A quick aside: Everything is now in 3D not because it means an improved movie-going experience, but because it's a way for producers and distributors to boost their bottom line by increasing the cost of a movie from about $10 to $13.
So to get a piece of that action, movie makers are presenting material that has no business being 3D just to cash in. And the most recent offender is "Yogi Bear," a travesty of a movie if there ever was one.
The CGI-animated Yogi Bear and his buddy Boo-Boo are the most popular denizens of the fabled Jellystone Park. The affable Boy Scout-loyal Ranger Smith (Tom Cavanagh) runs the park with little help from deputy ranger Jones (T.J. Miller).
Like most of the original Hanna-Barbara cartoon plots, this movie centers around Yogi and Boo-Boo (voiced by Dan Aykroyd and Justin Timberlake, respectively) figuring out ways to steal pic-inic baskets from unsuspecting visitors. But their harmless schemes take a backseat to the harmful scheme of evil mayor Brown (Andrew Daly). The mayor wants to sell and clearcut the park. Will Ranger Smith and newly befriended documentary filmmaker Rachel (Anna Faris) figure out a way to thwart the mayor's evil plan?
Will you care?
No. This movie is so awful, you find yourself rooting for the mayor to clearcut the whole thing. What's worse is how Yogi and Boo-Boo from the crudely drawn but funny cartoon, have been reduced to unfunny hacks who go around the park performing gross-out jokes and making pop-culture references ala the equally unfunny "Shrek." The 3D gags are spitting and popcorn flying and other ancillary gags that don't entertain nor move the story forward. Scrawled by Jeffrey Ventimilia, Joshua Sternin and Brad Copeland, "Yogi Bear" may have ruined the Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo experience for unsuspecting kids who may not have known about the clever and witty cartoon of yore - that never dumbs itself down as this piece of dreck does.
The best part of this movie isn't even in the movie but a YouTube spoof by Edmund Earle that has since gone viral and that posits Boo-Boo and Yogi in the climactic scene of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."[[In-content Ad]]
