the shaggy dog

Anubis · Post by **Anubis** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 8:50 pm

a were-dog?
http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/theshaggydog/hd/

Fenrir · Post by **Fenrir** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 9:46 pm

How many times has this been remade

Silverclaw · Post by **Silverclaw** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 10:01 pm

This will be the forth I belive

Hamster · Post by **Hamster** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 10:15 pm

I wish Disney would go away.

CrewWolf · Post by **CrewWolf** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 10:40 pm

This looks like it'll perhaps be the worst of the worst remakes. It's the same old "Father is too caught up in work and something happens that allows him to see what an a** he's been so that he can rectify it and learn the true meaning of family" with the same old gags and cheesy lines and stupid dog idiocy with the obligatory cat chase scenes and butt sniffing. Plus, the movie poster with the dog that has Tim Allen's eyes is just plain creepy.

Terastas · Post by **Terastas** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 11:03 pm

*nods* Disney is going to have one hell of a time defending their claim to creativity in the upcomming year. They'll stay in business since the nation is filled with people that still believe Disney is the one and only place to turn for all your entertainment needs, but sooner or later their going to run out animated movies to make sequels to and live action movies to remake, and sooner or later everyone is going to realize that Dreamworks couldn't be the ripoff company because their movies always look better (it's been two years since Madagascar came out -- do they really think we'll believe them this time?).

If Iger has half a brain, he'll make sure the script writers for Pirates of the Caribbean and National Treasure are happy to be there, because their live action films are really their only strong point left.

forsaken_wolf · Post by **forsaken_wolf** » Sat Mar 11, 2006 3:33 am

yea thats just plain bad and I was told that disney is owned from a porn industry or company but I'm not really so sure though and thats about what I all have say.

Renorei · Post by **Renorei** » Sat Mar 11, 2006 9:29 am

forsaken_wolf wrote:yea thats just plain bad and I was told that disney is owned from a porn industry or company but I'm not really so sure though and thats about what I all have say.

Read the bottom half of the page in this link:

http://www.geocities.com/d_gluver/disney.htm

It discusses some of the unsavory things Disney has done recently.

(Also, yes, I'm aware that Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, was in fact Warner Bros.)

Ronkonkoma · Post by **Ronkonkoma** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 2:09 am

yeah, Shaggy dog, should not have have been made, hollywood in general is making me ill with all the remakes and late sequels they are making , makes me mad enough to try and make my own movies

vrikasatma · Post by **vrikasatma** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 2:23 am

Their pop-up ad on Netscape News is seriously annoying, too. Just start to get into the article and then this big yellow fugly panel pops up and covers the page! I have to reload the page and hit "cloverleaf-period" to keep reading the article.

Shut up already!

Definitely letting this one pass me by. When's "Howl's Moving Castle" coming back? Where the hell is "Night Watch"?!

garouda · Post by **garouda** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 2:35 am

With Lasseter of Pixar now in charge of certain things at Disney, I believe we are in for glad tidings.

Still we must be patient, his impact will not be apparent until the crud already in the Disney pipes gets spewed out.

Kirk Hammett · Post by **Kirk Hammett** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 11:19 am

Haha when I first saw the ad, I was like holy **** another stupid comedy family thing! Then I saw the shape shifting dog. It's lame, but it has a shape shifting man in it.

-Rabid look on face-

Unfortunately the type of humor gets old. Fast. Napoleon Dynamite wins over all!!

-Evil laughs-

Terastas · Post by **Terastas** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 12:47 pm

garouda wrote:With Lasseter of Pixar now in charge of certain things at Disney, I believe we are in for glad tidings.

Still we must be patient, his impact will not be apparent until the crud already in the Disney pipes gets spewed out.

Actually, Pixar's on it's way down the crapper as well. Their just going down a different pipe.

