The Worst Idea Of All Time - REVIEW: Foodfight

Episode Date: March 28, 2020

This was originally a pay-walled episode available only to Patreon supporters. Please consider if you can #PayTheBoiz at patreon.com/join/TWIOAT.Universally considered the worst animated kids film to ever be released to the cinema; Foodfight! A $75m budget and 10 year long production period could only deliver 90 minutes of PS1-era visuals, an indecipherable plot and sexual overtones wrapped in the greatest marketing opportunity for large corporations which unfortunately failed to materialise. Please watch this film as soon as you can. The mentioned website for the film (via The Wayback Machine) is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20060421111622/http://www.foodfight.com/FF-flash.html  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

he's dynamic he's dramatic he's the big dog that always runs to the rescue i still got it charlie sheen is dex when doubt, just do the right thing. With Hilary Duff. Listen, tough guy. Doesn't mean that I couldn't kick your butt. Eva Longoria. I've got a hot case for you. Wayne Brady.

I'm your best friend, Daredevil Dan. And Christopher Lloyd. Somebody ordered I recall. The super slick. Got milk? Do I look like the Dairy Queen to you? Super slew clean up on aisle one is about to tackle your dicks they're building an entire army

his biggest case ever let's get him i do have an idea hello ladies and gentlemen of patreon and the wider worst idea of all time community I have barely in my life been more excited to talk about a movie with my man, Guy the Flash Montgomery, than I am today. Guy, what's up, man? How's your head? It's all right, thanks, Tim. I've just finished watching the 2012 animated adventure fantasy film Food Fight, starring the vocal talents of Charlie Sheen, Eva Longoria,

Hilary Duff and more. And it's really hard to find an entry point in talking about this. I suppose the broad overview of the plot might be a good place to start. Yeah, it's tricky because there's a lot of different places where we could start with this. We could go, what's the story that we're dealing with here? I think it would be equally apt to start with the visual presentation of this nightmare or the background production of it.

So I'm going to follow your heart. Let's talk about the story that they've tried to tell in this. So do you want to try and explain what the fuck we just saw pretty please uh gladly i also so the the basic plot as i understand it was uh there's a a town or some sort of city or where are we let's start with that guy where are we we? Well, I'm pretty sure I saw the Chrysler building in the background of a few frames. So potentially New York. I feel like we're in, it's almost like Las Vegas in that they've sort of handpicked various different landmarks and architectural styles and cultural flavors and sort of put them all in one place. What if I told you we were inside of a supermarket the whole time well i uh i can believe that i kind of thought that might be the case and they didn't make that immediately clear they only sort of introduced that halfway through when we

start dealing with humans and the humans are all giants and the characters who we've been dealing with a very very small very micro uh this movie was made in 2012 released in 2013 and to be honest by the end of it i thought it was i thought the first time i saw the lead who charlie sheen voices a character called uh dex dog detective who's some sort of dog detective he's like the the sheriff of the supermarket almost he he maintains the peace and sort of stops any bad guys he's a cover all there's no police force in the town inside of the supermarket he's sort of the the alpha and omega uh and he appears to i mean you're fucking i can hear your brain trying to figure this out he's well i what i was going to say before is that this movie was made halfway between the movie cloudy with a chance of meatballs and the tv show bojack horseman and uh i i might be you know taking three separate

unrelated pieces of information and taping them all together here, but it's trapped between both of those creations. We'll get to that guy in a little bit because what you said is not entirely correct that it was made the year before it came out. In fact, it's far from true, but we'll get into the production stuff later because I am so excited to reveal certain aspects of how this got made to you but first of all let's stay

in the story we open up with uh charlie sheen the dog detective named dex he is proposing to his girlfriend by the way he's anthropomorphized he is that how you say that word i think it is i might have added an extra syllable he's on two legs he's biped dressed head to toe like a um like an old school detective yeah and then he's got his lady love who is voiced by hillary duff who is a um if you're familiar with the concept of uncanny valley it's something where something looks human enough to kind of, you start registering it as human, but different enough to kind of terrify you. And that's what they've done with her character model. So she's a cat walking around on two legs

with a very human, female, sexy form, but like with a cat face, just enough to kind of give you a nightmare about it. And so he has coaxed his friend, who is voiced by Wayne Brady, which is the Skrull, that is a stunt pilot, to draw a picture in the sky of the two of them inside of a love heart. And then he's supposed to do a loop-the-loop to draw the final little piece on it, which is the engagement ring.

