Unless you’re one of those people who scours the updates on Quicktime’s movie trailer page, you probably didn’t know anything about independent family feature Gooby until someone in your circle (in my case, NewTeeVee’s own Chris Albrecht), sent you a link. If you were lucky, they also included a warning as to exactly what you were about to experience. I wasn’t so fortunate.
Gooby is the purportedly heartwarming story of a boy and his magical giant teddy bear, written and directed by Canadian sitcom writer Wilson Coneybeare (seriously) and starring Eugene Levy (of SCTV fame, plus all those great Christopher Guest films) and the voice of Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid in the Harry Potter films, the awesome UK crime series Cracker). The trailer suffers from the typical sort of bad-trailer-itis common to independent features, symptoms of which include poor pacing, a hammy use of voice-over and the revealing of every major plot point of the film.
But it’s also got something special going for it — the titular giant bear, whose stalking of this little boy makes him a prime candidate for To Catch a Predator. Over the trailer’s 2-minute running time, I honestly didn’t know who to feel sorrier for, the actor trapped in that creepy costume or the child who had to interact with it. (I have no pity for Eugene Levy; he’s proven in the past that he just doesn’t know any better.)
I’m not the only one horror-struck by this particular flick. Even though the film was released in the U.S. on April 17, it’s still a hot topic on Twitter, with comments ranging from “What does the Gooby trailer prove? The apocalypse needs to happen, and soon” and Every part of this trailer feels “molesty.”
Despite all this, however, Gooby hasn’t really become serious mashup fodder, in part because there are really only two things to say about it: It’s creepy as hell and inspires unfortunate jokes about child molestation. And this is reflected in the only two video spoofs I could find. This horror remix by YouTube user elgaucho565, similar in execution to the classic West Side Story zombie redux, only needs a few extra sound effects and ominous music to truly set the tone for terror. Meanwhile, YouTube user translatorscat only needed 20 seconds of footage to make the point that the character of Gooby too closely resembles Pedo-Bear, the Internet’s mockingly used mascot for pedophiles (described all-too-aptly as “the combination of a pedophile and a seemingly innocent cuddly teddy bear”).
The other video of interest is this switcharoo, in which YouTuber limeprojects took the Arcade Fire-infused audio from the trailer for the Spike Jones-directed Where the Wild Things Are adaptation and dubbed it over the Gooby trailer. Unexpectedly, putting the soundtrack for a good trailer over the video of an awful trailer make the awful trailer slightly better — it doesn’t cancel out Levy’s obnoxious mugging and pratfalls, but the lack of a Don LaFontaine wannabe trying to charm us goes a long way.
All these videos are just various ways in which the cynical and tech-savvy have chosen to cope with bearing witness to something so jaw-droppingly bad. The thing is, of course, that Gooby wasn’t made for a cynical and tech-savvy audience; it was made for parents seeking family fare that’s guaranteed to not be offensive. (Note that I didn’t say that it was made for children — this film looks to be an overprotective parent’s idea of what kids should want to watch, not what they actually enjoy.) It’s this sort of obtuseness that makes the trailer easy prey for us mocking Internet types, but also guarantees that the film will find some small amount of audience on home video. How much crossover is there between the two groups? For the makers of Gooby’s sake, hopefully not much.
