#roverdangerfield

If you’re a hot new comedian at the top of your game and you want to make the transition into full-length motion pictures, watch Rover Dangerfield. Take heed of its warnings. This is how NOT to do it. Don't make writer, co-producer, and star Rodney Dangerfield's fall be in vain.

Rover (voiced by Dangerfield) is a fast-talking, wise-cracking, gambling dog living in Las Vegas. When he upsets his owner’s boyfriend, Rocky (Sal Landi), he is thrown over the Hoover Dam to drown. Luckily for our canine protagonist, he is saved. Grateful at first, he’s horrified to discover that he now lives on a farm.

I wish Rover Dangerfield was egregiously unfunny, insulted your intelligence, or unsightly. . Then there’d be more to talk about. This is a film so mediocre it becomes a forgettable waste of everyone’s time and effort. The animation is ok, sometimes dipping its toe into sub-par. The best way to describe it is “generic”. Rover is modeled after the real-life comedian. He sticks out as unique. Everyone else looks like they’ve been pulled from some other random late 80’s/early 90’s animated picture. The humans look realistic while the animals are cartoony. Some of them behave like real animals, others are semi-anthropomorphic. There’s no consistency and evidently, little care was put into the designs. The acting? It’s ok. There's not much to say about it. The writing offers more inspiration. Not to say that it's inspired; you’ll find yourself wondering “haven’t I seen all of this before?” The city slicker in the country thing’s been done countless times. Slapping on a "cartoon dog" skin doesn't make it revolutionary. Tasking Dangerfield with sly comments doesn’t do much either, mostly because every snarky remark he dishes out is neither innovative nor fresh. Almost as if the best material had to be saved for stand-up routines, or got neutered to be inoffensive.

Rover Dangerfield is a head-scratcher. What's the point? Why not allow Rodney to really show off his comedic talents? Did he look at his notes and seriously think “Hey! This is great! It’ll have the audiences rolling in their seats to see me as a dog!” It's like they came up with the title, and then the creative juices stopped. The "plot" is little more than a bunch of sketches between musical numbers (did you ever want to hear Rodney sing? No? Too bad). No one older than 8 would find them funny, none are memorable regardless of your age. It all feels more like padding for a story that barely makes it to 74 minutes than a musical achievement.

You could make a lot of jokes at the expense of Rover Dangerfield. It’s “The movie that deserves no respect” or perhaps you could comment that showing this film to your children is much crueler than anything his character did in Natural Born Killers. But coming up with such jokes wouldn’t be worth your while, not for this movie. It’s more bland than bad, but with nothing actually “good” about it, The best I can offer Rover Dangerfield is a 2/5. (On VHS, July 7, 2012)

Does anyone else remember “Rover Dangerfield”???

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