And he's never made this maneuver before he crashes the plane and hillary duff's cat character gets concerned and has to run and check on him now that is about where it stops making any sense uh for my money whatsoever and even by that point we it's still not making a lot of sense we've established that the rules of gravity almost apply in this town uh yeah we know that daredevil dan voiced by wayne brady uh you know while he is incapable of executing the loop-de-loop maneuver he's also not at risk of dying by crashing his airplane from extraordinary heights well that's the thing because they introduce his character in that situation like there's massive stakes like he's

gonna die and then he does crash but he doesn't he's fine because it's like cartoon physics apply sometimes in this film but not in other times so it's pretty wild so i don So I can't even remember exactly what the next thing is, but she ends up getting kidnapped, the Hilary Duff cat character, whose name I forget. She's called Sunshine. Sunshine, of course. Sorry, yes, of course. Because Dick's dog, Techno,

keeps firing off these sort of almost misnomer idioms and film noir terms of phrases yeah uh but he keeps talking about having his sunshine taken away but he so he he doesn't get to propose to her and then you know his friend uh dear deal dances don't worry you know you can propose tomorrow or whatever and then and could we just say as well dear devil dan interesting character so he's a very freaky looking squirrel thing with a weird fucking weird little face um but they've kind of given him quite um almost like weird outdated um black stereotype lines for wayne brady to deliver and the whole thing just feels a bit sort of jingoistic and strangely old school. Also doesn't sound a lot like Wayne Brady.

It's like they've modified the pitch or something. I mean, we've got to talk about the grab bag of vocal talent that they have sewn together for this film. You've got Charlie Sheen. I mean, I don't know the production timeline because apparently what I have here on imdb is not entirely accurate i don't know if this is uh pre or post sort of you know the charlie sheen that we know today hillary duff probably still at the height or you know on the waning end of her powers as uh lizzie mcguire before she sort of decided to take

a step back from the spotlight eva longoria who I'm pretty sure was still having a moment via Desperate Housewives in a few rom-com roles. Wayne Brady, Christopher Lloyd, plays someone called Mr. Clipboard. Chris Kattan, Jerry Stiller, and a few others along the way. This is a pretty star-studded cast. And while I don't think any single person at the time that it was made had superstar status you've got a lot of like b plus superstars coming together for a movie that purportedly cost 60 million dollars to make and boy oh boy it could not look like it cost less so i want to um quickly

just sort of brush over the rest of this plot and world so we can get into some other aspects here so um firstly and this doesn't seem super relevant to the plot but dex owns a club which is just opened i think they're having a massive opening because you get this big sweeping shot of throngs of people millions who have turned out at a red carpet event he's in there um the place is heaving it's all going off and at this point sunshine is gone out of his life um presumably dead and uh this is when we get the introduction of it and by the way so this world is populated by all these tiny, weird-looking creatures that are called Ikes, which they never fully explain. But what they are are mascots for the brands in the supermarket. Yeah.

It is honestly so mind-boggling. Also, there's like a few song and dance numbers. and dance numbers and like when you enter the club everyone's doing this weird dance which is not rhythmically or stylistically related to the song which is playing which i think was marvin gay this is just the whole thing could not make less sense the tagline is a story of what happens when good food goes bad which the plot is impervious to the human mind you cannot get in on it you it is it is conceived of a set of circumstances where i'm like i'm so delighted and excited that this thing exists i'm gonna watch this again maybe like tomorrow because i'm so fucking fascinated by this 90 minute spectacle and how it came to pass.

It is unbelievable that this thing exists on the same timeline as me. It is fucking crazy. So all the Ikes, right, which is short for icons, which is mentioned once in the movie in passing. So you really got to listen to catch that nugget. The Ikes are kind of all united. got to listen to catch that nugget the ike's are kind of all united they're in a supermarket which sort of doesn't make any sense because you often see the sky and there's streets and buildings at times but then at other times they are in a supermarket which you can see the aisles and humans rushing around um the main thrust of the story is that this mystery woman uh is her name

lady x do you know eva longoria yeah the thing that is so crazy right is you expect a movie this mystery woman. Is her name Lady X? Eva Longoria? Yeah. The thing that is so crazy, right, is you expect a movie like this that sort of has all these moving parts which almost sync up perfectly to tell a story but don't quite. I can understand how a movie would be made like that or like this if you shot a film

and then you just cobbled together the footage you have yes but because exactly because it's animated and every frame of this was designed by someone this was put together i just don't understand how that's possible that everything this is every every frame and every shot and every editorial decision is deliberate in the sense that an animated film must be. But honestly, it smacks of people in high school who are trying to tell a story for the first time. I can't put these two bits of information together in my mind right now. This is why I'm so thrilled that this thing exists.

