The Walken / Country Bear Conspiracy

by JRoyale

2002-04-22 21:41:04

Team Walken

As has been recently reported in the PDJ, Christopher Walken, evil s00per villain extraordinaire, will be appearing next month in Disney's newest release, The Country Bear Movie. Always playing some wicked and very disturbed badass in movies like Sleepy Hollow, Illuminata, The Prophecy I, II, III, Pulp Fiction, Batman Returns, The Milagro Beanfield War, A View to a Kill, The Dogs of War, Heaven's Gate, and The Deer Hunter, Walken is unsuprisingly a big favorite in the PDJ news room.

So Walken's appearance in a movie like Country Bear managed to stir up quite a debate. There are many of my esteemed colleagues who believe that this deal is on the up and up and that we should take the words from the Disney Press Release literally and accept the fact that Christopher Walken actually enjoyed making this movie.

However, a quick viewing of the trailer — which I will now review for you because this is the PDJ and I don't actually review movies, just the trailers — shows this to be a fucking God Awful Film. I review trailers because it saves me a lot time and effort and in the hyperactive and lightning fast-paced world of webzines, time is money... or it would be if I got paid. The PDJ does get a number of complaints about this strategy... emails with the words "lazy," "cheap bastards," "uninformed" and "lacking journalistic integrity" are routinely received by our crack mailroom team which immediately routes them to the shredder.

So anyway, onto the trailer review, which starts with some talking infant bear cub being adopted by a family that just happens to neglect to mention to the cub that he isn't in fact a human being. Naturally, having a big black nose, two ears on the top of his head and being covered in fur causes him to grow suspicious and wonder just what in the hell is wrong with him. As he becomes an adolescent, kids at school start teasing him about his unusual physical traits, so his big "brother" explains to the cub that he is not human at all. This freaks the cub out and he runs away from home. Why??? I don't know... I guess I could watch the movie to figure this part of the plot out, but I'm sure it isn't important in the grand scheme of the universe. On the road, the cub has all sort of coming-of-bear adventures and finally runs into the Country Bears, a band of bears that is touring the country entertaining people with that special music and banter of theirs. To make a short review even shorter, the cub saves the band, learns his true identity, rejoins his bear culture and goes on to become the lead singer, just like Michele Jackson, err... with more fur. Of course, his adopted family arrives just in time to see the big number at the end of the movie and is very proud of him.

Ugh, what a horrible fucking trailer and I hope you all appreciate the 5 minutes of my life I wasted watching it for you. It seems that the Disney marketing dweebs have just flat run out of ideas and were stumbling through Disney World in the middle of some prescription drug binge when they walked past the Country Bears Jamboree and decided that marketing synergy was a good thing and a movie about starting singing animatronic bears was a sure seller. Forgetting, of course, that no one gives a flying fuck about the Country Bears.

But Disney, already owning the rights to the bears and desperate to jack up park attendance, sees this movie as one 2 hour DisneyWorld advertisement that people get to pay 9 bucks to see. Don't you just love synergy? Unfortunately for Disney, they couldn't just take the cameras inside the Country Bear Jamboree and film the robotic bears because then people wouldn't flock to the park to see the Bears "perform." It would also have been hard to stretch out that 15 minutes of "entertainment" into a full length film, tho' I have the feeling that anybody who actually watches this movie will wish Disney had done just that. Thus, Disney actually had to write a script. Big mistake... I've seen the trailer, remember.

Anyway, back to the reason for this article in the first place, which is how in the hell did Disney convince Walken to take a role in a shitty movie like this? I, and a number of other editors, simply refuse to believe that Walken willingly acted in this movie. Some editors speculated that Walken probably killed a person or two or 20 and Disney found out about it and blackmailed him into making this movie. That's believable as no one really questions whether or not Walken would kill people. The only debate here is how much would he make them suffer first.

Other editors, pointing out just how evil Disney has become since the death of Walt, theorized that Disney just threatened to break Walken's kneecaps if he didn't take the role. I think that is unlikely, as people don't generally threaten a man like Walken. Still, it is possible as no matter how tough a guy Walken is, even he can't take on the whole DisneyWorld security staff of clones.

However, I suspect that something much darker and more menacing is afoot here. I think that Disney just had Walken killed, dumped his body behind Splash Mountain and replaced him with an animatronic robot made from spare Abe Lincoln parts. And why not? Let's face it, Walken doesn't really express any emotions or any real facial expressions (except for an evil grimace), which is one of the reasons he gets all the good super-villain roles. So he is like the perfect candidate for robotic replacement. And what is scary is, as soon as they perfect this technology, Disney will be able to replace and control any person with a cardboard, one dimensional character, like our current selected President. Assuming, of course, that the oil companies haven't beaten them to the punch.

iambic@pigdog.org