The magic word for Pixar is "Plagiarism." We already know that Pixar and Dreamworks both came out with two movies that shared the same concept, those being A Bug's Life / Antz and Finding Nemo / Shark Tale. A lot of people like to point the plagiarism finger at Dreamworks because their movies came out a few months later, but consider the difference in quality between the two movies, especially in regard to plot and visuals. In Antz, Z was one ant out of a million struggling with his sense of self in a fascist collective that punishes individualism, whereas all Flick wanted to do in Bugs Life was fit in -- as far as kid's entertainment goes, which is the more common plotline? Same goes for the fish movies -- Shark Tale featured a double-pair of protagonists, one that wanted to escape a life of doomed obscurity in the ghetto, the other wanted to escape a life of crime. Pretty good for a kid's film, but how many times has the "I lost my son" plot been used? And the visuals? There are four scenes in Antz worth noting: The opening tour of the colony, the dancing scene, the battle at the termite colony, and at the end when they form a pryamid to escape. Watch those and try to tell me the movie was being rushed.

A lot of the same people that like to claim Antz and Shark Tale were ripoffs of Bug's Life and Finding Nemo also tried to convince me that Shrek was a ripoff of Monsters Inc. . . But what do those two movies have in common?!!

It's also been confirmed that The Incredibles was ripped from one of Brad Bird's former colleagues, and that the storyboard for For the Birds is identical, frame for frame, to a student film from a few years prior.

Add on the fact that they've lost their greatest talent, Joe Ranft, and Pixar seems destined to produce a lot of generic crap in the upcomming years. They probably think they can get away with it just because their Disney and Pixar, and the sad thing is that their probably right. It's been two years since Madagascar came out, and as soon as The Wild (which has an identical plotline to Finding Nemo no less) had their first five seconds available on Movie Surfers, they already had people pointing the finger at Dreamworks.

The good news, of course, for Pixar and Dreamworks fans alike, is that nobody's going to try to copy Cars. That'll give Pixar a brief claim to originality, and it'll give Dreamworks a head-start on all of their future projects.

D.I.S.N.E.Y: Did I Screw Not Everyone Yet?

Morkulv · Post by **Morkulv** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 12:59 pm

The dog-manip is just sloppy from what I've seen. I didn't even get the feeling it supposed to be a human in a dog-form.

CrewWolf · Post by **CrewWolf** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 6:55 pm

I figured it was Dreamworks that copied Disney because when Jeffrey Katzenberg left Disney to create his own studio, he left knowing a good many of the projects that were being held on the shelf at Disney, so he was able to jump on the animation scene ripe with ideas. That's just speculation though.

I don't think it's about originality anyway. Plagiarism is one thing, but originality has never really been an issue in the entertainment world. It's about creativity and how well they tell the story. And that is why Pixar will always pwn Dreamworks until the end of time. Well...as long as the executives at Disney keep their noses out of it.

Jamie · Post by **Jamie** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 9:04 pm

I recently saw the new "The Shaggy Dog" in the theater, so this is my review.

I've got good news and bad news, along with a summary of the transformation content.

TRANSFORMATIONS:

To start off, yes, it is a weredog movie. The main character Dave Douglas(Tim Allen) transforms back and forth from dog to human a number of times, gradually learning to control his powers, so that he gets to a point where he does not just have the transformations happen to him.

The quality of those transformations is another thing. They did not even try with the special effects, not even as much as you generally see in a normal low-budget werewolf movie. In one transformation scene, the camera enters his eye and goes into his bloodstream, where you see lots of microscopic dogs swimming around and tearing his red blood cells to pieces (no, I'm not kidding, this is actually what it shows). Then the camera exits the eye of... the dog he has turned into. There is also a scene where you are seeing things from the viewpoint of Dave Douglas, and he looks down into a puddle where he sees the reflection of his human face, then a dog paw comes down and taps the puddle, and when the ripples re-form, it is a dog reflection looking back up at him. Even as cheesy as this sounds, it was cheesier than you are probably imagining right now. They made no effort to make the ripples look like they were reflecting some sort of transformation. The transition between the two sets of ripples was abrupt and obvious. Other transformations were generally off-screen and implied, or very low tech, such as those involving more visuals of the microscopic swimming dogs, or (in one scene) seen through one of those security cameras that takes one frame every three seconds or so (and even then, didn't look very impressive for that sort of low-budget transformation). There were only two marginally decent transformation scenes (and I mean very marginal). One was where he was running as a human on all fours behind a row of cars, and each time you got a new view of his hands and feet, they were a little more doggy. Another was a view of just his hands transforming, where it was obvious (for once) that they had actually used a small amount of special effects.