And I showed Zoe a little bit of it this morning because i was just telling her about it she's like that sounds pretty wild i was like i've got to show you some of this movie and she's like what is this angle because you get these shots where you're just it's like a camera has been left on the ground pointed up accidentally and it's recording but it's complete the entire thing is cgi so everything is intentional everything has been picked by a human making this film so the the main cut and thrust of the movie is lady x comes along who's this um bizarrely sexual character considering i'm pretty confident this was intended for kids there's there's two audiences for these kind of movies and it's kids or stoners if you got high and watch this you would not sleep for a week because of the kind of visual aspect of it and

just trying to grab the story and not being able to latch on so she comes in throws herself at dex dex says no i've um i've got a broken heart from sunshine being gone. I'll never recover sort of thing. She says, that's fine. She ends up taking over the town. And then there is no shit, like a 50 minute war. That is most, that's the bulk of the film. And what it is, is lady X is actually, and I shit you not, an Adolf Hitler character. There's a lot of visual nods to nazism in the film and her um

the the x brand oh no sorry it's called brand x it's like this conglomerate um brand of products 30 strong she mentions which is taking over the supermarket and their whole thing is like being plain and low cost and they've all all got like Nazi style dress on. The building that she resides in has the Third Reich eagle. It's fucking crazy that this shit is in the movie. And yeah. And then you're treated to like a 50 minute war. And then it turns out that Sunshine has been kidnapped.

And she's alive the whole time but like i just uh i just wanted to kind of get the plot out of the way guys so we can dig into whatever we want are you satisfied that you have uh now you know to the uh to the highest degree communicated the plot of this film for those at home who might not have watched along um like would you recommend people watch this film before those at home who might not have watched along um like would you recommend people watch this film before listening to this yes everyone must if you if you like enjoy our kind of shit find a way to obtain this film it will blow your fucking mind i couldn't recommend watching it highly enough it is 90 minutes almost to the second which tells me that they had a contractual

obligation to make it across the finish line of an hour and a half i really didn't notice that on the file yeah it is honestly one of the most uh eye-catchingly disgusting bits of animation that i have ever seen it almost plays like you know sometimes uh on youtube someone reappropriates you know footage from a japanese like uh 3d animated animation and uh they i don't know if they put like if they put english voiceovers over it or whatever but it almost feels like someone has stumbled across like a huge bank or reservoir of footage featuring the same characters and just had one crack at voicing it over and trying to mold it into some sort of story.

The character, the X, the sort of... Not Eva Longoria's character, Lady X, but the guy... Is it General X or the guy... Oh, who knows? The lizard thing? No, no, no. The Lady X, but the guy, is it General X? Oh, who knows? The lizard thing? No, no, no. The guy who comes into the supermarket who turns out to be a robot. That's Mr. Clipboard.

That's Mr. Clipboard. They never say his name. Because I saw the character model, because they've done something super weird to his voice, and he doesn't have a lot of actual human the way well more importantly the way that he walks is yes harrowing and will stay with anyone who sees it for hours if not days afterwards there's um i if you can hear me typing it's because i'm trying to there's a game uh octodad deadliest catch if you've seen any videos of that it's that same sort of ragdoll physics approach where you just make a character model and then just let the limbs go fucking hog

wild yeah that's how he moves around but he does look like a interdimensional um uh sort of like a um like an a lovecraftian version of christopher lloyd like a really terrifying yeah next dimension christopher lloyd just just kind of mopesing around and he's human sized which is giant to these ikes but confusingly in the world that the ikes reside in there are also humans as background characters that are the same size as them who clearly aren't fellow icons i think that was an example of the movie wanting to keep its options open in terms of decisions that they hadn't made and again this feels like on the day of shooting but it just feels like that they had like a a hard deadline that they all worked towards.

And so a lot of people just went away and sort of made small bits or frames of the movie. I'm itching to talk to you about the production, but I just want to hold off till we've covered it the other basis first. So just to speak more, to try and put a picture in your mind, dear listener, about the visual style of this. more to try and put a picture in your mind dear listener about the visual style of this um playstation one uh cinematic cut scene is what my mind went to when it when the movie first kicked off i was like when did this movie come out 2002 maybe 2003 no no. It defies belief. It's just so... What? Did it get a cinema release?

I don't think it... It got a very... It says here, described the film had a low-key release being direct to video in most territories. Though I do note, when I tried to look up the um release date uh previously it gave me the date for russia so i assume it came out in russia first which makes

sense to me um this thing uh how i have to kind of get into it visually if you've ever seen vaporwave videos online uh of like um sort of bedroom animators and there are a few shortcuts that you use when you're first getting into animation like gridded floors to give you depth uh sort of simplistic character models but with ragdoll physics and it all adds up to just give a very hyper unnatural just real fucking crazy look to it which i am a fan of but there's a lot of physics stuff that doesn't make sense it looks like it hasn't been fully rendered like this is the previous version of the film before they've done the final export and all the animation software you know it sure does and i feel like you are sitting on a bank of information that might go some ways to explaining how exactly this came to pass because at your request and insistence i resisted the urge to do any research into the actual making of i mean we're talking about a movie that has a 60 million dollar 65 million dollar budget 65 you got it um what if i told you what if i told you and first of all

i'm on the wikipedia page now and the uh what they've got is the poster doesn't feature any of the characters in the film in the foreground there is a shark and a duck and what looks like a cowboy twizzler riding a shopping trolley. That's not in the movie whatsoever. That is the poster for this thing. So, what if I told you, Guy Montgomery, that this film was supposed to come out in 2003 for Christmas? I mean, I would say that in a weird way that makes some sense. This is how Wikipedia puts it.

