I can take a joke. I know he was only kidding when he said that the Care Bears movies were created by the Devil (played by Bennett the Sage). I had no problems whatsoever with the first Care Bears movie review. In fact, I expected more of the same for the second one. Boy was I wrong. It did have some of the same types of jokes, but there were some that just went a little too far. This is Care Bears, we don't need to be making jokes about abortion and other hidden meanings that aren't really there. The only reason I'm not criticizing Linkara's comic book review is because it was a badly made comic with no bearing on Care Bears canon whatsoever. Linkara freely admits he has no idea what the Care Bears are about other than the two movies the Critic has reviewed, but I'm not sure how much the Critic knows either. He did mention the greeting card thing, though, but then again you shouldn't be criticizing the Care Bears for not taking on bigger issues in the world. Unless you're part of Amnesty International, you don't exactly send out greeting cards to starving children in Africa or something. If the Care Bears were faced with problems bigger than the ones they are presented with in the series or any of the films, they would probably explode.
Truth be told, the second Care Bears film is my number one nostalgic movie of all time (second place would go to The Chipmunk Adventure). Therefore, I can defend it from my point of view. This movie is for babies. That alone explains the ending song - it's a lullaby. My mom used to play it so I'd go to sleep when I was that young. Another thing the Critic didn't understand (but rightly criticized anyway) that this is not a true sequel if it is telling a different background story for the characters. That makes it a reboot, making the first one entirely pointless. The aging process doesn't make sense either, but I have sort of an explanation of that too. The timing was what the writers wanted it to be, shoddy writing or not. Even though the Care Bears grew up while the kids on Earth remained the same, I'd say they still had child-like mindsets and were not fully grown up yet. This is proven by how gullible they are when Dark Heart shows up at their place, or when they keep going to help people only to wind up caught in his bag of doom. By that time they're aware that it could be a trap each time, but if they didn't at least go investigate they wouldn't be doing their job ("Boy Who Cried Wolf" much?), and if they don't do their job, evil has won. And if True Heart and Noble Heart didn't leave them alone from time to time (including the time they had Dawn and John taking care of the cubs), they wouldn't be able to learn from the experience.
Another prominent nitpick is villain motivation. Sure, it would be nice if they were given some backstory, any of them. But at that age are we really thinking about that? No, all we needed to know back then was, "here are some bad guys doing something bad to people and here are the good guys who are going to stop them." Personally, I liked how Dark Heart was redeemed in the second movie (still got no real name that we know of after becoming a real boy, but oh well) and how Christie hadn't totally given in to evil because she still saw value in all life, good or bad; she was just kind of b*tchy, like the Critic said. If we really needed to, we could fill in the plot holes ourselves later (including backstory if we're bold enough). I'm not trying to make excuses for this just because of my nostalgia goggles, but I do have a better sense of it than what was presented by the Critic.
I will admit that the third movie is f***, and in fact the Critic had it on his list of Top 11 Mindf*cks. The reason I didn't like isn't just that it's a take on Alice in Wonderland (and really the only version of that I remember liking as a child was a live-action show on Disney wherein Alice had daily adventures in Wonderland by stepping through the looking glass), but because of the bad attempts at rapping. I think the writers had just given up by that point. The villain had the same character design they used for a different villain in their version of The Nutcracker, which I think was the better movie or special. I even liked that version of The Nutcracker better than the one that was on CR's list of forgotten animated Christmas Specials. The fact that they often reuse voice actors for different roles in the movies doesn't bother me at all because really there are more important things in the world to worry about than getting hung up on this stuff. Sometimes you just have to stop questioning everything and sit back and enjoy something for what it is. Some films are just made to participate, not win a contest or aspire to be anything else than what they already are. Simple pleasures, guilty pleasures, what have you, just be happy.
Update: Anyway, glad he's not going to do any more of these, even though the Wonderland movie did suck. I also forgot to mention the other first movie with Professor Coldheart. It's really for the best.
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