Conclusion: If you only want to see this film for the transformations, prepare to be disappointed.

PLOT SUMMARY:

It is a rather standard Disney plot about a workaholic father who ought to spend more time with his kids and learns so by the end. However, this plot is done slightly better than Disney usually does it, perhaps because the mom and kids were good actors with some actual character development, not cardboard, uninteresting people spouting lines.
The 2006 film "The Shaggy Dog" is part of the loosely-connected "Shaggy Dog" series, but it has less connection to the 1959 original than any of the other films do. In fact, it is the only film where the main character is not named Wilby Daniels, and it is the only film where the transformations do not have anything to do with a magic ring. In fact, the 2006 "The Shaggy Dog" draws heavily on stereotypical werewolf imagery, with the full moon often featured prominently in the background for no reason I can fathom, and the condition of being a weredog being transferred by bites and body fluids. This means this film is the only "Shaggy Dog" film with two weredogs in it ([spoiler]Robert Downey Jr. makes a far more interesting weredog than Tim Allen, it is too bad his screen time is so short. I think you'll enjoy his few scenes as a weredog if you enjoy the reluctant-shapeshifter-forced-against-his-will angle. That he is the bad guy only makes it sweeter.[/spoiler]. Where does this film fit in the "Shaggy Dog" series? It is sort-of a very loose remake of the 1976 film "The Shaggy D. A.", which is one of two alternate-storyline sequels to the original 1959 film. The other sequel, The Return of the Shaggy Dog completely ignores "The Shaggy D. A.", while the 1994 "The Shaggy Dog" was an actual remake of the 1959 original, with a teenage weredog instead of a grown-up weredog.

THE GOOD:

They could easily have done a lot worse with this film. I've seen Disney do much worse. Aside from the low production values, the cop-out transformation scenes and the cookie-cutter plot, it is actually decent. I don't expect that it is worth a theater ticket for most fans, but if you get a chance to watch it for free, go for it. There are a lot of nude scenes with Tim allen, but these aren't as yucky as I was afraid they would be. Yes, he is an ugly, hairy old man, but he was always able to hide behind furniture or whatever, and his nudity never overwhelmed the rest of the scene.

THE BAD:

Many of the problems you expect from a Disney sequel are here, even though they are not quite as bad as usual. The subplot about a magic dog (not a weredog) from Tibet kind of threw me off, because they were mixing a magic subplot and a genetic engineering subplot in the same film. The film was also a bit preachy about animal rights, but the lab scenes were all so silly that it didn't really have much impact.

OTHER NOTES:

Except for extreme fans, I think this would only be worth it to buy on DVD if it were packaged in a set with other "Shaggy Dog" movies, preferably all of them. Maybe if we wait a couple years, it will be.

Figarou · Post by **Figarou** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 11:39 pm

Jamie wrote: Conclusion: If you only want to see this film for the transformations, prepare to be disappointed.

Thanks for the warning.

*puts in "do not watch" list*

Terastas · Post by **Terastas** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 11:36 am

CrewWolf wrote:I don't think it's about originality anyway. Plagiarism is one thing, but originality has never really been an issue in the entertainment world.

True. But the magic word for Pixar is still Plagiarism. Like I said about For the Birds, the storyboard for FtB and a previous student film were near-identical frame for frame. I wish I could have found the movie they ripped off, but I couldn't find it because apparently the student film was either storyboarded but never made, or has since disappeared from any websites hosting it due to accusations of plagiarism against Pixar (I hope it's the former, because the latter would be just plain evil).

Sure, Pixar might "pwn" now because they have a loyal following, but sooner or later their going to have to make something other than a buddy film or a looking-for-my-son film.

garouda · Post by **garouda** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 3:07 pm

Didn't Shakespeare essentially cover all the basic plots that are nowadays reiterated in one fashion or another ?