Blame It on the Dog Read Online Free PDF

sixteenth annual Kids’ Choice Awards, airing live from the Pauley Pavilion at UCLA in Los Angeles.
    “And the nominees are …” said presenter Ashton Kutcher:
“Austin Powers 3
,
Master of Disguise, Crocodile Hunter, Scooby Doo
.”
    “And the winner is …” (dramatic opening of envelope; breaths bated all over America; asses clenched in the audience for fear of upstaging the winner)
“Scooby Doo!”
    Suddenly the award show’s producer inexplicably cut to a reaction shot of TV twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen sitting in the audience, which fed all sorts of speculation and created a stink in its own right, but we’re not concerned with that here. If the Olsen twins want coverage in this book, they’ll have to come up with their own farts—in stereo.
    Anyway,
Scooby Doo
was Warner Bros.’s $51-million remake of a popular 1970s TV series from Hanna-Barbera, an animation company known for its barely moving cartoon characters. For the new Hollywood version, real actors stepped into all the roles exceptfor the eponymous Scooby Doo, a talking Great Dane re-created by computer graphics (CG) technology. In the award-winning scene, the dog got into a farting bout with Shaggy, his goofy human companion played by Matthew Lillard. (Lillard had already given the Hollywood press the
Scooby Doo
poop scoop before the movie’s June 2002 release when he announced, “Scooby and I actually get into a farting contest. Your kids are gonna love this.”) Since Scooby was unavailable for the Nickelodeon event, Lillard ran up onstage alone to accept the award, an orange blimp called the Blimpy—an unwieldy representation of a flying gas bag presented to all Kids’ Choice winners, but certainly most appropriate for Favorite Fart.
    Pop culture observers who watched the event weren’t sure what a farting prize portended for the film industry. “It’s a sad movie indeed that tries to offer many funny sequences but only delivers one, and when that sequence is an immature farting competition between a man and a dog, that’s when you realize just how unfunny the rest of [
Scooby Doo
] actually is,” said online critic Mark Dujsik.
    But Hollywood didn’t care. The Kids’ Choice Awards happens to be one of the loosest and hippest of the countless awards shows that clog TV schedules early each year. Along with the presentation of the fart blimp, there’s a celebrity burping contest whose past winners include Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, and Hugh Jackman. And these A-listers are all happy to do it. According to Nickelodeon president Cyma Zarghami, the willingness of celebrities to join the juvenile hijinks is “a testament to how powerful the kids’ audience is. This segment [of moviegoers] is really important to the box office.” Also, as any ad exec will tell you, it’s wise even for actors to establish brand identification early and build a lifelong relationship with consumers.
    The following year, on April 3, 2004, the winner of the Blimpy for Favorite Fart in a Movie was
Kangaroo Jack
, again a Warner Bros, movie with a CG character in the lead. This time the award-winning scene, which lasted about a minute, involved two crepitating camels and one of the film’s flesh-and-blood stars, Anthony Anderson, who retorted with a camel-worthy fart of his own. The drafty dromedaries must have been off making another movie during theawards, because only Anderson showed up to accept the accolades of a grateful public.
    Again, it was a case of kids overruling the critics, who were generally not kind to
Kangaroo Jack
. “Apparently, [the camels’] frequent farting struck someone on the screenwriting team … as absolutely hilarious, and so the joke is allotted several minutes (which feel longer),” said PopMatters ( http://popmatters.com ) reviewer Cynthia Fuchs. “By the time the punch line comes, the joke is past expiration.… And matching [Anderson’s] bodily functions with those of the ostensibly horrific camels only