Follow That Bird - DVD Review

MOVIE
VIDEO
AUDIO
EXTRAS
OVERALL

One Disc
1.33:1 Aspect Ratio - Pan & Scan
English, French & Portuguese Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
English, French, Spanish & Portuguese
Theatrical Trailer
Jump to a song feature
Run Time: 89 Minutes
Snap Case

MOVIE
Rated G, for overall wholesomeness and a general feeling of well-being

Follow That Bird holds a special spot in my heart. It's one of the first movies I ever saw more than once in the theater. So, it could mean one of two things, that it was the movie that jump started my love affair of film, or that it was the movie that jump started my lack of money due to all the times I go to the movie theater. Either way, I first saw it at a summer day camp with my cousin Natalia. It was a strange camp, on the one hand they took us to movies and to and awesome old pizza place in Chicago that had movie screens with Three Stooges playing and the waitresses wore roller skates beginning my life long love affair of roller skates and pizza. Well, pizza. And then, this same camp would force us to walk at least a mile and a half to swim in a freezing pool next to a caramel factory. It's strange what you remember, isn't it? Well, sometime in August of 1985, we went to see three movies with the camp, The Goonies, Karate Kid Part 2 and Follow That Bird. Were we a little old for Sesame Street? Perhaps, but there were younger kids at that camp. But, a longtime fan of the Muppets at that point (as long time as you can be at six) I was thrilled.
A meddling agency, much like social services, decides that Big Bird (voiced by Carroll Spinney) is an orphan because he has no one else of his own kind around on Sesame Street. This leads Miss Finch (voiced by Sally Kellerman), the agency's representative, to take Big Bird to live with a family of Dodos in Oceanside, Illinois. (A special side note, the young boy Dodo is voiced by Eddie Deezen, the geekiest geek of them all, he used to be a standard fixture of geekdom in movies, most notably in Grease and WarGames, kind of amusing) So, anyway, after a little while of playing stupid games with the Dodos (who are, as their name implies, REALLY stupid) Big Bird decides he wants to go back to Sesame Street, so he runs away from the Dodos. Back on Sesame Street, the gang is watching a news broadcast anchored by Chevy Chase. He turns it over to Kermit The Frog (voiced, of course, by Jim Henson) who informs the gang that "a big yellow bird has run away from home." Everybody sets out to find Big Bird and go on some wacky adventures.
What a wonderful blast of nostalgia watching this movie now is. Natalia informed me that on a channel called Noggin, they show old Sesame Street reruns from our days of watching it. Unfortunately this is the closest I get. But Follow That Bird has some great Bert and Ernie banter in a small propeller plane that Ernie flies, we also get a lot of the Count and Oscar and we get to see Snuffy in his natural environment, or what I assumed to be such. There are some mediocre songs, nowhere near the caliber of those in The Muppet Movie or Muppets Take Manhattan, but cute. There are a bushel of guest stars, probably to amuse the parents who don't share my nostalgia for the material, Paul Bartel, Sandra Bernhard, John Candy, Chevy Chase, Joe Flaherty, Dave Thomas and Waylon Jennings all appear. My favorite moment in the movie, though, is Cookie Monster eating Gordon's Volkswagon Beetle.
I don't know if kids'll love it these days. From what I hear, Sesame Street is a very different place now. Littler kids will. Do a double feature of this and Elmo. Interestingly, in a window at the end of the movie, Elmo makes a brief appearance. This did come out the same year as Elmo was introduced on the show.

VIDEO QUALITY
The video quality is good, with the bright colors of the film well reproduced, especially the blue bird scene. The blacks are deep, but nothing too impressive. There are some artifacts noticeable at times, but it's obvious Warner wasn't prepping this as a major DVD release, so expenses were spared, I'm sure. My biggest gripe, though, is that this film isn't in its theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1 but rather pan and scanned to 1.33:1. While I'm sure this is because it's a kids release, that doesn't explain things to me. I'd imagine that the kids watching this wouldn't be bothered by the black bars or would soon forget them. I'd imagine it's the parents, ignorant of the benefits of Widescreen, that forces DVD companies to continue releasing pan and scan movies. Oh well, off my high horse.

AUDIO QUALITY
Little effort is made to make this sound any different from the TV show in scope. There are a few moments that stand out with decent sound design, the airplane ride and some of the songs fill the speakers nicely, but otherwise, the sound design is distinctly unimpressive. Also, just a question, when did they start including Portuguese as a language on DVDs? I've just started noticing it recently.

EXTRAS
Being a kids DVD, the extras are scarce and the menus are EXTREMELY simplified. Watch, Scenes, Special Stuff and Languages are our options. The Special Stuff menu allows you to jump to a song. But as there are only a handful and they're not terribly impressive, this isn't a tremendous extra. Also included are the original theatrical trailer, which I remember seeing on TV. There's also the Elmo's Adventures in Grouchland trailer to get the kiddies to beg you to rush out and get that.

CLOSING THOUGHTS
You can't always go back again, recapture your youth. This is evident in countless eighties films being re-released on DVD to a jaded audience hoping for that wonderful feeling as kids, only to find that our sensibilities have changed so far we can never achieve what we once had again. Some movies transcend that, though, The Muppet Movie, Muppets Take Manhattan, The Goonies, Ghostbusters, Back To The Future, and so on. These are the ones that (hopefully) will never get old and, we'll have them digitally remastered for our more sophisticated tastes.