I am neither a fan nor a huge detractor of Disney, but I was aware of the spate of garbage direct-to-video sequels they went through for a while there.  That there is a sequel to Bambi feels as weird to me as if somebody made a sequel to Titanic.  I’ll confess I have seen one of their half-assed sequels, and that was the first one they did for Lilo & Stitch.  That was bad enough that I am deeply bewildered as to why there is more than one. 

The only reason I watched Kronk’s New Groove, the sequel to 2000’s The Emperor’s New Groove, was because it was on the same disc as the first film.  I was also a smidge curious because the star this time was Patrick Warburton’s titular dim henchman.  He stole the 2000 film and had me wishing I could see a picture was largely focused on him.

I’d like to take back that wish.

This is really three episodes of an aborted series where Warburton’s character was going to be the star, and it feels like it.  The unrelated stories are told in flashback, ala Emperor, and allegedly telling how our protagonist is desperate to get a literal thumbs-up from his disapproving father when he arrives for a visit.  If it wasn’t for that, the three individual tales would have no relation to each other, and they barely do even with the wraparound story.

The first, and best, story has Kronk once again drawn into a ruse by Eartha Kitt, returning as the villain.  At the end of the first film, she had been turned into a cat and, here, she is half-cat half-human.  It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize this was a reference to her stint as Catwoman on the original Batman TV series.

The second has Kronk as a camp counselor competing against a troop led by Tracey Ullman.  I wasn’t surprised to hear Ullman in this, as I feel she’s like the relief pitcher of animation, somebody who is always willing to do a paying gig.  I can respect that.

The third is really an extension of that wraparound story, as Kronk’s dad (John Mahoney) shows up at the diner where our hero is the cook and there’s all manner of sitcom buffoonery to try to pass off John Goodman’s family as Warburton’s, including Goodman ending up in drag.  If there was a chart following the progression of best-to-worst through the episodes, this would be a straight down vertical line going off the bottom.

One element of this production which surprised me was the return of the main voice cast from the original film, something that is apparently still unheard of with these efforts to squeeze the last bit of profit from a property.  There’s even a cameo from David Spade, which I thought was big of him.

The humor here is faux-edgy, and just a bit watered-down from its predecessor.  One thing I am very weary of in this most recent phase of Disney is the easy potshots they take at their own legacy, such as Kitt’s underground secret lair being accessible through a water ride with a “It’s A Small World” theme (and animatronic cats that look like the Radiohead bear, weirdly enough).  Other moments very gently parody Tarzan and Lady and the Tramp.  But I don’t think these are even good-natured jabs the House of the Mouse is taking at itself, so much as just another way to hype its many brands.  Oh, and there’s also a reference to Gollum and..oh yeah, Titanic (and, no, I’m not counting this as the sequel to that).

That said, I was surprised by the times I laughed while watching this, however few those moments were.  Now that I think about it, all of those occurrences were in the first half-hour.  I liked how Kitt has so much trouble appealing to Kronk’s good nature that she wrote “helping others” on her hand as a reminder to use that talking point.  When it is announced Kitt has been elected emperor, Kronk has a weird moment of clarify when he says, “I never knew that was an elected office.”  There’s also, fortunately, the return of Kronk’s conscience manifesting itself as an angel one should and a devil on the other. Every time I see this surprisingly persistent shtick in a movie or show, I wonder if anybody has ever had the angel and devil actually have their own angels and devils on their shoulders, in some sort of weird endless regression.

Kronk’s New Groove isn’t as dire as I thought it would be, but it is little more than serviceable.  What I find most confounding about this endeavor is they probably could have had a decent, if still slight, feature if they had just had the plot of the first “episode” be the structure for the entire work.

Dir: Saul Blinkoff, Elliot M. Bour, Robin Steele

Starring Patrick Warburton, Tracey Ullman, Eartha Kitt

Watched on Disney blu-ray