Yet Another Journal

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» Monday, March 08, 2004
Let's Smack the Lesson Over the Head...Again
Disney Channel had Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure on tonight. I watched it, despite a bad review from a friend whose opinion I respect.

He was right. :-)

In yet another in a series of "hit 'em over the head with the lesson" films from Disney, Lady and the Tramp's scruffy son doesn't want to abide by the rules and escapes to keep bad company with a pack of junkyard dogs led by a self-absorbed Doberman named Buster, who was...surprise!...once Tramp's protegè. Buster "has issues" about being "abandoned" by Tramp.

Anyway, one of Buster's gang is a pretty little female dog named Angel and, well, you guessed it, she and Scamp hit it right off. But where he wants to be footloose and fancy free, she longs for a home--and keeps telling him how lucky he was. Over and over and over.

Lady and the Tramp, who were such vibrant figures in their own movie, are reduced to stereotypical parents in this one. Tramp has "gone establishment" and lectures Scamp about the big bad outside world. And while Lady was a bit naïve when Tramp met her, she was hardly a shrinking violet where protecting her family was concerned. Yet every time something goes wrong in this film, Lady runs for Tramp instead of doing something about it herself. Yeah, yeah, I know, in the end this is about the father-son bonding thing, but she's a mother. She's going to go looking for the kid herself, not just leave it up to everyone else.

The less said about the "little Lady puppies" the better. For a modern Disney philosophy that's supposed to espouse strong female leads (Pocahontas, Ariel, Belle, etc.), the three girl pups are vacuous little airheads who adore baths and coo in little girly voices and do the usual "Brother is a pest" comments. At least Scamp is interesting next to these little twits.

Other things are "off." Sneaky Si and Am and Aunt Sarah both have small cameos; the formerly strong-minded calculating Siamese are quelled by the dogs easily and become part of a silly gag. Aunt Sarah is suddenly motherly and pushing food on everyone. Jock and Trusty exist in the film simply to perpetuate the running gags about Trusty's un-trusty nose and penchant for long tales.

It's a pity, because there was a good story in there somewhere. Scamp and Angel are actually interesting characters when he's not posturing and she's not lecturing. The animation isn't all that horrible; they tried to capture the Gay '90s style of the original with cheaper animation and it's not half bad, although there are no surprises either--nothing dramatic like Tramp's fight with the rat, the chase after the dog catcher's wagon, etc. in the original. The songs are...iffy, not terrible but not good either, and the opening introductory song about a "little New England town" is just a reworking of the much better opening to Beauty and the Beast and most of the time they just seem to interrupt the action.

And if you like Don Knotts, the fellow who does the dogcatcher's voice does a dandy imitation. Pity it wasn't a dandy imitation of a real Scamp story, though...