Alphabetical Movie – Ice Age

I realize I may be saying this with something less than all the possible information on the subject but Ice Age had the single funniest trailer ever produced.  In fact, it was because of that trailer and that trailer alone that I first watched the film.  I didn’t even care of the movie was any good.  I felt that I owed it to the film because of how much the trailer made me laugh.

For those unfamiliar with the film, I give you a youtube link to the glorious story of a saber-toothed squirrel and his nut:

Scrat (the squirrel in question) is the vegetarian answer to Wile E. Coyote.  He will forever pursue his acorn but he will never actually be able to posses it.  Nature itself is dead set against his success.

Having been a huge fan of Road Runner cartoons for as long as I can remember, this trailer was the greatest thing ever.  What else did I need to know about the film?  Did I need to know this was the pre-credit tease and that the rest of the film wouldn’t be about Scrat at all?

Hell no!  I knew that the filmmakers’ sense of humor closely mirrored my own and as a result, there was a pretty good chance I’d like the rest of the film.

Ice Age doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the first two minutes but I was generally right that the filmmakers had my sense of humor.  Scrat makes regular guest appearances and all of them are – well – better than the rest of the film.  If the little dude ever got his acorn, I would be very upset.

Scrat (and Wile E. Coyote) are perfect examples of Schadenfreude.  We don’t want them to succeed because it is far funnier to watch them fail.  America’s funniest home videos don’t show us a bunch of videos of dogs making spectacular leaps.  They show us videos of dogs running into walls.

The beauty of the trailer for the film was that it implied we’d be spending the entire movie watching a sabre-toothed squirrel run into a wall.  I was completely on board with that.

If I had a little more pride, I’d talk about the touching story of three different animals becoming a herd as they tried to rescue a little meat-eater who would, one day, try to kill them with a spear.  I have to be honest, though, what I really want to see is that little guy, all grown up, trying to kill them with a spear.

He doesn’t succeed, though, he chases them for a while and then trips on a rock and ends up face down in the snow.  Sort of like a prehistoric Elmer Fudd.

Tell me you wouldn’t watch that!

This year, the fourth installment in the Ice Age franchise will hit theatres and I’ll probably go see it.  I’m sure that Manny, Sid and Diego will figure prominently in the story but we all know that what I really care about is watching that poor little squirrel and his ever doomed quest to store his acorn.