Yogi Watch 2010

The Yogi Bear movie is a little over four months away. Today I saw the poster for the first time...

My thoughts....the poster is actually pretty awesome. It's bright and colorful and it stands out from most of the other movie posters for current movies. I'm sure somewhere along the brainstorming sessions somebody came up with a poster featuring a close up of Yogi and Boo Boo's face tinted blue with a tag line of something like "Pic-a-nic Happens". But the poster does focus in on pic-a-nic baskets which should be the main theme of any Yogi Bear project.

The design of the two main characters is probably what is going to off-set most people. When I first heard of the film, I was expecting them to use real bears or at least CGI realistic looking bears but these designs are pretty dead on to what Yogi and Boo Boo would look like in real life. They are much more on-target with their classic counterparts then say Alivn and the Chipmunks or Garfield were in their big screen epics.

What has me most excited about the possibilities of this movie is an interview I read with director Eric Brevig. Alot of times these pre-film interviews with directors are just all hype and they say what ever they think will help to sell the movie, but other times I read these articles and I'm thinking, "Are you %&$# kiddin' me!?" Like the director of the new Tom & Jerry live-action film who said something along the lines of, "Yeah, I watched a few of the old episodes with my kid but we're going in a whole new direction." What!?!

Yogi Bear director Eric Brevig says, "I wanted to make a movie that's a comedy in which some of the characters are bears, as opposed to a kid's film." That's somewhat refreshing...if it's true. What I really liked was: "Well, I think the world of Yogi is a timeless world, and I've gone to great lengths to avoid specific things in the movie that tell you the time period —for example, people don't use cell phones in the movie, [the park rangers] use walkie-talkies. The things we take for granted — BlackBerrys and so forth — they don't really exist in the Yogi world; it will have a classic feel to it." That's some smart thinking, my friends.

This dude sounds like he might be smarter than the average director. You can read the whole interview here.