Jay and Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie 2013
It feels like it’s been a long time since I’ve heard about this movie coming out before I finally got the chance to watch it. It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Kevin Smith, not just his movies but also his many different podcasts. While I don’t listen to as many of them as I used to, I still keep up with Hollywood Babble-On, Tell-em Steve Dave, and occasionally the original SModcast. This is also one of those rare cases where this movie is based on a run of comic books that I have read before seeing this movie and actually own. There are quite a few changes to the story, the format, and definitely the art style, along with many inside jokes that seem like they’re intended for fans of the podcasts, but at the same time I felt like they are just jokes that I had heard many times over because they were inspired by something that he’s said in one of his podcasts whether it was intentional or not. And while I generally enjoy Kevin Smith’s humor, I felt like this movie focused too much of the juvenile dick and fart jokes into such a small space of just over an hour that I quickly grew tired of it. There are several moments of fun, but overall I just wasn’t that interested in the exploits of Bluntman and Chronic as I thought I would have been.
While this movie has a rather overly long title that cashes in on the names most people are familiar with when it comes to Kevin Smith’s work, this is really just a Bluntman and Chronic movie, pulled from the trade paperback in 2001 a few years after Chasing Amy when they were first introduced. It references many different superhero origin stories while simultaneously tossing them aside to have Jay and Silent Bob become superheroes after winning the lottery from a scratch off ticket. And of course, nearly every one of these scenes is turned on its side through the use of a blow job or a handy. One of the few jokes I did enjoy was how every single one of the “League of Shitters” origin stories involved them falling into a giant green vat of chemicals. There’s also the occasional pop-in by writer/director Kevin Smith who decides to over-explain a possibly controversial joke or why Cock-Knocker’s voice is different from his earlier movie which was a little hit-and-miss for me, which at least it was only done about three times so it wasn’t overly distracting.
One of the few highlights of this movie is the voice acting. Jay/Chronic is obviously front and center and he falls back into the role quite easily, but there’s also quite a few other familiar voices. Neil Gaiman has a small role as their manservant, Ralph Garman does his Arnold Schwarzenegger impression to play Dickhead, who has a literal dick as a head, and one of the most fun voices was the ultra-high-pitched Tara Strong who takes over the role of Cock-knocker after being played by Mark Hamill back in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. There’s also quite a few voices that you would recognize if you are a regular listener of the SModcast network, as Bryan Johnson, Walt Flanagan, Scott Mosier, Ben Glieb, and at least a couple others from Smith’s shows make brief appearances in the movie.
The animation itself is a bit of a sticking point for many people. It’s directed by Steve Stark who has been working with SModcast for a few years now after making a couple shorts on his own using audio from a SModcast episode and setting it to his own animation, then he moved on to do many other shorts in the same vein that were on the SModcast YouTube page and are also in a couple DVD collections under the name SModimations. It is a fairly basic style which reminds me quite a bit of the classic Ren and Stimpy cartoons. The characters are fairly exaggerated, and they tend to interact with objects done in a completely different animation style. In the end, the animation is completely serviceable, though it never really does anything to help elevate the movie even though I’m sure there are several background in-jokes that I didn’t catch.
Overall, I think that a superhero comedy filled with dick and fart jokes can only take one so far, and this movie gets the most out of its very short just-over-an-hour runtime with a play on plenty of origin stories including Captain America, Green Lantern, Spider-Man, the Avengers, and even a little Back to the Future at the end. And of course the majority of the parody is at Batman’s expense with the Blunt-cave, the Blunt-mobile, even a reference to Tim Burton’s Batman when the Blunt-mobile turns into the Blunt-wing and they fly straight up into the air to create a silhouette on the moon. There’s a few things here and there that I thought were funny, but unfortunately I felt like most of the movie fell flat, and this is coming from a fan of Kevin Smith and Jay Mewes’s previous works. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.