The film was originally scheduled for a Christmas 2003 theatrical release. However, this failed to materialize and later planned release dates were also missed. Eventually, the producers defaulted on a loan. In September 2001, creditors auctioned off the film's assets and all associated rights in 2012 the film had a low-key release being direct to video in most territories so here's what happened the maker of this film is a director um he's actually predominantly in his previous career or his you know his film career um a producer his name is lawrence kazanov and he is responsible for bringing us the mortal combat franchise to the silver screen uh mortal combat and mortal combat annihilation um he worked as

some sort of like associate producer on terminated 2 and he is also currently working on a project to turn tetris a game that demonstrably has no plot into a trilogy of films this is a guy who takes a franchise that doesn't have any characters and turns that into three pictures so first of all just a little heads up on who we're dealing with here that's lawrence lawrence managed to put this idea together with a friend of his i believe they also wrote the script together yeah here we go story by uh lawrence kazanoff and joshua wexler they put this thing together in the early 2000s they get a huge amount of investments film producers investors they throw their money into this thing um not only that but because of the nature of the story that it's all set in a supermarket uh they got a whole bunch of brand tie-ins to this film which when it came out got a lot of

criticism and lawrence's reaction to that to the criticism was don't worry they didn't actually pay us any money so it's not it's not it doesn't count as like a brand consideration what we had is a whole bunch of contra deals where they were going to cross promote the movie in exchange for having their brand involved so his answer was don't worry we're so bad at financing movies that this doesn't count as like horrible advertising towards kids because we didn't get the money for it so anyway he created the concept in 1999 this thing has uh quite a long gestation period they start building it um it misses a succession of deadlines one after another the thing just cannot be built i think part of this is the rate of change that technology was going at during that

time um particularly in animation but a lot of it's just got to be ineptitude i mean when did toy story come out 90 there was the 90s wasn't it 1995 yeah there you go and that thing looks immaculate so here's what happened in uh late 2002 bearing in mind this is supposed to come out in christmas 2003 kazanov reported that the hard drives containing unfinished assets from the film got stolen in an act of industrial espionage i do not believe that for one fucking second i think this guy was sitting on what he knew was an absolute dinger and tried to pull insurance fraud and it did not work so after um i don't know at what point they had done all the voices but i assume it must have been the first thing that they did so they could

animate around that is that like would that make sense to you guy uh i mean i don't i don't know the order of events i i think you you're given uh oh shit i mean this is a good question because i feel like to to give the best possible vocal performance you must be performing over models at least of you know the action right you're right match the emotion of what you're saying to uh you know the action that the characters are giving uh but you don't lock off the visuals entirely because then you can adapt to the vocal performance. You could be right.

I mean, it doesn't seem to matter what order things are meant to be done in because this movie appears to defy every ordinary bit of protocol. Like, genuinely, the line between the way it reads as though it's a film, like a film with live performances, I just can't imagine what it's like to spend a day in Lawrence Kasanoff's brain.

Like, he must have had- So he's created a whole raft of companies under him this is a different this didn't slow him down the most stressful experience i'm just thinking as someone who wants to even put together a competent film to just show that you can put together a story yeah this would have been the most like exhausting and anxious 12 years of his life as he's like constantly under the weight and cloud of this just unwieldy monster that he keeps adding to in the hopes that will make more sense but it just becomes more and more it's a real house of cards i did take the liberty of doing quite a bit of research into lawrence before we jumped on the mic and his imdb is populated with just so many credits and

then you get to food fight and there is a bit of a stall for a few years while he is trying to figure this one out uh if you go to his website which it looks like i mean it is if you want to see what the internet looked like in 1998 go to larry kazanov k-a-s-a-n-o-f-f.com uh he is a madman he's an absolute madman but it's got all his credits on there i don't often do this guy i'm loath to do this but there's no better way i could put it i just want to read you a paragraph from wikipedia again yeah yeah of course this is under the production heading lionsgate established a distribution deal and the financing company story arc and that's uh one that lawrence started i think just to finance

this film represented investors who gave 20 million dollars in funding to threshold which is the another company in 2005 due to the lionsgate deal the celebrity voice actors and the product tie-ins a release date in 2005 was later announced but missed another distribution deal was struck in 07 but nothing came of it lionsgate had a negative reaction to the delays the investors had grown impatient due to the film production company defaulting on secured promissory notes and the release dates that were not met finally in 2011 the film was auctioned for two and a half million dollars story arc investors had ultimately invoked a clause in their contract that allowed the fireman's fund insurance company

