Have no fear, Underdog (voiced by Jason Lee) is here in Walt Disney Pictures' Underdog

In all honesty, I can’t really tell you too much about the show. I just remember loving it. It made me giggle and I absolutely had to be up by 6:30 every morning to make sure I could watch it. “Look up in the sky,” the people of Capitol City would say. “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a frog!” No, not bird, not plane, not even frog, this show was about everyone’s favorite canine hero Underdog, and just thinking about it now is more then enough to make my girlishly giddy in blissful reminiscence. 

This has nothing to do with Disney’s new millennium take on Underdog, nothing at all. But then, seeing as how this new movie has an equal amount of nothing to do with my beloved and silly morning ritual of so many years ago I think it’s perfectly fair for me to keep talking about what it is I want to. Besides, if I start talking about the film I’ll only get depressed, and when a woman of my three-decade age gets depressed all that therapeutic ice cream goes straight to her thighs and none of us want that, now do we?

So, back to the cartoon. I remember one time I was running around the house pretending I was our title character’s love of his life Polly Purebred. After a long while of this, my Mom asked me why I wasn’t pretending to be Underdog, he was the ones with the superpowers after all. Thinking it over, I decided Polly just had a better sense of style and she didn’t make so many silly rhymes. More so, she was also a journalist and had a better vocabulary, which now come to think of it probably should have been a hint pointing at many of the things I do in my life right now.

All this aside, for those that really want to know about the movie there’s not really too much to tell. It isn’t dreadful (shockingly – those trailers were pretty abysmal) but it isn’t even remotely memorable, either. The ten-and-under crowd I saw it with ate it up, absolutely loving the cute-as-as-button beagle Shoeshine voiced by Jason Lee as well as adoring the standard Disney Channel comedy provided by his relationship with new owner and friend Jack (Alex Neuberger).

For the rest of us, there is nothing to keep us either interested or watching. While there is a thankful lack of bathroom humor (I think I only counted two potty jokes, a record for this kind of film I’m thinking) there is also not a single like of wit or originality in this thing anywhere. Peter Dinklage theoretically could make for a great Dr. Simon Barsinister I suppose if the script gave him anything to do or if director Frederik Du Chau (Racing Stripes) tried to do something interesting, but as both fail him he unfortunately doesn’t even register.  

But then, neither does the movie. I literally forgot the majority of it the second I stepped out of the theater choosing instead to remember those glorious moments from my childhood when a cartoon Underdog was out there saving the day much more excitingly then this one could ever hope to. Too bad, because Disney could have done something fun and interesting with this instead of turning such a wonderful character and his vehicle into the one thing they never were weekday mornings: Dogs.

Film Rating: êê  (out of 4)  

Additional Links

-  Underdog Theatrical Trailer