Fat Albert (the cartoon) came along a few years after I'd lost interest in Bill Cosby. As a youngster I sat glued to the turntable listening to Cosby records, but when his portly creation and the gang came along I was over Cosby and, hence, I went into Fat Albert more-or-less as unfamiliar with the cast of characters, as my children were sure to be. This is just a personal illustration of the logistical conundrum that this doomed comedy finds itself in. The humor in Fat Albert is decidedly juvenile, and since the demographic group that the film is aimed toward are as out of the loop as myself, the film really unfolds before a largely clueless and estranged audience.

I would suppose that most adults have, at least, a nodding acquaintance with Bill Cosby's ode to his North Philadelphia childhood-inspired cast of cartoon characters. Albert's booming catch-phrase "hey, hey, hey" has been etched into our collective conscience, but beyond that, the only vague memory I could conjure up was the episode where the kids stuck some bubble gum on the head of the tall skinny one in order to retrieve their basketball from the sewer. Hence the only real chance Fat Albert had at connecting with "any" audience would be if it were expertly written in such a way as to transcend it's lack of a core audience. Fat Chance.

Quite unfortunately, the screenplay is not only unable to connect the kids to this long-forgotten shtick, but it's so dreadfully awful that it fails to do anything more than throw it's hat in the ring for "worst movie of the year" honors. Fortunately the year is young and by the time such dubious honors are awarded, perhaps people will have forgotten about this disaster altogether.

The unlikely plot of this milestone in miscalculation revolves around a Philadelphia tween named Doris who is struggling to find her identity and is not the most popular girl at school. In the most implausible of twists, the friendless Doris happens to be watching a Fat Albert cartoon one afternoon following a particularly bad day at school and her lonesome tears drop upon the TV remote - which magically fetches the cast of cartoon deadbeats into the real world. (The implausibility I'm mostly speaking of here, is that she was actually watching a Fat Albert cartoon). For their part Fat Albert and the gang, now fleshed-out in the real world, seize the opportunity to be "real boys" by vowing to see that Doris is soon swamped with friends.

Had this film been released at the height of Fat Albert's popularity it probably would have been a harmless, modestly successful film - that might even be a cult classic by now. Sadly (and I mean sadly) this poorly timed and misguided fantasy is so utterly lacking in laughs, and overall smarts that it's really hard to fathom how it ever managed a green light. Without the Cartoon Network familiarity enjoyed by Scooby Do for example, what chance did it really have?

SNL's Keenan Thompson plays the obese Albert and does his best to recreate his "hey hey hey" days, but really has no chance of pulling anything redeemable from this wreckage. He develops a crush on Doris' foster sister and at a party attempts to win her favor by improvising a little rap? Why shouldn't he be a natural at rap, since it didn't exist in the era he has come from? The creators try to wring jokes out of tired bits, where kids from the past are left dumfounded by cell-phones and other modern amenities. "B-how-b-riginal."

The saddest thing about Fat Albert is the painful lengths that it's creators (including Joel Zwick) have gone to faithfully recreate these characters, and how futile their effort ends up being in the face of an audience who literally know nothing of them. This kind of nostalgia only works when those who are witnessing it hold the characters dear to their hearts. Alas, the various quirks and eccentricities that a "Weird Harold" or "Mushmouth" might have held to a long lost generation are entirely lost on most of the movie goers on planet earth.

Even the potentially hilarious scene in which the "real boy" Fat Albert shows up at Bill Cosby (Geppeto's) house falls just as flat as the rest of the proceedings. The only recent film that I can think of that could even hold a candle to this misbegotten mess, would be last year's Garfield, but even that copy-cat isn't an accurate comparison. File Fat Albert under trying to find a needle in a "Hay Hay Hay" stack.