Aug 4-10  Stoner Comedy Week: I don’t gas reefer anymore, but I love it when people in movies do!

Lawrence Kasanoff executive produced movies like Party Camp, Blood Diner, The Underachievers, Dream a Little Dream, Blue Steel, Class of 1999, A Gnome Named Gnorm and Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College before finding success with the Mortal Kombat movies. He also founded the Vestron Pictures genre subsidiary Lightning Pictures in 1986, Lightstorm Entertainment with James Cameron in 1990 and Threshold Entertainment in 1993, which is where this movie came from. Threshold claims to have done the first morphing in a film for Terminator 2, as well as tons of 3D and 4D work on theme park attractions.

Kasanoff and Threshold Entertainment employee Joshua Wexler created the concept that would become Foodfight! in 1997. They entered into a $25 million joint investment with Korean investment company Natural Image, thinking that foreign pre-sales and loans against the sales would cover the budget. Kasanoff also decided to produce and direct the film, despite having no prior experience in animation.

If this was a success, the movies Arcade and Mascots would be next. As those movies never came out, you can assume that Foodfight! was anything but successful.

In fact, it was a mess.

After raising tens of millions of dollars in funding, the film was initially scheduled for a Christmas 2003 theatrical release. It was also said to come out in 2005 and 2007. Then, when a loan was defaulted on, creditors auctioned off the film’s assets and all associated rights to Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company.

In an article in Animation Magazine, “The Long, Strange Odyssey of Foodfight!,” Kasanoff was beyond gung ho on the project, saying, In terms of coming to have an independent digital animation studio making a digitally animated movie right now, I think we’re pretty much it. We’ve got the movie, we’ve got the property, the place, the equipment, the talent, we’re there. Do we believe our next film, Foodfight!, is going to be a huge hit? Of course we do! We think it’s great. We’ve gotten a fantastic response to it. I’ve told people all over the world, and we’re getting a uniform reaction to it. We’re betting a ton that it’s going to be a great movie. We’re risking more on this movie than any other venture I’ve ever been involved in in my life. Every studio but one offered us a deal on the movie, but for us as producers, not for us as the animation studio. We’re never going to be the next Pixar, being for-hire producers with some other shop.”

Before the rights were sold, the hard drives holding this movie disappeared. Industrial espionage was claimed. In 2012, it was released on DVD and on demand in Europe.

So those are the facts. Here’s another one: this movie is weird.

Weird because none of the corporate mascots paid to be in this. They allowed the film to use them, but no one made money. And yet this feels like a sell-out film. And they’re barely in the movie, despite being all over the poster. Somehow, some execs got worried and pulled their characters, like Cheetos’ Chester Cheetah, the Coca-Cola Polar Bears, Count Chocula, the M&Ms (the animators had “mistakenly rendered the Green M&M, a female mascot, as male within the footage shown to company representative”) and cereal mascots like Sugar Bear, Lucky the Leprechaun, the Trix Rabbit, Cap’n Cruch, Sonny from Cocoa Puffs and the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee.

It all takes place in Marketopolis, a grocery store that when the lights go down turns into a neo-noir film where Dex Dogtective (Charlie Sheen) and his partner Daredevil Dan (Wayne Brady) protect other foods from criminals — and run a nightclub called the Copabanana, don’t fall in love — when Dex isn’t pining for his lost love Sunshine Goodness (Hilary Duff). There’s also the new Brand X, led by General X (Jerry Stiller) and Lady X (Eva Longoria), taking over the store, which is populated by the Energizer Bunny, Kid Cuisine and K.C. Penguin, Punchy from Hawaiian Punch, Mr. Clean, Twinkie the Kid, Mrs. Butterworth (Edie McClurg), the Vlasic Stork, Charlie the Tuna (Jeff Bergman), The California Raisins, Tootsie the Owl and Mr. Bubble. These characters are Ikes, or icons, and when they die, their brands die. Someone is killing Ikes — this is a kid’s movie, but has a cartoon cat played by Harvey Fierstein be Harvey Fierstein and a joke from Midnight Cowboy, not to mention the “La Marseillaise” sequence from Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion being parodied (thanks as always to my guiding light when it comes to writing things like this, Nathan Rubin) — and there’s a secret plot that’s not all so secret.

This is a movie with Larry Miller playing Vlad Chocool, a chocolate cereal vampire bat who has a forbidden love for Daredevil Dan (this is them getting back at General Mills for not allowed Count Chocula out to play); Chris Kattan as Polar Penguin; Ed Asner as the old guy who runs the grocery store; Cloris Leachman as the Brand X Lunch Lady and Christopher Lloyd as the voice of Brand X.

According to comments made by animators, Kasanoff didn’t seem to realize the difference between live-action and animation, often demanding retakes and notes like “make this more awesome.” He also insisted on bringing his dogs to the studio, one of which was said to be a nightmare. He also reportedly asked for a personal nude 3D render of Lady X, which he would keep and admire.

Either the animation was unfinished in this or that’s how bad it is, a movie that wants to be a tough gumshoe film yet is a movie for kids but filled with outright unpaid product placement and sold off to Europe, who didn’t have most of these characters — or may outright hate them, like Chef Boyaredee — where no one wanted to watch it.

How did this get made?

Why did this get made?

It’s still better than Sausage Party.

You can watch this on YouTube.

To learn even more, watch ROTTEN: Behind the Foodfight!