Nic & Tristan Go Mega Dega (2010)

Movies geared at children are one of the toughest to sit through.  Some studios, such as Pixar, are able to find the right balance of adult themes to go into their children’s movies.  Toy Story might be for kids on the surface, with the toys being the main characters and all.  But when you look at it, it’s really a movie about jealousy, which is something that adult viewers can take away from it as much as kids.  The concept isn’t dumbed down.  They believe that children will grasp what they grasp and adults will grasp what they grasp.  They tackle the story from both sides so that everyone will enjoy the movie.  Parents and their kids will each have a good time watching their output.

There are many children’s movies that don’t take that approach.  The demographic is children, so everything is geared towards children.  The jokes are dumbed down.  The story is dumbed down.  Everything is placed on the level of the children to make them laugh, giggle, and have a good time.  Their adult counterparts, however, dread sitting through these movies.  There’s nothing worse than watching a movie that doesn’t put any work into making the story emotional.

Nic & Tristan Go Mega Dega was very much geared towards children, with little work done to make it entertaining for older audiences.  Nic Fishtickle (Nic Puehse) and his brother Tristan (Tristan Puehse) dreamt of skateboarding in the Mega Dega.  The day of the event was the anniversary of their parents, Howard (Craig Anton) and Sylvia (Janet Varney).  The brothers had to escape the watchful eye of their babysitter, Aubrey (Lindsey Shaw), to go to Mega Dega, while trying to replace a symbolic figurine that Aubrey broke.

If you don’t know Nic and Tristan Puehse, don’t worry.  I didn’t know them either before watching the movie.  You might though, because they were kind of famous.  They were twins who were skilled skateboarders.  By the time they were ten years old, they were popular within the skateboarding world.  Ellen Degeneres had them on her show when they were nine years old, which solidified them as popular people.  Eventually, they were given the chance to star in their own movie.

Hollywood has a history of taking people who were famous for one thing, and putting them in major movie roles.  Though Nic & Tristan Go Mega Dega might not be seen as a big movie, it still falls in line with this mindset.  Much like how Gymkata took gymnast Kurt Thomas and tried to make him into a movie star, or how Double Team brought Dennis Rodman from basketball and placed him alongside Jean-Claude Van Damme, Nic & Tristan Go Mega Dega attempted to bring the skateboarding twins into the world of movies.  In fact, this was the second attempt at making Nic and Tristan into household movie names.  The first had been The Legend of William Tell.

Their second outing as movie stars didn’t fare too well.  Though there was a solid cast that included Janet Varney, Lindsey Shaw, Ariel Winter, and Bobb’e J. Thompson, the movie couldn’t keep itself afloat.  There were many reasons that the movie wasn’t good.  It wasn’t the fault of the cast.  They were not the reason for the lack of quality in the movie.  The supporting cast did a good job, and even the Puehse twins were decent in their roles.  If anything, the cast was the reason to check the movie out.  Everything else kept it from being good.

Right off the bat, the movie hit hard with the boys walking through the desert while holding their skateboards.  The problem was that the background was done up to look like a storyboard.  It was drawn rather than shot on a set or location.  This was a weird stylistic choice until it was revealed that this scene was an actual dream.  That was forgivable and made sense.  Later in the movie, when that same style of set design was repeated, it made no sense.  Instead of it being a dream, the twin skateboarders went into the sewer and it was a drawn background.  The rest of their world, though cartoonish, was not a cartoon.  The sewers were cartoons with live action characters.  The movie needed to choose a location style and stick with it instead of jumping back and forth and causing confusion.

The humour was another thing in Nic & Tristan Go Mega Dega that felt off.  That’s not to say it couldn’t work for someone.  Comedy is highly subjective, which means that not everyone will find the same things funny.  This movie was filled with absurd humour.  The kids flew across the city in a car after yanking on the emergency break.  They got away from a security guard with a Pop Rocks and Coke style explosion.  There were cockroaches doing stand-up comedy.  And then there was the babysitter.  She was super strict because she wanted a badge for babysitting that would somehow get her a scholarship to Harvard.  Oh, and there was a party for party crashers.  None of that really worked for me.  The one joke that did land was a character named Steve.  He was the cool guy who didn’t speak much that the babysitter fell in love with.  Something about the way that character was portrayed made me laugh the whole time he was on screen.

Finally, there was the conclusion.  Here be spoilers for Nic & Tristan Go Mega Dega, so be warned.  In the title of the movie is Mega Dega.  It was the original goal for the twins, which was put on the backburner when their mother’s figurine was broken.  They went on the hunt for a new figurine, almost forgetting about their desire to go to Mega Dega.  It was only when they had obtained the figurine that Mega Dega came back into the story, and that was only by chance.  The twins needed to get home faster than their parents.  The shortcut home took them through the competition, which they then participated in, and won.  It wasn’t a satisfying way to tie that storyline up.  They weren’t intending to go there at that point in the story.  That was no longer their goal.  It felt unnecessary.  The characters were having their cake and eating it too, as were the writers who scripted this.  I know that the title has them going Mega Dega, but it would have been more satisfying to have them skip it so that their parents were happy.  A lesson would have been learned.  The characters would have changed.  Instead, they got everything they wanted and didn’t learn a damn thing.

Nic & Tristan Go Mega Dega was a pretty bad movie.  The faults far outweighed the positives.  Though the performances were solid, and Steve was a pretty funny character, there were major problems that the movie couldn’t overcome.  The lack of sticking to their own world building caused confusion in the sewers.  Most of the humour was childishly absurd to the point that it dumbed things down too far.  Then there was the ending which felt unsatisfying and unearned.  The filmmaking is what brought it down.  Behind the camera was the problem.  And it’s all because they wanted to put two popular skateboarding twins into a movie.  They thought it would sell based on the twins and not on the quality.  You can do both.  It doesn’t have to be one or the other.  I’m sad that it had to be this way.

Maybe these notes will cheer me up:

• Gymkata (week 76) and Double Team (week 193) were mentioned early in the post.
• Nic & Tristan Go Mega Dega featured Janet Varney, who was in Catwoman (week 174).
• Bobb’e J. Thompson also made his second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Nic & Tristan Go Mega Dega, after being featured in Fred Claus (week 265).
• Another actor in Nic & Tristan Go Mega Dega was Gerry Bednob.  He was in Furry Vengeance (week 162).
• Finally, Jerad Anderson was in Nic & Tristan Go Mega Dega.  He was previously in Bratz: The Movie (week 63).
• Have you seen Nic & Tristan Go Mega Dega?  Have you even heard of it, or heard of the kids?  What do you think of it?  Let me know in the comments.
• The comments are also a good place to let me know about any suggestions you may have.  Twitter is another place to suggest movies to me.  I’m always looking for what other people think I should be checking out.
• Sometimes when I watch bad movies, I share clips of them in my snapchat story.  If that sounds interesting, or if you want to see any other stuff I might share, feel free to add me (jurassicgriffin).
• Now we move onto next week.  For only the second time of 2018, we’re going out of the 21^st century.  The Sunday “Bad” Movies will be taking a trip to the early 1980s to watch Tarzan the Ape Man.  This should be a fun enough one, but we’ll see.  Come back next Sunday and I’ll have a post for you.  See you then.