In the video game Elf Bowling, the elves of Santa’s Workshop are on strike so Santa abuses them by using them as bowling pins as they yell, “Is that all the balls you got, Santa?” The perfect game to adapt into a kid movie! I mean, just look at this fact about the game: It became an internet sensation in 1999 when people originally thought it was a computer virus.

This movie even gets the sequel in, where Dingle Kringle — Santa’s brother — hooks up with Mrs. Claus as they all go to a tropical island and meet the Moai statues of Easter Island. There were eight of these games, including Elf Bowling – Bocce Style and Elf Bowling 6: Air Biscuits, in which the elves could fly by way of flatulence.

So…this movie. Take it away, Wikipedia.

“The film was panned by critics for its writing, animation, directing, humor, plot, musical numbers, voice acting, characterizations and for having little to nothing to do with the premise of the game.”

Santa Claus (Joe Alaskey, who voiced many of the Looney Tunes and Droopy the Dog) started in life as a pirate captain. He redeemed himself somewhat by taking took toys from the rich and giving them to orphanages. He battles his half-brother Dingle Kringle (Tom Kenny, yes, Sponge Bob) and like Holmes and Moriarty, they’ve both taken off the board. But you know, instead of the Reichenbach Falls, they get frozen into blocks of ice. Lex the elf sees them and thinking like the Eskimos did to Sub-Mariner, the elves start to worship Santa as some kind of god who will fulfill a prophecy of leadership, at which points he starts bowling with them once he’s thawed out.

Unlike the game, the elves in this love being smashed by a bowling ball. Dingle takes them to Fiji and Santa has to rescue everyone. The Moai also show up, despite Fiji being 4,600 miles from Easter Island. This is topped by dialogue that is quite intelligent, such as “I have a teensy question for you…who pooped in the peanut barrel?”

At least Tom Kenny got his wife Jill Talley (Karen the Computer Wife on Sponge Bob) a job as Mrs. Claus. He would later say that hen he got a call to do the project, he’d never heard of the recording location, which led to him driving around LA and ending up in a bad neighborhood where the recording took place inside a rundown apartment building.

A U.S./Fiji/South Korea co-production directed by Dave Kim with Rex Piano as co-director, this had animated outsourced to South Korea with the editing happening inside a Simi Valley house owned by Kim’s mother. Kim was so hands on that he did the motion capture for the dance scenes.

The credits tell you that Elf Bowling 2: The Great Halloween Pumpkin Heist is coming. Somehow, the world was not ready for that and it was cancelled.

I warn you: this is the kind of CGI that makes strike and spare animation at a bowling alley look like Katsuhiro Otomo by comparison. There are theories the world ended in the 2000s and we’re just the residual memories of dead souls, floating through a lifeless galaxy. This movie is a real argument for the truth of that presumption.

You can watch this on YouTube.