Children's Movies Which Will Never Be Remade

All Dogs Go To Heaven


Synopsis: Dog runs an illegal gambling operation with a cohort who solicits his murder rather than share their profits equally. Dog reaches heaven, finds that he has squandered his life and is doomed to Hell, whereby he distracts the angel-dog in front of him, steals his life's magic clock and rewinds it, cheating death. He returns to Earth, effectively immortal and gung-ho on exploiting an orphan with the ability to talk to animals with the purpose of regaining control of the city's illegal animal rackets. After ruining her shot at getting adopted, he eventually chooses to rescue her and save her life at the expense of his watch, dying yet again but finding himself redeemed and welcome in Heaven. He dies and the street urchin gets a family. Dom Delouise is a wiener dog.

Why They'll Never Remake It: Tons of gruesome doggy death.

Status: Dead as the protagonist, though only after a sequel and a television series.

The Aristocats

Synopsis: A faithful butler overhears his mistress dictating her will to her lawyer. (Incorrectly) believing he is going to be overlooked after his years of service and all the Lady's fortunes are to go to her cats, the butler bundles them up in the middle of the night and hurls them off a bridge into a river. The same thing a woman just got yelled at for on the internet a few months back. "Duchess" and her three kittens are discovered by (Abraham De Lacey Giuseppe Casey) Thomas O'Malley, an alley cat. O'Malley proceeds to flagrantly hit on Duchess, who in her sheltered lifestyle does not realize she is basically riding his cat-dick for a lift home. It's Ass, Gas, or Grass, baby, and Duchess ain't paickin' her wallet or bud. Of course, right as O'Malley is about to get his freak on, Duchess' kittens pop out and he's all, "WOAH THERE BITCH I DI'N' SIGN UP FOR THIS SHIT!" but being a man of his word he agrees to guide them all home anyway. Somewhere along the line he falls in love with Duchess and gets to live with them back home wearing an adorable little collar and bow-tie. Also, the butler gets arrested for something ridiculous.


Why They'll Never Remake It: More violence against animals, this time by humans who should be above all that. Also, the hero gets roped into raising another man's children because a father's life is better than that of a swinging bachelor, but no one can have sex so they can't be his kids. Let's just go ahead and illiminate the 101 Dalmations series, The Lion King and any other Disney film that proposes murdering animals. Plus, Phil Harris died in 1995, so this also rules out a remake of The Jungle Book with his amazing voice.

Status: Just got a DVD rerelease, then sent back to the Disney "vault," so increase demand for another five years, thus justifying exorbitant pricing.

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

Synopsis: Little White Boy moves to, I don't know, India or some shit, with his family. Not knowing anything about the land, they build a nice little Western-style house on the ground next to a jungle. Little White Boy befriends a mongoose, which he names something ridiculously long. Living so close to dangerous brush, no one but the family is shocked when a vicious cobra goes to eat Cody. (I don't know that that's his name, honestly, but he's as little and dumb and white as can be, so Cody seems like the perfect name for him.) Cody is saved by Rikki and his mongoose wife, who dies killing the Cobra, herself the wife of an even larger, meaner cobra who is now pissed at the humans for invading his area and killing his wife. Big Cobra goes to kill the Cody, but Rikki jumps in and they end up killing each other. Cody is sad that his friend has died, but even tually he finds a little brown boy or a rock or something to play with and forgets all about it. White people continue exploiting the land and native cultures.

Why They'll Never Remake It: Aside from all the animal fighting and revenge killings, it was based on a Rudyard Kipling story and no one wants to have to work P.R. for story written by the guy whose most famous work is "The White Man's Burden."

Status: Hopefully still carried at your local library in the "Teach Kids Not To Play With Fucking Cobras" section.

"It's MY day!" cried Grumpy. "I don't care if I have to strangle
every last one of you bastards to get in their first!"