which had insured food fight to complete and release the film as inexpensively and quickly as possible i love the petulant uh person who is driving that suit it's just like i don't give a fuck what it looks like i'm gonna see what this i'm gonna see what the fuck kazanov has been doing behind closed doors for the last 10 years um as a result of all of the product tie-ins that he managed to negotiate there was a bunch of merchandise that came out years before the movie was released. So there's all this random merch that just came out into places like Walmart because they had all these deals going. And it wasn't tied to any movie that fucking existed. It grossed approximately $20, dollars of ticket sales in its opening weekend

it was released on dvd in europe in october of the year it came out and it opened in june so what's that about four months i think um it is almost universally in fact i won't even say almost it is universally considered the worst animated children's film ever released uh that's according to a lot of prominent film critics i'm not in critique websites i'm not i'm looking i'm trying to find somebody to buy merchandise right now i'm not going to argue with that assessment of uh the movie that was so fucked it's it is crazy that it exists it is just nuts and i i love the fact that um so if i'm reading this right if i'm understanding this correctly this film this animated film making a movie is hard making an entirely computer generated film in the early 2000s very tricky

this film was completed by an insurance company that. That's who put the finishing touches on this. Just staggering. I can't seem to find anywhere to buy merchandise. You can get a new copy of the DVD from Amazon Prime for $6.86 if anyone wants to chuck a bit of money Larry's way. On his website, though, I have seen that the, you know, much talked about rumors and hype surrounding this Tetris trilogy date back to 2014.

So I'll be damned if this guy isn't back on his bullshit. 2025, 2026 is an exciting time to look forward to potential release of the first of these films it will probably resemble um like you know when a kid does that animation where you got a flick book it'll look like that but as a movie uh displaying the story of tetris in three 90 minute parts i've i've clicked onto the trivia page on imdb now tim hit me and there's a few good things here um not least of which is uh lawrence kasanoff promoted the film by saying it would be his studio's casablanca many quotes i guess reference to that movie i can understand what he's getting at because he has tried to dress his main character the human dog uh voiced by none other than the sheen machine as the main dude from casablanca and of that era And there's bits where it does devolve into an attempt at an homage to film

noir. Like there's that kind of in a monologue narration about what is the line of all the, of all the, of all the dairy aisles and all the supermarkets in the world, she had to come to mine. You know? So it's heavy.

It's there. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah absolutely uh there's also there's some really good trivia on here uh so there's apparently a trailer made in 2002 before the original animations were stolen that is available online um in addition to that tim i'd like to give you two bits of information back to back yes first of which is lawrence kasanoff declared his company the new pixar and meant for this movie to start a huge media empire numerous uh merchandise tie-ins were planned including a food fight on ice show the second piece of trivia i'd like to share is many animators reportedly refused to list this film on their resumes. Fair enough. I would sue someone for defamation if they attached me to the film.

Even if it was true, I would still give that lawsuit a go. There's also a little bit of background on the unique animation style. The creators intended to animate the film in a very cartoonish, squash stretch style yes like the classic looney tunes but after the hard drives were stolen they decided to change to motion capture yes and then this is a great paragraph it's well written it says the very primitive method used in the film resulted in a noticeably choppy animation and left many characters with extremely limited facial expressions and barely emoting eyes yeah yeah that's very true so what happened there because i was reading about this as well he did he changed the style of animation that was going to happen halfway through production i

didn't realize it was tied to the point where the hard drives got stole i do not believe for a second those hard drives were stolen by the way when i say that fucking just imagine me doing some big old timbo sized air quotes so when the hard drives got stolen so he didn't um so far as i've read about the history and production of this film didn't properly communicate that to the animators so they were really working off two books here and motion capture is um i think if you do it right it's it's reasonably expensive, especially back then. Like, it was a pretty tricky process. But what you end up with in this film is part of the reason I keep saying the word nightmare is because the character models are incredibly simplistic.

But the physics are surprisingly complex. So you've got scenes where Wayne Brady's character um what is his name danger dan the squirrel thing yeah something like that so he as they've mentioned the eyes don't really move that the mouth has very um sort of limited movement while he's talking and stuff but he there's one scene in particular i'm thinking in the middle of the movie where they're talking and he's constantly in motion like he he's his feet are moving around he's just kind of like running on the spot for no reason in the middle of a conversation and i can only imagine that the um i don't know the motion capture artist was just trying to throw some

things around and then they didn't get like a proper scene of him just standing there so they had to kind of supplant that onto the character model it's so cool and weird it is not for kids though i cannot stress this enough do not let children see this film for so many reasons number one visually terrifying number two the hyper sexualization of these characters and the confusion around interspecies sex the implication is is heavy and frankly has no place being in any movie let alone one intended for children i think that's less likely to cause problems for the kids i think the kid what's really going to stress out a child watching this is the animation is unlike anything uh that i've i think i've seen i imagine that any of them have seen like it is what i think you know a rendering of a child's nightmare of an animated show might

