We’ll have to see if the writers have the skills to make our wildest entertainment dreams come true.














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