Any Disney Movie Based on a Fairy Tale

Synopsis: Princess is sheltered and devoid of character, aside from being pretty. Maybe she's kindly, if in a very provincial sort of way. Someone gets angry at her, then tries to kill her. A handsome prince saves the day and takes her away to live with him as his wife.

Why They'll Never Do It Again: All Disney females must now be of stronger moral fiber than their male "saviors." Disney has also been shying away from the whole "blatant attempted murder" thing for humans as well as animals, these days. Even stories which begin with one or both parents already dead are becoming less and less common.

Status: They're totally going to do it again. Constantly. Except now the stories will be bastardized even farther than their saccharinely sweet Golden Age counterparts. Rapunzel is some kind of sequestered idealist whose prince is a conniving coward in Tangled, and The Princess and the Frog was basically panned from day-1 as exploitive of a black princess, placative for finally tossing black folks their own princess and just generally being a shitting movie with no relation to the original whatsoever. Granted, there was no hope of making a Snow White wherein she chokes on the apple core and Prince Charming literally fucks it out of her. Apparently Disney never had a thing for borderline necrophilia. At least not publicly.

Three Ninjas/Home Alone

Synopsis: Bad men attempt to break into someone's house while the parents are away. Child(ren) fend them off using ingenuity and a series of deliciously evil and most likely very, very painful and possibly deadly homemade apparati. The burglars survive somehow, but are captured by law enforcement agents. In one, the children have yellow-belt level ninjutsu skills taught to them by their maternal grandfather. Also, I believe their mother was the long-running female ADA on "Law & Order" back in the late '90s.

Why They'll Never Be Remade: Because, frankly, they already have been. To death. At this point it's just needless violence on camera, essentially justifiable elder abuse. In fact, the legality of all of this is questionable since the kids are almost certainly using more than reasonable force to repel home invasions. Only the fact that these are children worried about kidnapping and murder really excuse that level of aggravated assault. Likely, any judge would move the case to family court and the kids would be put through intensive cycles of counseling to make sure they weren't terribly traumatized by their experiences.

Status: Three sequels. Each.

On Dying In Bed

One of these days, lying in bed I'm just going to crack my neck so hard that it severs my spinal chord and I'll lose all motor control below my neck, causing me to slowly and silently suffocate, staring up into the black of my ceiling awake and fully cognizant of the last three minutes of my life pathetically passing by without so much as the ability to call for help.

These are the things I worry about as I'm falling asleep at night. Seriously, I could have nailed so many goth chicks in high school if I'd had the mind to. You call it dark and brooding? I call it being Jewish.

On Summer Reading Lists

If you had to compare it to a drug, really, reading is more
like alcohol than weed or heroine; some people just need
a nightcap to wind down from their day, others need it every
day t the expense of their health, but a lot of people just have
to develop a taste for it as they age.
Few people are natural addicts.

When I was a kid there was always some kind of contest at the local library for kids to read the most books out of a given list. This was of course back in the days when I went to a library, anyone else I knew was likely to be in a library and most of use were just hoping to book time on the computers to play Putt Putt educational games.

Honestly, I went to my college library for a book once, and I couldn't take it out because it was a scholarly journal, so I had to photocopy the damned thing. I think the rest of the time I used the library for a meeting or two and to use its printing station twice a week one semester. (There were a ton of articles to print each week, but after three years my weekly page allotment had rolled over into a small fortune in white, pulpy gold.) Senior year I actually remember following someone into the main part of the library and getting lost.

Oh, but in those days of yesteryear my library encouraged kids to read their faces off. Now, I've got no less than 29 different books sitting on my night stand forming my "to read" pile, two seasons of television and 3 movies sitting on top of my dresser, and I've honestly lost count of the number of shows/movies/documentaries I've downloaded or queued up on Netflix to be watched eventually, not to mention the dozen or so monthly comic series I keep up with as they hit the interbutts. I just never seem to have the time to get any of this crap read anymore. (Or watched.)