look like um and well it did remind me a little bit of reboot the old tv show reboot if anyone's seen that which was the first entirely computer generated tv series ever made it was very good it was set inside of a computer but it was um it kind of reminiscent of that but uh way less well done well tim you'll be interested to hear i've stumbled into a subreddit uh which is unresolved unresolved mysteries and uh seven months ago a user posted a discussion under the banner who stole the worst animated film ever made and this is the the user's second unresolved mystery write-up um and this thing has got so much heat the uh you know if if you i think if if anyone really wants to dig into you know people give us some details guy come on give us the juicy dates

what's in there why are there any inferences of uh it truly being stolen in an act of industrial sabotage or insurance fraud or what? Well, there's literally so much information about it. I don't know where to begin. I just think you should visit it. If you look up Unresolved Mysteries. You can hear me typing right now. What is that? Who stole the worst animated

movie of all time because if you refuse to share some of these details guy i will be forced to read this and share them is this from february 26th uh seven months ago that sounds about right food fight was actually in production for a decade originally slated for a christmas 03 release the large amount of money was put into licensing all the characters and products. Brackets. It wasn't a case of being one product placement. They actually had to pay for the right to use the characters.

Production was underway, and early release models were drawing buzz. Threshold Animation Studios, the studio behind Food Fight, was actually once called the next Pixar. You can't just say that if it's the guy's company who quoted that you know what i mean some say guy montgomery is the greatest living comedian who says that

guy montgomery does you can't put that on a poster um so what's the top comment here well i wish i had more evidence for it i believe food fight to be part of a money laundering scheme yes my kind of fucking shit on reddit there are many ways to uh there are many ways a film production could be used as a way to launder money and the loss of a mystical finished draft is an easy way to do so because there is no proof such a draft was fully completed i did have a list of sources that point to this but i'm at work right now so we have to get back to you later love that energy i watched an interview guy with lawrence yeah it was on south african tv he was in cape town promoting uh i don't know another film

of his and he was talking about mortal kombat and he said um he played the game for the first time on the arcade and approached the guy who held the rights for mortal combat and he said uh if you give me the rights to this i will create this product in every cultural medium there is i will put it on tv and movies and on stage and he did and now he brags about the fact that uh and rightly so there's five billion dollars of stuff associated with mortal combat like the gross retail value of all of the things that are mortal combat without being the video games is five billion dollars this guy's he's got big dick energy yeah he's got he's got ambition and it sounds like he doesn't have control over when he executes

but you know that's not his problem necessarily unless he does you know I don't think he ever intended for this to come out let me say that I'm on a hyperlink from their subreddit and it says here it sort of gets the thrust of the mystery

and it says so who stole the drives what industrial espionage took place it must have been serious because this kind of thing literally never happens movie assets are backed up and the security is tight you can't just walk out with an entire movie on a single hard drive that's sort of yeah that's true although i will point to i'm pretty sure it was toy story 2 where they accidentally wiped the entire film and had to start from a woman who just happened to bring a hard drive um with a recent backup home with her so she could work from home i'm pretty sure that's toy story 2 so you know

to say that it's never happened this isn't without precedent um this is so crazy he was working with the big dogs coca-cola proctor and gamble to to license these uh characters if he was successful in this let me say this it would have been a dangerous film you know because it's it's basically just a big ad for products that you would find in a supermarket directed at kids. So there's Larry just trying to make as much money as possible by ramming promotional considerations down your fucking throat. This is the kind of thing that those big Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, gamble those sorts of corporations they have wet dreams about they're like you're gonna make a motion picture which is gonna have like merchandising and stuff that's just around our stupid mascots for our products yes sign me the hell up there was a food fight on ice planned guy webisode storybooks plush toys everything there is a 2013 listing from an ebay auction for a plush dex detective but sadly it doesn't feature a picture and the listing is now expired

i think that you know the power of cult and the internet will drive up uh the price of these products if it hasn't already happened i mean i would kill for some of this hellish merchandise even a beautiful high-rendered poster yeah the cinematic release um actually yeah that would be a good addition to the studio in here i'm going to try and find that um yeah i will buy that for in here that'd be be great. I've also got here an old Food Fight promotional website from Web Archive. Really? How's it look?

It's just booting up. Oh. uh it looks like it was made a long long time ago can you send me a link or describe it in glorious detail for me describe it in high def it's using the latest anime online animation and website building techniques available in the year 2008. So there's a sort of small video that you're shown through that describes the basic setup and premise of the film. Then takes you to like a shot of a sort of New York Broadway Times Square type shot with decks looking very dapper in it. And then I'm through to the main part with the tagline now.

It says a new computer animated movie splatting to a theater near you, fall 2007. So they've made this a full four to five years after the original release date. And they still had to wait another five years. Get ready for a tale of what happens when good food goes bad. We've then got various different materials. You've got production, partners, studio, cast, and quite excitingly, story.

