Video of the Week: 'Death to Smoochy'

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 16 (UPI) -- When Robin Williams' "Death to Smoochy comes out on video Tuesday ($26.98 list price for DVD, $22.98 for VHS), it may well do better than it did in the theaters last winter. It could hardly do worse.

Its domestic box office gross of $8 million of a budget of $55 million made it one of the biggest flops of the year.

Still, while it wasn't quite that bad, it's no overlooked gem either. "Death to Smoochy" resembles a foul-mouthed, R-rated episode of "The Simpsons," one in which Krusty the Klown would be fired for extorting payola from doting parents for featuring their children on his show. Dorky Ned Flanders would replace him and become a huge hit as "Smoochy," a Barney-like singing rhinoceros. Crapulous Krusty would plot to destroy nice Ned, while everyone else in children's television would conspire to corrupt him.

As the first salvo in his year-long attempt to shed his image by playing bad guys, Williams fills the Krusty role, but converts the lovable old Yiddish showbiz shlub into a tightly wound homicidal degenerate named Rainbow Randolph Smiley (a vicious parody of his own "Mrs. Doubtfire" and "Birdcage" roles). I'd allow Pee-Wee Herman to take my kids to the movies before I'd let Rainbow Randolph spend 30 seconds alone with them.

Edward Norton ("Fight Club") transforms Ned Flanders' born-again Christian into a New Agey post-Puritan do-gooder hero. "When we were little and my brothers played cowboys and Indians," he explains, "I was always the Chinese railroad worker." As Smoochy, he leads the children on his show in singing, "My Stepdad's Not Mean (He's Just Adjusting)."

The ever-tasteful Danny DeVito ("Throw Mama from the Train") directs and also portrays Smoochy's crooked agent. Not surprisingly, the movie is filled with Sicilian-style suggestions about precisely where various improbable objects should be inserted and how many twists they should be given.

Like DeVito's "The War of the Roses," this is a dark comedy. Screenwriter Adam Resnick specializes in satirizing the television industry, having written for David Letterman and "The Larry Sanders Show."

It's also one of the darkest comedies ever, literally. Comedies are traditionally overlit, but "Death to Smoochy" is strikingly underexposed, with rich, saturated colors.

Even with everything working right, though, "Death to Smoochy" isn't as good as that fictitious "Simpsons" episode would be. Krusty is simply a richer, more appealing character than William's motormouth sicko.

And while Ned Flanders is as fervently benevolent as Norton's Smoochy, his insufferably perky mannerisms -- "Howdily-doodily, neighboreeno!" -- are a lot funnier than Norton's habit of promoting vegetarianism to all the carnivores around him.

Further, the movie tends toward repetition and overkill. Sure, it's fun to expose people in children's television as venal careerists, but to go on to make them murderous mobsters is to lose that contact with reality that's essential to effective satire.

While it's not as hilarious as all the talent would imply, "Death to Smoochy" will appeal to those who like their comedies extremely nasty.

What little experience I've had with the kid's TV business was the complete opposite. Everyone was extremely polite. It was like trying to do business in Japan. Nobody would ever flat out say, "No. I hate it. Go away. You stink." The animated sit-com I wrote for spent three years in a limbo of postponements, with nobody ever being willing to officially put it out of its misery. (It's now showing on a different network.)

That's because nobody knows what kids are going to decide they like next. Back before I had children, I'd watch this late-night show that scanned the world for the worst in foreign television. The all-time low was this weird Japanese stinker featuring color-coded kung fu fighters in motorcycle helmets battling the phoniest monsters since "Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster." Ha-ha! Those wacky Japanese! Little did I know that within a few years I'd be shelling out to buy my nagging kids their own "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers" paraphernalia.

People in the children's TV business may enjoy the maliciousness of the "Smoochy" characters as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for how'd they like to behave. In reality, few of them can afford to permanently burn their bridges with anybody else, because the apparently talentless geek wasting your time today might be the king of Kid TV tomorrow.

Rated "R" primarily for filthy language.