Blockbuster History: Superhero animals
Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: in addition to having the most soullessly branded title of any superhero movie this year, DC League of Super-Pets is all about what happens when housepets are also superheroes. Basically the same thing as when human beings are, except this time it's only for very very young, undiscerning audiences.
The most interesting thing about the 2007 feature film version of Underdog is that it exists at all. And given that it isn't very interesting that it exists at all, that probably tells you most of what you need to know about how much meat there is on these bones.
But let me tease this out a little bit anyway: 2007 was in some ways the very twilight of the most recent period in American blockbuster filmmaking before our own. Most importantly, it was the last year before Iron Man and The Dark Knight came out, and the one-two punch of those movies is pretty much the reason that "blockbuster movies" and "supehero comic adaptations" were more or less indistinguishable terms for the great bulk of the 2010s. Somewhat less importantly, 2007 is near the end of the period when the Walt Disney Company (which released Underdog) was still flailing around trying to find its own asshole; and perhaps least importantly - but still importantly - 2007 was a period in time when you could still do an unabashed nostalgia throwback to media from the 1960s, unlike our own current nostalgia empire that seems to have settled on the 1980s and maybe the early 1990s as the allowable pool of pop culture to draw from.
In other words, Underdog is a pretty fine exemplar of "The State Of Cinema", circa August 2007. That is its chief, if not indeed only merit. Do we need such an exemplar? Eventually, I guess. Mostly, what it tells us is that the state of cinema back then was a bit desperate and flopsweaty. In particular, I think what Underdog really exemplifies is that still, as late as the summer of 2007, studios weren't entirely sure that superhero movies could be taken all that seriously, and maybe they were really best thought of as insincere junk food for undemanding children Which is not to say that they are more sincere in the 2020s, nor that they expect a particularly demanding audience. But at least they're not this.
The last thing about Underdog's mere existence that's interesting, or at least inexplicable, is that this film very obviously supposes that you, the viewer, have a strong pre-existing investment in the character and the original 1964-'67 cartoon series where he entered the world. Since the film also supposes that you were born probably between 1999 and 2001, I'm not sure where the film expects you to have picked up that knowledge, but no two ways about it, this is not merely an origin story for Underdog, it's an origin story that assumes you know where it's heading. It even opens with footage of the cartoon, one of the more famous examples of the "cartoon modern" style of the late '50s and early '60s TV animation, produced by Total Television (one of the main studios whose thing was making you think that they were Jay Ward Productions, when they very definitely weren't). It's playing on somebody's nostalgia, but I'm not entirely sure whose, which is perhaps why the film tanked pretty hard at the box office.
So anyways, Underdog. First up, besides that montage of footage from a 40-year-old Saturday morning cartoon, is a rock version of the TV show theme song, performed by Plain White T's, and man, if anything is just going to plunge you at top speed into "this movie could literally only have conceivably come out during a roughly four-month span in 2007", having a theme song by Plain White T's is a great way to do it. At the same time as all of the above, we get narration from Underdog himself, letting us know that even though he's famous for being a crimefighter, this will actually be a story of how he became such a thing, starting with his great professional failure as a police dog. Underdog will be played by a beagle (or several beagles, at least) with a CGI mouth that makes me wonder, as do pretty much all talking animal pictures made from 1996 to the present, how it is remotely possible that so many filmmakers could look back at the example of Babe and say to themselves, "nope, I think our movie should look worse than that". And yet here we are, and the dog's mouth turns into a shiny CGI smear everytime he speaks, and the best I can come up with is that it constantly kept reminding me of the then-three-years-old Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, but always in the specific context, "okay, well at least it looks better than Superbabies". Underdog's voice is provided by Jason Lee, who was having just an absolute fucking nightmare of a 2007: he'd be on the other side of the "live-action humans and indescribably vile photorealistic CGI animals" divide a mere four months later, in Alvin and the Chipmunks. This is the better film, but the worse Lee performance; the whole point of Underdog is that he's a big cheesy hambone, a parody of a melodramatic hero prone to overwrought statements of bravery in the form of deliberately forced rhyming couplets. Lee's performance lives exclusively in a gravely gurgle, like the only way he could get through the experience was by chainsmoking, not merely between takes, but indeed during them. He doesn't have fun with the corniness, seeming to be vaguely ashamed of the rhymes (to be fair, the screenplay, by Adam Rifkin and Joe Piscatella & Craig A. Williams, has already beaten him there), and remaining far too ironically aloof and knowing. And really, if your Underdog remake isn't going to embrace cheesiness with both arms, I don't know what you think you're doing.