So this is the official story as described by the website that was made for the film in the year 2007, 2008. Food fight takes place in the supermarket at night when the light, it's all in Comic Sans. Food fight takes place in the supermarket at night when the lights go out and all the people leave. Then, magically, the grocery store transforms into a city. The boxes become buildings. The aisles turn into streets. The Chinese food aisle becomes Chinatown.

The Italian food aisle becoming Venice. And so on. This sounds like a pitch document. And it also sounds like they just watched Toy Story while drunk. Yeah. Then out from every door of this marketropolis comes two types of characters, ones you already know, some of the most famous characters in the world,

like Mr. Clean, Charlie the Tuner, the Energizer Bunny, and more, and ones you're going to meet the actual stars of the movie these include dex dogtective charlie sheen the super sleuth and head of the usda united supermarket defense association dear devil oh that's who uh dex dogtective is wait what can you what's the acronym again the us what da united supermarket defense association because they the usda i'm pretty sure is the united states drug administration but that's a real it's weird that they settled on that because that's a real foundation with an acronym that's a real organization but anyway it did confuse me

when he was behind the stage of something that said the usda i was like okay weird the uh you also got daredevil Dan, Wayne Brady, the world's worst flying squirrel stuntman, the sweet and lovable sunshine goodness, Hilary Duff, and the villainous and seductive Lady X, Eva Longoria. They all hang out at the Copa Banana, the hottest nightclub in town, in the produce section, of course.

However, all's well until Brand X moves into town and it's evil lady x and her minions try to take over the only way to stop them is yes a food fight and this tale of what happens when good food goes bad follow the epic adventures of the new super market heroes dex dog detective and dare devil dan join them and others as they wage battle against the evil Brand X for control of the store and perhaps the world. I'm going to send you the link to this website. Thank you so much I'd really appreciate that and that will be

a hyperlink in this episode description if I've forgotten to leave that out please google this on your own but I will be sure to try and put that in. Here's where I can't wrap my head around even in the best case scenario the url contains uh the word flash.html which scares the shit out of me because that is a web standard that hasn't been used for some time i don't even know if this

will run it yeah i literally have to click a dialog box that says enable flash and then chrome comes up with a warning box so are you sure you want to run flash this may crash the browser um which is terrifying because we're actually recording through the browser at the moment so hopefully it stacks up holy fuck yes animated intro oh yes yes yes this is right up there with the space jam website which still exists to this day folks you're in for a real treat um here's what i can't wrap my head around best case scenario this film looks good you got these big stars um let's say the script got another going over the central plot the entire story of this film is centered around a battle between different supermarket brands

of products like the whole point of this story existing the the whole narrative of this movie is just around brand mascots that is the sickest it's like society has gone rotten to its core that that is a children's film that is so fucked to me in such a deep level well i don't know tim we're out of time but we're not out of time i refuse to stop talking about this movie ibm threw in their technological prowess to this film i was reading about it they were using cutting edge technology i'm assuming probably in the first draft where the hard drives got stolen because there's no way anything we saw in the finished product um was cutting edge it says here on the website thanks to threshold's unique technology alliance with ibm which gives us access to the

unlimited power of ibm on demand center we've been able to improve the animation process and provide more creative control to both our director and performers that this this should have been something else you know i don't know that it should have i feel like you know this guy kasanoff is a hype man he sells dreams and then does you know and then does the least amount to deliver an approximation of what he's sold and you know whereas with mortal kombat he kind of executed this is one of the instances where he didn't pull it off but that's fine on to the next enterprise i'll buy tetris i mean this entire thing is clearly a fucking disaster the guy genuinely pretended that a hard drive containing files that were the building blocks the movie got stolen it's crazy our friends the mackleroys uh well justin and griff they do i call him griff i don't think i'm allowed to griffin have a series called monster factory on youtube where they select

usually rpg games that have a character model creation tool built in so you can like you know make your own character look the way you want it to look and just try to create the most horrifying um version of a character that the game engine will allow and the way that they've made christopher lloyd in this movie mr clipboard is so like straight out of monster factory bulbous eyes that look in different directions a disfigured head a bulbous disproportionate uh chin real crazy unhuman hair but still distinctively christopher lloyd to the point where you can tell it's christopher lloyd even without hearing the voice in fact if anything the voice will throw you because they've

done some weird thing to his voice but and that's another thing i noticed sorry i will let you come in but i just want to say when you were like listening to this movie did you notice that some of these characters have been voiced on very different and very worse microphones yeah but it that matches perfectly with the visuals you know like it would have been more jarring if there was one track of perfect audio throughout the whole film uh but the i was just going to say to the credit of the filmmakers it is revealed that uh christopher lloyd's character whatever his name is is mr clipboard mr clipboard yes sorry uh is a robot designed by lady x you know uh by proxy she's that's the way in which she starts getting these product x this

