BUY IT AT AMAZON: Click HERE
STUDIO: Warner Bros.
MSRP: $19.98
RATED: TV-G
RUNNING TIME: 46 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Deleted Scenes
• Set-Top Game
• Music Video
• Trailer
The Pitch
“Okay gang, we need a new original Looney Tunes Movie, preferably centered around Christmas.” “Um, what if, OH – Daffy Duck is a grumpy old miser who, I dunno, gets visited by some ghosts or something and has a change of heart?” “Sigh. I said original, Johnson. Original.” “Ohhh…yeah. Heh. Well, we could set it in the present and make Daffy the manager of a fancy department store?” “Now THAT’S the originality I’m looking for! Let’s get to it, gang.”
The Characters
Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Marvin the Martian, Speedy, Sylvester and everyone else – the gang’s all here (seriously – almost every single third-tier character ever featured in any Looney Tunes short is in here in some form or another).
The Nutshell
I’m sure you’ve all seen, heard or read one of the countless incarnations of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Well, this is another one.
With the runaway success of Happy Feet and March of the Penguins, our little tuxedoed friends thought the ride would never end – how wrong they were.
The Lowdown
Honestly, there just really isn’t a lot to review here. Like I said, we all know this story front ways and back, so any discussion of the plot would be redundant. All of the basic narrative elements are intact and all the characters are accounted for – we’ve got everything we need for an adaptation.
What makes this adaptation different from, say, Mickey’s Christmas Carol, is the lack of any sort of real heart. Yeah, Daffy learns the lessons he’s supposed to learn, but in a generic sort of paint-by-numbers way. It feels like the writers saw the story as a given and rather than spend any time giving real life or emotion to the characters, they used the basic plot devices to tell the story as simply as possible, using the rest of the time for stupid pratfalls and character-related humor.
The standard argument, of course, will be that it’s for kids, but that’s really dismissive of our younger population. Mickey’s Christmas Carol is for kids too, but it manages to retain all of the heart and soul of the original story, without succumbing to the temptation to hit Scrooge on the head as many times as possible. With Bah, Humduck, it seems like the easy laugh is the priority and I feel like that does a disservice not only to the source material, but to the target audience as well.
Looks like Mrs. Claus had a little too much eggnog.
And that’s not even taking into account the complete dilution of classic cartoons that were extremely smarter in 7 minute spurts than this is in its entire 40 minute running time. If this had been made in the hey-day of Looney Tunes, I probably would have adored it, but, instead, what we have is disc that manages to piss on the legacy of every classic property it touches. Bah, indeed.
The Package
I really like the artwork on display here. It’s bright, it’s lively and it realy sells what’s inside. Sadly, it’s probably the only thing the people working on this disc managed to do right.
Moving on to the features: there’s some deleted scenes included, but there’s no insight into why they were excised; there’s a set top game that got stuck in a weird crazy loop on the third level (and it was sort of a pain in the ass to get there, so I didn’t bother to start over again to try and fix it); there’s a “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” music video that is just clips of the movie strewn together with no discernable pattern (it’s not even synced with the music) and there’s a whole slew of trailers.
"And just what is THAT little gesture supposed to mean?!"
Bottom Line? Skip it. Your Christmas will be much, much merrier without it.
OVERALL 3.0 out of 10