Man, this past week I've done well, though. I had three whole snow days and there's a three-day weekend ahead of me. I might really manage to burn through a small pile of this. If I could only somehow get rewarded for finishing all this reading I've accumulated. And perhaps if my progress were to be shown on a map of some sort, say, in the shape of a growing caterpillar….

On Snow Days

I had had a plan for yesterday, or rather, I had a plan for a good snow day activity and I just wasn't in the mood for it yesterday. Perhaps if I elaborate you'll understand why.

A while back I came across a recipe for cookies. As you can see, part of that recipe includes functionally prepared cookies. No, it's not some trick, that's a recipe for a chocolate chip cookies with a prefabricated cookie inside. It's a cookie with a delicious other cookie center. Marvelous.

And yet, I just wasn't prepared. I had things to do, people to see, conversations to be had and materials to read. Honestly, I just wasn't in the cookie baking mood. Really, up until this point in my life, I never imagined there was such a thing.

Of course, the last time I ate a dessert that had an Oreo on the inside, I didn't poop for four days, so maybe that had something to do with it.

On Updating Your Look

Here's a picture of me from about thirty seconds ago:

A handsome rake, I know, but as much as it's difficult to improve upon such near-perfection, it is possible. I say "near" because I believe it would always be possible for my to be less humble.

However you will also notice one other attribute that could support the "near" hypothesis. I have to wear glasses. Yes, though I was once blessed with the sight of winged predators, hovering just below 20-12 and approaching the realm of trained sniper agents, come of age my vision has withered some, requiring the usage of corrective spectacles which–if I might be honest–I think provide me a certain level of class and bookish reliability that counterpoints the rougish charm of my goateed visage. I mean when I want to look extra confident and completely too cool for the rest of you, I still pop in the contacts, but for prolonged or everyday use, I stand by my trust frameless.

Well, I did. For about eight years. But recently I've noticed that street signs aren't exactly as clear as they could be. Shifting between reading distances was becoming labored. Despite the perfection of my frameless frames, it was time to get new glasses.

Once health coverage kicked back in for my in January, the search began. Preferring the lack of a frame to hamper my sight, I ventured to continue with a frameless model, also with thin wire for the earpieces and a shape complimentary to my perfectly formed cheek bones. Finding very little even remotely close in the usual places and nothing affordable anywhere else, I ended up going to Walmart and perusing all six of their men's frameless choices.

And damned if I didn't find the perfect pair. Well, almost perfect. They're still not invisible corrective surgery, but I'll take them. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the new and improved look for Dave Zucker in the far off year of 2011:

On Cruel Games

According to the BBC, "We" has become the most common word used in recent U.S. State of the Union addresses.

Tonight at the bar, I suggested we attempt a drinking game wherein we drank every time President Obama uttered the phrases "great nation," "the people" or, of course, the word "we."

Jay was the only person to take this challenge.

He is a brave man. Perhaps not smart enough to avoid this trap, but damn sure smart enough to know when he's no longer enjoying his beer.

On Internet Porn

I'm not sure, but I think internet porn might be the purest form of distilled perversion imaginable.

It's the most capricious thing imaginable. Don't like short girls? There's still porn for you. Like redheads? You're in luck. Only get off to women being degraded by men wearing pterodactyl costumes at night in the forest? I can find it for you in about 3 seconds. Everything is available.

And it's all available at once. You can start off looking for plain vanilla guy-on-girl and end up miles away looking at pixelated Japanese women doing the foulest things imaginable in any of a myriad series of complex costumes. You can indulge your every perversion as the mood strikes you. You can't download music as fast as you can find any new type of porn you could imagine. Honestly, I can see why porn is always at the forefront of visual technologies and why the internet is forcing mainstream porn to adapt. Hell, I've seen entire documentaries on basic cable dedicated to the porn industry. It's on the History Chanel for God's sake. Don't try to tell me that porn isn't as common and suburban as in interracial gay couple with an adopted Asian baby, these days.

Sometimes, though, I just think the only thing keeping internet porn alive is the subtle hope of one day seeing someone you know naked on the internet. And then hoping that someone is at least attractive.