Mr. Popper's Penguins Review

Mr. Popper's Penguins Review
Mr. Popper's Penguins is a wonderful children's book. In the book Mr. Popper is a house painter in the 1930s and, like most house painters, only works Spring through Fall. in the wintertime he drowns himself in National Geographic and radio shows about world explorers. During one such show, he learns of Admiral Drake and his Antarctic adventures. He writes to him, and surprisingly Admiral Drake responds to Mr. Popper's letter with a live penguin. The adventures start with one and soon enough, the penguin family grows to nine. Mr. Popper, his wife, and their two kids take the penguins on the road as an act to earn money. The act eventually gets old and there's a run-in with the law only to be bailed out by Admiral Drake. Mr. Popper is then faced with a moral dilemma that questions the penguins' future.

Its hard to imagine messing up a movie version of this book, but somehow someway the filmmakers behind the movie version of Mr. Popper's Penguins found a way to bastardize and destroy every single ounce of charm out of this clever story. They have replaced the poor painter with the story of a workaholic divorcee, who spends most of his time as a slick corporate real estate mogul. Of course he is a absentee father because his father wasn't there for him, funny how movies recycle old cliches. For some reason they thought that telling the oft told story of a jaded modern business man who finds a heart and also wins back his family, would be far more entertaining than the clever idea of a family on the road with a penguin circus during the great depression.

I can see the development meeting in my head...

Studio Executive: Penguin's are up 40% in popularity this quarter, what should we do to get in on this market? 

"Creative" Mind: Animated penguins who sing and dance? 

Studio Executive: Wait Warner Bros. already did that with Happy Feet.

"Creative" Mind: Well We have this wonderful children's book we optioned about a man who lives in Stillwater and has a penguin circus to feed his family during the depression. We could do a live action/animation blend.

Studio Executive: I like it. But lets loose the circus angle and for that matter change everything else in the book. Also, this memo I got says we need to humanize Wall Street after the housing crash.Make him a rich and pompous New Yorker, so that when he learns something people can love real estate moguls again. and make sure he gets pooped on a lot. Oh and at the end can we have Ice Ice Baby play over the credits? I mean who doesn't love Vanilla Ice?

Of course I don't actually think anyone actually said these things, but something tells me that there was hefty market research done. And it is the business of art that makes lousy uninspired drivel like Mr. Popper's Penguins.

My biggest problem with the movie wasn't that they modernized the story, or that they decided to lose the circus, or even that they picked a recycled storyline. My biggest problem with the movie lies in the fact that it took a great children's book, and reduced it to penguin poop. Literally,  I counted no less than seven jokes about penguins pooping. Some of them were Jim Carrey getting pooped on, some of them were penguins pooping on each other, or in toilets, and most of them were not in the least bit funny. Its a sad comment on today's youth if this is what they consider high brow humor.

I can accept that this was a children's book. I can also accept that the producers wanted to attract a modern audience, and that they felt in order to attract that audience they felt obligated to change plot lines and characters. But are kids today that superficial that they cannot appreciate a period piece? Do we have to add a fart joke to a classic tale for it to be more relatable to kids today? This is the part of the review where I bring up the god awful Gulliver's Travels starring Jack Black, because it did the same thing to a good book. Taking a tale, modernizing it but also reducing it to nothing more than a collection of out dated hip hop montages laced with dick and fart jokes. I am sorry, maybe I am old and out of touch, but when you reduce a beloved children's tale to nothing more than poop jokes, then you are not just pooping on Jim Carrey, you are pooping on the people who love the literature in which it is based.

Do yourself a favor and spend the evening reading the book to your kids, or even to yourself.  The book is far more entertaining and thought provoking than this movie, and if you order it on amazon its only like three bucks.