Nerding Day: Animalympics

What if I told you that there was a movie in which comedy superstars narrated pop-culture parodies of very sexually-frustrated animals competing in an off-brand version of both the Winter and Summer Olympics? And what if I told you that it somehow played like a combination of the worst of Looney Tunes and the dumbest shit in Heavy Metal? Heavy Metal the movie, I mean, not just a metal that weighs a lot. Or the music, I guess. That probably comes up first in people’s minds. I dunno. I’m more of a Weird Al and Nobuo Uematsu guy, so I guess my taste is a little too fine to think of some garish loud guitar wailing that would shoot my father out of a chair. I don’t love my dad, but I don’t want him to break his neck on the ceiling of the home I’d inherit if he did that.

That’s all to say that in 1980, NBC released a made-for-TV animated movie in which beasts of nature participate in Olympic-style games previously reserved for the true masters of this Earth: Humanity and its progeny. The movie features some of the most famous talent (of 1980) and makes fun of some of the biggest sports figures (of 1980). And it was directed by Steven Lisberger, who you absolutely do not remember as the writer and director of the original Tron. Somehow this both came before and makes less logical sense than Tron, a movie that spawned an entire franchise predicated on the notion that nobody wants to watch it.

But this movie is Animalympics, and it is like going to the zoo after downing a six-pack of expired cough syrup. It’s wonderful. It’s horrible. And if you showed it to a child today, I guarantee it would haunt their fucking dreams until they die in their holocube or whatever we’re going to end up being shoved in when we’re too old to prompt an AI chatbot to do our jobs or whatever stupid shit this future has in store for us.

Let me back up for a second. There was a period in Western animation history - and I do say this with absolutely zero authority - in which it seemed like nobody really knew what the fuck to do with the artform. I’m just going to say that between about 1975 and 1982, animation mostly consisted of people on every drug imaginable trying to remember whether children like or dislike being traumatized. You know what the most heartwarming animated movie to come out of this period was? Watership Down. By the time we got to Animalympics in 1980, you could feel animators asking themselves between lines, “Kids like horny animals trying to fuck, right? That’s really the undercurrent of everything we do, right?” And, hey, we eventually got John Kricfalusi out of that deal and he’s never done anything wrong that you could find all the details about on Google.

Thus we have the Animalympics, the very movie you’re reading about on your phone right now while driving home from the bar. Animalympics was actually intended to be two separate hour-long movies: One based on the Summer Olympics and one based on the - you’ll never guess this, don’t even try - Winter Olympics. The idea was likely that idiot children don’t understand the concepts of games like “soccer” or “hockey” or “running faster than other people” so if they created a fun animated film introducing them to those topics, they’d fall in love with the Olympics. Or, I dunno, NBC just wanted some extra programming because back in the day there were only three television networks and so having a dog skiing was a big leg up when it came to awards season. And I mean that: The Winter Olympics(ish) version was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film.

Anyway, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, which is a real start to a sentence that involves this animal sports movie, President Jimmy Carter boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. With the Olympics canceled, the Animalympics production company realized they couldn’t really just put out the Summer one by itself. So they mashed them together into one film that probably makes just as little sense as the others did. Which is none. This movie makes no sense.

Part of what makes Animalympics so confusing is that there are, oh, maybe three dozen different stories that keep getting dropped and, right when you forget what happened, picked back up. Seriously: It opens with animals carrying torches into Corporate Stadium (which, I’ll admit is pretty funny) and then switches to a preview of every event, then back into the animals carrying the torches, and then a Richard Nixon joke that - even when this aired - was a dated reference. Watching it as an adult now feels odd. I’m sure watching it as a kid when it first aired would be like when a drunk relative at a dinner party tries to do bits.

We also have to contest with multiple announcers based on real-but-now-utterly-and-completely dead people like Barbara Walters, Howard Cosell, and - I swear to God - Henry Kissinger. For some reason, there’s a Henry Kissinger parody character as a turtle narrating the games. Why? I don’t fucking know. I wasn’t alive back then, thank God. Was Henry Kissinger a sports announcer after committing war crimes? Or was he just a fun reference? Why am I asking these fucking questions like any of you are going to answer me. You’re nothing but a bunch of blank faces with nothing but deep, fading lights for eyes.