Then again, it's not like embracing the cheesiness works out elsewhere. Lee is a lost cause right from the jump, but the film has made the immaculate decision to cast Peter Dinklage as the supervillain Dr. Simon Barsinister, and Patrick Warburton as his dim henchman Cad Lackey, and those two men, paired up, as the villains of a silly kids' comedy, ought to be a full-on miracle. I'll say this, at least: they're not holding back, Dinklage especially. They're shamelessly hammy, at least, but it simply never lands; it's loud and shill but certainly not funny, nor campy. Whether this is them not doing it right (Warburton, certainly, isn't putting in nearly as much energy as we all know damn good and well he's capable of), or director Frederik Du Chau not knowing what to do with them, or just that the script was that misbegotten, I cannot say. I can only say with great confidence that there's nothing at all about Underdog that is in any way lively; it's just several different flavors of grinding, unfunny tedium.
Setting aside the actors (also including Amy Adams, still bright and early in her career, mindlessly yammering her way through the role of Underdog's love interest, a spaniel named Polly Purebred; that's one way to play a small dog, I guess, though not ultimately a very rewarding one), the main issues with Underdog are that it's too chintzy looking to convincingly sell its superheroics, and aggressively lazy in its comedy and plotting. The latter comes as no surprise and isn't interesting to talk about: it's just kids' movie boilerplate. The main emotional throughline, in which Underdog - under the civilian name "Shoeshine" - befriends a sad teen boy named Jack (Alex Neuberger) and helps Jack patch things up with his sad dad Dan (Jim Belushi), an ex-cop who was disgraced the same time that Underdog himself was, is insufferably trite, and it's a heavy anchor on the main conflict, which is about Barsinister trying to create a super soldier serum or something an accidentally creating the super-strong, flying, English-speaking dog superhero who can stop his plans. It's just not possible to take the whole "superhero action" thing seriously when it keeps abandoning even the pretext of stakes for more scenes of the insipid Jack pining after a girl or doing whatever the hell he's doing. The jokes, meanwhile, range from the blatantly obvious to the not even obvious; at one point, Underdog flies past the Space Shuttle, and an astronaut says "Houston, we have a beagle", and it's all labored and terrible and it's not even the right joke, since obviously the point you're trying to write towards is "The beagle has landed". And yeah, you're ripping off Charles M. Schulz at that point, but I cannot for a hot second believe that the authors of Underdog had enough shame for that to be a factor.
The failures as a superhero movie are at least particular and remind us that this is, after all, a 2007 film. Because, after all, one could sink a ton of money and time and love into an Underdog movie, though I concede that one most likely would not wish to. But that's clearly not a consideration here, and it's sort of conspicuously something that was never a consideration. The film's chintziness, in its CGI and its flat aesthetics and the fact that Underdog spends nearly the entire movie as a normal beagle, not even in a costume (I will set aside the fact that he's not anthropomorphic as being so far afield from what the movie was ever going to be that it's not worth worrying about), seem to be as much as anything because nobody involved took this at all seriously: a superhero dog from the 1960s? This is garbage for kids, it doesn't need to look good. And somehow, I don't know if I can quite bring myself to believe that this would have been true five or ten years later. We have never lived in a world that was ready for a $200 million Underdog movie, to be sure, but making it as a crummy live-action film probably wouldn't have happened much later than 2007, and acting as though superhero storytelling was so boring that you needed a pedestrian domestic drama to prop it up definitely wouldn't have. None of this, to be clear, makes Underdog remotely worth watching or thinking about, but it does make it feel like an odd little time capsule, and that's better than nothing. Barely.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
The most interesting thing about the 2007 feature film version of Underdog is that it exists at all. And given that it isn't very interesting that it exists at all, that probably tells you most of what you need to know about how much meat there is on these bones.
