How could this happen? What does this mean?

[Cats]

Remember Air Bud, that stupid looking movie from the 90s where a dog plays basketball? you saw trailers for it in commercials while you were eating your honeycomb cereal before school and thought, "heh, that looks like a movie a faggot would watch", and then you went to school and forgot about it for the rest of your entire life until i mentioned it just now? do you remember that?

behold the nightmare vortex churning eternal just below the surface tension of both Sanity and Reason.


It's not about basketball anymore. Hasn't been for ages. Sports? Nope, not for 6 movies now. It's not even about the DOG anymore, the one from the title...that dog has been dead since 1998. These dogs went to fucking Outer Space, and even that was 5 movies ago. How could this happen? What does it MEAN?

This has grown far beyond anything that any of us could have imagined when we saw those Air Bud commercials all those years ago, and it disturbs the living daylights out of me on a level that seems much deeper than primal. This feels like it is part of some vast gestalt of fear; a puzzle-shard of some bright, unbearable truth about our own realities that would instantaneously crush the mind of a creature so small as Man and send his brains dribbling like porridge out of his nose should he ever find himself able to decipher the whole.

 

[Ultrapenguin]

Oh yeah, it's been quietly growing in the background for a while, I've seen a couple Youtubers mention it.

It seems like among especially retarded children who were born with too little oxygen getting to their brain the "live action talking animals" genre is a wellspring of entertainment.

I'm unsure if it's a rotating cast of retarded children (like progressively newer generations of retarded kids demanding a more contemporary take on talking animals) or if it's one small demographic of retarded kids that have cornered the market, but clearly this is a successful and easily produced genre.

To be fair though it's also a safe genre. Yes, it's not especially intellectually challenging entertainment even by child standards, but you give your kids a talking animal movie and you know what you're getting. It isn't really a field that experiences a lot of change or innovation.
Plus even adults can handle that, as we know half of all visual content uploaded to social media is pictures of people's pets anyways.

I myself don't enjoy the genre though, I find trying to anthropomorphize pets to be very strange and awkward.

PS: All the dogs that starred in the first 6 movies are most likely dead by now. I know the original Air Bud is.

 

[Ultrapenguin]

Double post to add important information:
After a bit more research, the animals did not start talking until the mid 2000s.
As you can see, in Air Bud Spikes Back (2003) he did not talk, he still barked:

However in Air Buddies (2006) you can see that they now talk:

Clearly the series sold out by betraying their original vision.

 

[AbduluCthuluZulu]

This isn't the only time it's happened either. That old vaguely furry movie about wolves in a nature preserve, Alpha and Omega, ended up spawning an entire cinematic universe worth of Direct-to-DVD sequels about everything including sports, ghosts, and even fucking DINOSAURS. I'm not kidding.

 

[Party Hat Wurmple]

It means it's time to reboot Air Bud as a chocolate lab and make him a transgender and show the struggles of a trans person's life from a dog's perspective. Also throw some shit in about baseball and poorly edited CGI of him/her swinging the bat with his/her mouth.