Tag Extreme Sports

TV Special Tonight!: Zolar – The Extreme Sports Movie

goldstar 2 Comments

Two things that kids like are space aliens and extreme sports (i.e., skateboarding, snowboarding, etc.). In 2004, Kids’ WB brilliantly and cynically combined these 2 elements by producing a made for TV movie about an extreme sports loving teenage space alien. Witness Zolar: The Extreme Sports Movie.

Mediocrity….TO THE XTREME!!!

Kids’ WB’s first (and only) live action movie,  Zolar tells the story of a blue-skinned teenaged extraterrestrial who possesses immense galactic power but is interested primarily in skating with his friends and reconciling his freakish exterior with the norms of society. And surviving attempts on his life by the evil interstellar overlord Hedion. That concerns him too.

Here’s the skinny: Fourteen years ago, a burst of galactic energy collided with Earth. This burst contained a blue skinned alien baby (I didn’t know energy bursts could do that). Said baby was found by a guy named Skip, who lives in a bus. Skip claimed the baby as his own and did what any human would do with an alien baby; teach it to skateboard to the max, man!

Here’s Zolar and his adoptive parent dude Skip. Skip is the one on the left.

Zolar’s  bright blue skin and the fin things for his ears are OK, but there’s something familiar about that nose…

Jimmy_Durante

“Ha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha!”

Moving on…
Fast forward to the present day. Four meddling kids (they’re names are Keiko, Dex, Hanson, and Chelsea, but you don’t need to know their names. I’m just going to call them by their character archetypes: Leader Boy Who Gives Everything His All, Nerd Boy Who’s a Technical Whiz, Wacky Dressed Girl Who Has Kooky Colored Hair and Ca-Razy Kewl Outfits and Little Sister Who’s Out to Prove She’s Not Just a Kid, Even Though She Is) are trying to break into the extreme sports circuit, be it rollerblading, skateboarding or snowboarding. Problem is, they all suck at all of them. One fateful day, they run into Skip and Zolar. Skip offers to train them in the way of awesome skateboarding, while also giving his adopted alien freak boy a chance to make friends with some normal kids.  Zolar also has a propensity for making the following ejaculation:
“BLUE-YA!!”
 
“Blue no!”
 
Seriously. Stop trying to turn “Blue-Ya!” into a catchphrase. It’s not going to happen.
There’s also a cameo by professional skater Jason Ellis, who provides lengthy exposition and makes the startling revelation that all extreme sports athletes are actually aliens in disguise!
Silver Surfer
“That sounds ridiculous to me, and I used to work for a guy who eats planets for sustainance!”

“File this under: bull crap.”

All of the world’s extreme sports athletes are space aliens. Really, that’s like saying that all of TV’s famous cooking show stars are actually mutant Morlocks.

You always wondered. Now ya know!”

 

Everyone immediately becomes friends. However, the evil Hedion (C. Thomas Howell), a powerful space bad guy, seeks the power that Zolar has within him. To capture Zolar and retrieve this mojo, he dispatches some cronies to Earth, chief among them some clown named Geommer.

Geommer puts together a scheme to trick Zolar and takes him prisoner. It’s now up to Zolar’s new friends to spring their blue chum, and prevent Geommer from taking over the universe.

Thanks to dvdverdict.com for the synopsis.

On the upside, Zolar is harmless family fare. There’s no blood, death or sexual innuendos. On the downside, the movie is very, very, very stupid. The premise alone opens the door for all kinds of unanswerable questions: How does a hippie guy living in a bus manage to hide an alien for 14 years? What’s with Wild Grrl’s look?

Zolar

Normally I’m all for chicks who wear wacky outfits and crazy colored hair, I actually liked the pink hair, but this chick was wearing FAR too much makeup. Seriously, no need to cake it on, sister; any more and you can officially qualify as a clown. Seriously, all she needs is a pair of big floppy shoes and a red honking nose and she’d be in the house.

“All of a sudden I’ve got somethin’ in my pocket. It’s as big as my shoe, but it feels just like a rocket!”

Where are these kids’ parents? Aren’t they concerned about their kids being chased and blasted by laser gun toting evil aliens from another planet? And how does anyone not notice a teen with blue skin and gills wearing street clothes? Yeah, sure. All you have to do is dress the space alien in a baseball cap, a plaid shirt and blue jeans and everyone thinks that he’s a normal person.

“That’s just stupid.”
 
“Real stupid!”
 
Zolar is nothing but a cynical attempt to cash in on two popular fads to make money off of gullible kids. It would be like making a movie about giant robots who know Kung-Fu. Or a movie about Wild West cowboys fighting alien invaders.

Oh, wait. That actually happened. Anyway, as evidenced by shows such as Prostars and “Hoop Squad”, arguably the single worst episode of Static Shock of all time, trying to pass off pro athletes as super heroes is always a terrible idea. I think that Chad Rocco (CR!) said it best, “Just because you can play basketball, that doesn’t make you a super hero!”

All of a sudden, the concept of extra terrestrial ducks who play hockey seems plausible.

Out of Fuel

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It looks like we can add another cable/satellite channel to the list of fallen channels which decided to stop being a specialized entertainment network and instead become a sheep that runs the same crap as everybody else. TV’s latest casualty is Fuel TV.

Fuel TV is just the latest channel (after G4, A&E, Bravo, TLC, SyFy, History and several others) to sell out and lose sight of what put them on the map in the first place and instead try to cater to the lowest common denominator by running generic shows that you can see on any other channel, but while most of the other channels have chosen to run reality show garbage, Fuel TV has opted to run nonstop UFC shows in place of variety.

Now I’m a homebody couch potato who’s about as athletic as a sloth on Ritalin, and I admit that I didn’t watch Fuel TV all the time, but I did watch some if its’ shows, and what they aired then was tons better than UFC footage 24/7. I watched The Captain & Casey Show, American Misfits, Stupidface and GKA, and Fuel introduced me to bands such as Bad Religion, Tweak Bird, Damone and The Aquabats, whose videos I saw for the first time on the now late show The Daily Habit.

So I’d like to welcome all surf, skate, motocross an wakeboard enthusiasts to the club; you’re now in the same boat as us geeks and nerds: namely, those who used to have a channel just for them but don’t anymore. Is it any wonder more and more people are cutting the cord and getting their entertainment from the internet nowadays?