But let me tease this out a little bit anyway: 2007 was in some ways the very twilight of the most recent period in American blockbuster filmmaking before our own. Most importantly, it was the last year before Iron Man and The Dark Knight came out, and the one-two punch of those movies is pretty much the reason that "blockbuster movies" and "supehero comic adaptations" were more or less indistinguishable terms for the great bulk of the 2010s. Somewhat less importantly, 2007 is near the end of the period when the Walt Disney Company (which released Underdog) was still flailing around trying to find its own asshole; and perhaps least importantly - but still importantly - 2007 was a period in time when you could still do an unabashed nostalgia throwback to media from the 1960s, unlike our own current nostalgia empire that seems to have settled on the 1980s and maybe the early 1990s as the allowable pool of pop culture to draw from.
In other words, Underdog is a pretty fine exemplar of "The State Of Cinema", circa August 2007. That is its chief, if not indeed only merit. Do we need such an exemplar? Eventually, I guess. Mostly, what it tells us is that the state of cinema back then was a bit desperate and flopsweaty. In particular, I think what Underdog really exemplifies is that still, as late as the summer of 2007, studios weren't entirely sure that superhero movies could be taken all that seriously, and maybe they were really best thought of as insincere junk food for undemanding children Which is not to say that they are more sincere in the 2020s, nor that they expect a particularly demanding audience. But at least they're not this.
The last thing about Underdog's mere existence that's interesting, or at least inexplicable, is that this film very obviously supposes that you, the viewer, have a strong pre-existing investment in the character and the original 1964-'67 cartoon series where he entered the world. Since the film also supposes that you were born probably between 1999 and 2001, I'm not sure where the film expects you to have picked up that knowledge, but no two ways about it, this is not merely an origin story for Underdog, it's an origin story that assumes you know where it's heading. It even opens with footage of the cartoon, one of the more famous examples of the "cartoon modern" style of the late '50s and early '60s TV animation, produced by Total Television (one of the main studios whose thing was making you think that they were Jay Ward Productions, when they very definitely weren't). It's playing on somebody's nostalgia, but I'm not entirely sure whose, which is perhaps why the film tanked pretty hard at the box office.
So anyways, Underdog. First up, besides that montage of footage from a 40-year-old Saturday morning cartoon, is a rock version of the TV show theme song, performed by Plain White T's, and man, if anything is just going to plunge you at top speed into "this movie could literally only have conceivably come out during a roughly four-month span in 2007", having a theme song by Plain White T's is a great way to do it. At the same time as all of the above, we get narration from Underdog himself, letting us know that even though he's famous for being a crimefighter, this will actually be a story of how he became such a thing, starting with his great professional failure as a police dog. Underdog will be played by a beagle (or several beagles, at least) with a CGI mouth that makes me wonder, as do pretty much all talking animal pictures made from 1996 to the present, how it is remotely possible that so many filmmakers could look back at the example of Babe and say to themselves, "nope, I think our movie should look worse than that". And yet here we are, and the dog's mouth turns into a shiny CGI smear everytime he speaks, and the best I can come up with is that it constantly kept reminding me of the then-three-years-old Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, but always in the specific context, "okay, well at least it looks better than Superbabies". Underdog's voice is provided by Jason Lee, who was having just an absolute fucking nightmare of a 2007: he'd be on the other side of the "live-action humans and indescribably vile photorealistic CGI animals" divide a mere four months later, in Alvin and the Chipmunks. This is the better film, but the worse Lee performance; the whole point of Underdog is that he's a big cheesy hambone, a parody of a melodramatic hero prone to overwrought statements of bravery in the form of deliberately forced rhyming couplets. Lee's performance lives exclusively in a gravely gurgle, like the only way he could get through the experience was by chainsmoking, not merely between takes, but indeed during them. He doesn't have fun with the corniness, seeming to be vaguely ashamed of the rhymes (to be fair, the screenplay, by Adam Rifkin and Joe Piscatella & Craig A. Williams, has already beaten him there), and remaining far too ironically aloof and knowing. And really, if your Underdog remake isn't going to embrace cheesiness with both arms, I don't know what you think you're doing.