On the plus side for anyone old enough to remember when The Simpsons was in 4:3 format and nobody else, Animalympics features the voice talent of comedy stars like Billy Crystal, Harry Shearer, and Gilda Radner. You can pretty easily pick out who’s who and it’s always nice seeing Harry Shearer using the news / sports announcer voice he’s used in everything from The Little Giants to The Simpsons to The Little Giants. They basically play the role of living segues, moving us from sport to sport as fast as possible.

Most of the sports come in small, charming sketches. Keep in mind that I said “charming” and not “funny.” The problem this movie has is that almost everything they do is make fun of a sport in a way someone else has already done before. A figureskating bit where one of the figureskaters is dangerously more intense than the other is kind of the only figure skating bit. And the entire track and field sequence is basically animals beating the shit out of each other set to an inspirational song.

The song isn’t ironic, either. It’s not played for laughs. There’s a very strange disconnect between bits that should be humorous and a tone that isn’t sure if it’s making fun of the Olympics or giving kids brave animals to root for. Nor do I understand why I’m putting so much thought into the intentions of the producers behind the 1980 animated movie, Animalympics. A lot of the scenes in the movie involve characters overcoming their destitute backgrounds. An alligator has an entire thing about rising from the sewers and seeing a frog do the high jump to change his life and become an athlete. It’s sweet, but also disconcerting. Every animal athlete seems to be this close to living a life in Hell.

Between an otter surfing, a hog sword fighting a chicken, and a hockey game in which I think it’s implied a bear dies, there are two larger sports stories in the movie: Kurt Wüffner, a dachshund cross country skier and René Fromage and Kit Mambo, a goat and a panther who are competing in a marathon. Both aren’t great by any stretch of any imagination. I’d say Kurt Wüffner’s is the worse one, mostly because his Winter Olympics bits interrupt some of the few quality gags we have in the special, such as the Calamari Brothers - a group of squid - basically crashing out their way to victory. Squid on a bobsled would be the best part of any movie, and it’s especially true here.

Kurt Wüffner’s story also takes a turn when he gets lost while skiing and ends up in Dogra-la, a frozen hippie colony. And, hey, wouldn’t you know it - we get another vaguely melancholic inspirational song. There are so many random interruptions of sketches about fake Animalympics history and fake Animalympics sponsors that Kurt Wüffner never seems to actually matter. We just go back to him every so often and have to remember where he is on his journey where nothing really matters and he doesn’t really learn anything that important.

Do you know how hard it is to make an animated movie where there’s a dog on skis and it’s boring? It’s like if they made a parrot compete in diving and it was also boring. And, baby, you know that shit is in there too. Of course a parrot is diving. Why wouldn’t he be? And what would you say if I told you that there’s a kangaroo who - oh my God, you’re going to laugh at this so much, it’s so funny, just cracked me and the boys at the office up - does boxing? But don’t worry, that kangaroo definitely has a vaguely racist accent. No, not Australian! More imagine what a really isolated racist grandpa thinks a black athlete sounds like.

The only narrative that seems to have a real beginning, middle, and end is that of René Fromage and Kit Mambo, the marathon runners. The plot is a little bit complicated, but let me see if I can summarize it for you: The two racers are horny for each other. That’s about it! But at least there’s some structure here. René Fromage is experienced and above it all. Kit Mambo is rising in her career and ready to take on the world. But when they run next to each other, they fall in love. Which they talk about scene after scene after scene after scene. But, again, at least it feels like it has substance, which is a rarity when it comes to cartoons where goats run next to panthers. I really can’t emphasize enough how horny these scenes are. When I watched this on a VHS tape as a kid, I felt an uneasiness that I was a third wheel on something pretty intense.

Animalympics isn’t bad so much as a film that feels like it escaped containment from somewhere else in the multiverse. It’s batshit insane, and not necessarily to its benefit. There are only one and a half storylines in this thing that have any substance whatsoever. The rest are musical montages that don’t go anywhere and competitions that last about 15 seconds for a sight gag that the Looney Tunes probably did better during World War II. It’s confusing. It’s terrifying. It’s horny. AI could never make slop like this. It’s slop that requires a careful human hand to project all their internal crises and sexual hangups onto anthropomorphic animals. Will you have a good time watching it? Probably not. Will you be inspired by it? Probably not. Will it leave you feeling uncomfortably aroused? It just might.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Michael Lehr who knew what that acronym in the tags meant without having to google it.

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