A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

A THIN LINE SEPARATING CREEPY-CUTE FROM JUST PLAIN REPULSIVE:  No one else did, so Nathan Rabin watched The Oogieloves In The Big Balloon Adventure as part of his AV Club "Flops" series:

Here’s one of the many perplexing elements of The Oogieloves In The Big Balloon Adventure: Sometimes the words to its songs appear at the bottom of the screen, but most of the time they don’t, so audience members are often asked to sing along to songs that 1) they’ve never heard before, 2) they consequently don’t know the words to, and 3) are fucking terrible. Those three qualities make The Oogieloves In The Big Balloon Adventure the sing-along family movie that’s impossible to sing along to.



We’re then introduced to the Oogieloves. There’s Goobie, the Michael Nesmith of the group, right down to his winter hat. As evidenced by the fact that he wears glasses, he’s the intellect of the group, a turtle-green inventor prone to saying things like, “Bobby Wobbly, why do you wobble so much? Is your center of gravity misaligned?” Goobie plays guitar in the Oogieloves band, while Toofie is a purple-skinned, yellow-haired gentleman who plays drums, and is posited as the rollicking free spirit of the group (who, I would imagine, scores most of the groupies). Inspired possibly by prison and/or gang culture, Toofie refuses to wear a belt. Consequently, his pants fall down a lot. Whenever this happens, we are admonished to yell deliriously at the screen, “Goofy Toofie! Pull up your pants!” (Something similar occurred at the Royal Shakespeare Theater when John Gielgud’s pants were rigged during productions of The Tempest so that theater audiences—craving, like children and Tyler Perry fans, a truly interactive experience—were admonished to yell at the stage, “Goofy Gielgy, pull up your pants!”) Lastly, there is Zoozie. She is a girl.