Then again, it's not like embracing the cheesiness works out elsewhere. Lee is a lost cause right from the jump, but the film has made the immaculate decision to cast Peter Dinklage as the supervillain Dr. Simon Barsinister, and Patrick Warburton as his dim henchman Cad Lackey, and those two men, paired up, as the villains of a silly kids' comedy, ought to be a full-on miracle. I'll say this, at least: they're not holding back, Dinklage especially. They're shamelessly hammy, at least, but it simply never lands; it's loud and shill but certainly not funny, nor campy. Whether this is them not doing it right (Warburton, certainly, isn't putting in nearly as much energy as we all know damn good and well he's capable of), or director Frederik Du Chau not knowing what to do with them, or just that the script was that misbegotten, I cannot say. I can only say with great confidence that there's nothing at all about Underdog that is in any way lively; it's just several different flavors of grinding, unfunny tedium.
Setting aside the actors (also including Amy Adams, still bright and early in her career, mindlessly yammering her way through the role of Underdog's love interest, a spaniel named Polly Purebred; that's one way to play a small dog, I guess, though not ultimately a very rewarding one), the main issues with Underdog are that it's too chintzy looking to convincingly sell its superheroics, and aggressively lazy in its comedy and plotting. The latter comes as no surprise and isn't interesting to talk about: it's just kids' movie boilerplate. The main emotional throughline, in which Underdog - under the civilian name "Shoeshine" - befriends a sad teen boy named Jack (Alex Neuberger) and helps Jack patch things up with his sad dad Dan (Jim Belushi), an ex-cop who was disgraced the same time that Underdog himself was, is insufferably trite, and it's a heavy anchor on the main conflict, which is about Barsinister trying to create a super soldier serum or something an accidentally creating the super-strong, flying, English-speaking dog superhero who can stop his plans. It's just not possible to take the whole "superhero action" thing seriously when it keeps abandoning even the pretext of stakes for more scenes of the insipid Jack pining after a girl or doing whatever the hell he's doing. The jokes, meanwhile, range from the blatantly obvious to the not even obvious; at one point, Underdog flies past the Space Shuttle, and an astronaut says "Houston, we have a beagle", and it's all labored and terrible and it's not even the right joke, since obviously the point you're trying to write towards is "The beagle has landed". And yeah, you're ripping off Charles M. Schulz at that point, but I cannot for a hot second believe that the authors of Underdog had enough shame for that to be a factor.
The failures as a superhero movie are at least particular and remind us that this is, after all, a 2007 film. Because, after all, one could sink a ton of money and time and love into an Underdog movie, though I concede that one most likely would not wish to. But that's clearly not a consideration here, and it's sort of conspicuously something that was never a consideration. The film's chintziness, in its CGI and its flat aesthetics and the fact that Underdog spends nearly the entire movie as a normal beagle, not even in a costume (I will set aside the fact that he's not anthropomorphic as being so far afield from what the movie was ever going to be that it's not worth worrying about), seem to be as much as anything because nobody involved took this at all seriously: a superhero dog from the 1960s? This is garbage for kids, it doesn't need to look good. And somehow, I don't know if I can quite bring myself to believe that this would have been true five or ten years later. We have never lived in a world that was ready for a $200 million Underdog movie, to be sure, but making it as a crummy live-action film probably wouldn't have happened much later than 2007, and acting as though superhero storytelling was so boring that you needed a pedestrian domestic drama to prop it up definitely wouldn't have. None of this, to be clear, makes Underdog remotely worth watching or thinking about, but it does make it feel like an odd little time capsule, and that's better than nothing. Barely.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
