Bill Cosby, creator of Fat Albert and no stranger to controversial comments, was curiously silent about the dumbing down of his beloved character. © 2004 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.

The gang’s fading “colors” could have been a metaphor for the death of a generation of gangstas who wear tha’ red or blue, but this script doesn’t really give a Crip. Instead of struggling to serve as a moral compass to da gangbangaz as he might have done in the original series, Fat Albert opts to assuage the angst of one teenage girl by passing off messages about self-esteem and self-belief, as if today’s animated shows aren’t awash in such lessons already. Cosby, where is thy sting?

In past rantings on the subject I have specified why these foolish products are nearly foredoomed to fail. Anyone interested can flash back to the aforementioned thesis done in January of 2002; I have no intention of running down the dreary list in this current analysis. This time around I am more interested in discussing why anyone in control of a motion picture studio even greenlights these abominations. I have come to believe that these pictures are made because there are mass delusions in the industry.

The strongest of these thought disorders is that certain past animated series and today’s live-action films are essentially the same thing. Execs seem to believe that animated source material is infinitely malleable in its conventions and narratives and that violation of these conventions is acceptable and easy. An intertextual approach is no more problematic than setting a thermostat. Apparently any cartoon extant may be considered to be live-action film, and the writing for both is essentially the same. An animated cartoon may be hand-drawn and look funny, but in the end it is nothing more than a collaboration between actors and writers putting gags across.

This is a ridiculous notion on many levels: The sort of plotting and scriptwriting that informs seven-to-13 minute cartoons cannot support 90-minute scripts, nor is it meant to. Would one expect, say, Butch Hartman to make a 13-minute animated version of Reservoir Dogs? The end result of these Procrustean pyrotechnics is simply to make Fat Albert even less like its animated predecessor.

More delusions: There is no appreciable gap between the world Fat Albert (or any older cartoon) inhabited during its original airdates and the present. Fat Albert existed in a certain cultural context in which animation, television programming, and children both black and white occupied a different consciousness, one that defies replication. The solution? Attempt to contemporize by weighing Fat Albert down with self-reflexive conceits. The Say Hey Hey Hey Kid meets his creator. Fish-out-of-water gags. The bizarre, somber ending in which Cosby all but admits the inescapable influences of a past he cannot recreate.

There is also the madness of creative bankruptcy amongst the studios. As I write this article, remakes have been announced for King Kong, Willy Wonka (now “Charlie”) and the Chocolate Factory, The Amityville Horror, Assault on Precinct 13, Guess Who(’s Coming For Dinner), The Honeymooners, War of the Worlds, The Longest Yard, The Bad News Bears and Fun With Dick and Jane. It seems that in an industry littered with remakes and sequels, there’s no harm in digging up animated series for the remake mills, this time as despicable LAAFs that do little but insult the sensibilities of movie audiences outside of mall rat clans and do grave injustice to the source cartoons. But this too is a delusion; just because a live-action film or an animated series was once made, that does not mean that it deserves (or, in the case of Fat Albert) even needs to be remade. Besides, no LAAF ever produced has actually been a remake of an animated film, only an attempt at distilling the essence of a series into a 90-minute script. LAAFs then, haven’t even worked as remakes.

Yet another delusion is willful ignorance on the part of studio execs, even in the face of repeated failures. The moviegoing public has figured all of this out on some conscious or subconscious level and they genuinely hate these LAAFs. The critics vote with their PCs, the public votes with their wallets, and the vote is generally thumbs down. I am reminded of a particular Ren & Stimpy cartoon in which Stimpy’s daily “appointment” consists of getting his head kicked in by a horse. Not only is the cat left more organically impaired than before, he even pays for the pleasure. So it goes with the filmmakers and studios that continue to waste lavish budgets on LAAFs, sending them down the line to local theaters like ordure through waste pipes only to suffer critical lambasting and skimpy returns.