Seriously, it’s gone too far now. First there was live-action Alita, then a live-action Pokémon, then a live-action Sonic the Hedgehog, then a new live-action Masters of the Universe with some femmy pretty boy standing in for He-Man, and now this, this little slap at my industrial complex.
There it is, a live-action Dora the Explorer movie. You thought before that Hollywood was out of ideas? Brother, you don’t even know what out-of-ideas looks like.
Let’s get the inevitable jokes out of the way first: yes, Dora turned out nice and all that. But much more important is that this trailer is almost identical to a parody that College Humor created some years back with Ariel Winter:
The similarities are so striking, it’s as if someone at Nickelodeon watched this parody sketch and said, “Hey, we could actually do this.” Notice Dora’s reunification with Diego: the real movie’s version is just like the parody’s … except not funny.
The concept in both the parody and the real film is that Dora is like a miniature Lara Croft, though I can’t help but think that the parody version, while obviously lower-budget, is both funnier and closer to the spirit of the original cartoon, featuring the talking backpack, fourth-wall breakage, and bilingualism.
This parody enjoyed a popularity of its own, and in fact they went on to create a three-part miniseries. It’s pretty damn funny, probably funnier than the big-budget movie is going to be, considering that, according to the preview, most of the movie’s jokes consist of people hitting their heads on things.
I can’t claim to be terribly familiar with Dora the Explorer. I attempted to watch it once, but gave up: I like to think my endurance for children’s cartoons is pretty high, but that one was was too annoying even for me. Nonetheless … there’s a good chance I’ll watch this movie.