product x into the supermarket um i mean there's a whole thing in the middle of the film about product recalls that is their version of dying uh so there's some concept of like a power on high a head office where you put some paperwork in and your product gets recalled and for these ikes these mascots that is the end of the road for you that is your death it's so crazy the world building in this is throws so many big concepts and ideas out there without giving proper parameters on where it starts and ends that you just can't get any semblance of what is happening well i'm going to finish this compliment which is they could have conceivably made christopher lloyd's animation so confusing and herky-jerky and terrifying

because they wanted to denote he could be a robot. That was the best technology that Eva Longoria's character had on hand to develop a robot. And if that's what they did, that's a fine thing to do. I actually think you're probably right about that because the fact that he's a robot is uh very out of left field just sort of thrown in at the end so i suspect that uh they got the animation models back you know part way through so what they were dealing with and they were like holy shit we've got to have

some reason for this one oh you know some part of this well i'm just thinking that means that you're not you're giving credit in reverse whereas i thought yeah it's like they're they're gonna know he's a robot so they'll make him walk weird so that it's like for anyone who's super switched on and on the level like he's taking just the right amount of hallucinogens they can call it and see that coming but you think it's like in hindsight they were like well that is so. We need to be able to explain it. What's the most efficient way of doing that? He's a robot. Bang.

Put it in at the end. I think so many aspects of this film and the production of it were beyond any kind of saving. But they took a look at that Christopher Lloyd movement and they were like, good God, there needs to be some sort of recompense for this. There needs to be some sort of recompense for this there needs to be some justification um for this horrible movement of this man in the supermarket and i i yeah i think

they engineered that for the ending um i'd just like to do a little roll off of the partners involved who were featured prominently on the website as as guy mentioned published in 1990 what was it uh sorry 2006 2007 and we got we got big hitters we got cabri schweps we've got uh energizer we got procter and gamble we've got take two interactive um who have made a lot of pretty good games and some shit ones. We got Tootsie Roll involved, folks. IBM is listed here officially as well. Hormel Foods. There are a lot of brands that I didn't recognize, but I have a feeling are like the biggest brands in America.

A lot of these mascots, I didn't know, because I didn't grow up watching TV ads for American brands. Starkist, Nanko, Con Agri-Food, Del Monte del monte quality something called little milk and farmland dairies big hitters big huge checkbooks and then for larry to come back and say don't worry we didn't get any money off them for the film so this doesn't count as us advertising to your children through the medium of motion picture i mean you've failed on every front you've done an evil thing for no personal gain for yourself my man that that doesn't justify what you've done i love this movie i love this movie so much under the studio

there's i mean this this website is a bounty of treats, and I genuinely am telling you that I have to go soon, but I do want to read this. Food Fight's the first full-length digitally animated feature film from Threshold Animation Studios. Threshold is one of the most advanced digital entertainment companies in the world. Through a revolutionary technology alliance with the IBM Corporation, Food Fight will be epic in scale, and this is the best part,

looking like no other computer animated film before it it's true and arguable with thousands and thousands of characters battling for supermarket supremacy and the biggest food fight ever put on film uh you better duck when they launch the cream pies cloudy with a chance of meatballs which used a similar sort of idea for what is quite a lot of visual fun. We're just seeing giant food, you know, wreak havoc on anthropomorphic characters or in the case of that film, human characters came along, like exist.

It's entire life was shorter than the production process of this film. And that movie was a lot of fun. And then the Bojack Horseman thing I was referencing earlier was like the characters are fast talking and they do try and pack quite a lot of gags and like they put gags on signs in the background like this movie is not without uh commendable ambition but it is also uh a disaster i i absolutely loved this movie. I was enthralled with it. And I think everyone should watch it. That's my review. Yeah, look, do what you will.

It's fucking crazy. This concludes our Patreon watch of Food Fight. And I cannot thank enough the people who voted us to watch that movie uh you are you are the real heroes here and i can't wait for the tetris trilogy hot diggity dog thank you very much for joining us if you'd like to contribute to patreon go to patreon.com that's p-a-t-r-e-o-n slash t-w-i-o-a-t it's just patreon.com slash worst idea of all time but it's the acronym you guys get it and uh we live on there if you give five dollars a month you will be the first people in the world to hear these episodes and you will um occasionally get some content that's

just for you guys for no one else no one else gets it just for you guys, for no one else. No one else gets it, just for you. If you are giving us $10 or more a month, you'll be part of the Deciders Club, which get to make the decisions like these that deliver us these absolute gems. And once again, Deciders Club, you've outdone yourself. I'm so grateful for you delivering this gem to me.

I'm going to rush out and watch the movie again and buy all the merchandise I can find. Guy Montgomery, thank you very much for joining me on this gem. It's honestly my pleasure.