Father of the Pride: really underrated?

D

dg2003

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I knew nothing about this show and picked up a four hour long two DVD set yesterday, which cost about six dollars. What can you lose for that price?

I watched a few episodes last night and really enjoyed what I saw. Goodman's charisma leads the proceedings effortlessly (he's not another Homer/Peter Griffin dummy), Carl Reiner takes it to the next level and the Las Vegas animal show basis for a sitcom is pretty original and intriguing. There's much originality here, and there are set pieces I literally have never seen in any cartoon/sitcom that border on the fairly dark. For example, a show centred around a replacement Zebra rug, and mulling over whether to kill a zebra hanging around the local bar (!), which leaves you guessing.

Then I went onto imdb and here to trawl through the opinions of the show, and I see so much negativity aimed at it. Accusations of the show being unoriginal and just an excuse to do a CGI sitcom. Seems the show was deemed a massive failure by many, too.

I can see that the subtle humour must have gone wasted on an audience more interested in Seth McFarlane style pop culture references. The male protagonist of the sitcom family isn't a fat idiot either, and the show actually tries to address morals and emotions, rather than winking at the audience that we are all too clever for the genre.

Curiously any praise for the show seems to be heaped on the buffoonish depiction of of Siegfried and Roy. They are played as eccentric, madmen stereotypes continuously degenerating into nonsense. I guess that says a lot about audience expectations for a show these days.

Katzenberg did a great a great job, I think (creator of the show!), and I'm curious to see how the show progresses as I continue to watch the rest of the boxset. Next up is an episode concerning pandas, which by all criticisms listed online from 2004, I think was shown as the first episode, and has recevied a large amount of panning.

Anyone have an opinion on this show? Does it keep getting better?
 
I never watched the show on TV, but I think a big part of why it failed was the terrible marketing behind it. Nobody behind the scenes seemed to know how to pitch it. Was it for adults only? Teenagers? They had a featurette in Disney Adventures about it, but I can't imagine the demographics for the two were the same.

It just seemed like they couldn't attract any one audience slice, and ended up with no audience at all.
 
Like ABC's Capitol Critters, Father of the Pride was a difficult series to market. On the surface, it looked like a Saturday morning kids' cartoon with talking animals substituting for humans. Because of this, many adults wrote Pride off as being just another kid's show and didn't bother with it. FotP's ratings weren't great, and the series was too expensive to keep producing if no one was going to watch.



Pfft. The IMDB boards. That place is a haven for negative posters who post negativity just for the sake of being negative. Anyone who's looking for fair and impartial commentary online should keep right on looking. Now, if you want a series that exemplifies the above statement, that would be UPN's Game Over, a generic sitcom about a family of video game characters whose being game characters gave the producers an excuse to render the series in CGI, and not even good CGI. The real shame is that Game Over was a bad series that had the potential to be good, if only it had been handled properly. Another case of the idea being better than the show itself.
 
Thanks for all of the above comments.

I am nearly done with the first disc of this series, and I am constantly laughing out loud (last gag to do so involves Sigfried and Roy dining on a salami bust of Barbra Streisand).

I can appreciate that the jokes might be a bit esoteric and subtle for a broad mainstream audience, but this show is a gem that does everything it says on the tin. The endless barrage of name guest appearances obviously saw worth in the material, too.

Goodman is really understated but the character is the glue that holds it all together, and Reiner's thoughtful yet acidic grandfather is so effortlessly charming. This is high calibre stuff, expertly written with an eye on showbusiness, satire underneath the situation but the characters are against the genre stereotypes you'd expect.

I think that if you prefer your cartoon sitcoms more King of the Hill than Family Guy, trust me on this one and get the boxset.
 
While I agree Game Over is a terrible, terrible series (pretty much video game in name only and I use that term loosely), Father of the Pride didn't impress me either from what I've seen. It's still the same generic family sitcom, complete with precarious little brother, down-to-earth mother, rebellious teenage daughter, rambunctious grandparent, etc as they live their everyday lives (well, everyday lives of entertaining lions). Topped with some pretty lame dialogues and stories, I felt the show, while not bad, was thoroughly average. It's practically every family sitcom, only disguised as CGI lions.
 
Yeah, I've only seen bits and pieces of Father of the Pride, and based on what I have seen, it mostly struck me as being a run-of-the-mill domestic sitcom with what were essentially human characters in animal guises. At least Capitol Critters had some originality and substance to it.
 
Except you've got the satirical showbiz angle, delving into very human issues inherent in that industry (and in any industry) of networking, bitterness, nepotism, living up to expectations, dealing with eccentric personalities, prejudice and handling success/failure, while weaving them into the family sitcom format.

In addition to this it rather effortlessly manages to marry the animal and human worlds, while making groundrules clear on the extent of how far the separate parties interact. You've got perhaps the most heightened human community imaginable (Las Vegas show world) by way of sitcom animals in a human world, which is a helluva lot to balance in episodes that only last twenty minutes long.

Anyone convinced this is just some Dinosaurs retread with CGI lions has really missed the point, in my opinion.

Looking at the pilot episode commentary, it seems the pilot never aired! No wonder it got such bad reviews, as that must have sent the whole thing way out of context.
 
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