Hi, we're New Zealand. We've seen Napoleon Dynamite. See?

4.10.09

3:43 pm

Before I got balls deep into Battlestar Galactica I had added the movie "Eagle Vs. Shark" to my Netflix.

It came in and Chris and I watched it over the weekend.

I later did some research and found out that the original title was to be "Napoleon Dynamite In New Zealand" and it was going to be the second in the Napoleon Dynamite series (here's a spoiler: they were going to have him spout off a lot of facts about Australia while in New Zealand).

It was going to be your typical fish out of water story but with that awkward character acting and 70's/80's/90's timesmear that Napoleon Dynamite forced a nation to fall in love with and quote incessantly for two years or so.

("Like Crocodile Dundee meet Napoleon Dynamite in reverse sort of" was one of the actual lines used in the original pitch).

Then the American studio said, "This is a god-awful retarded idea" and killed the project.

But New Zealand wanted the world to know how much they weren't just for jerkin-clad gay midgets and CG and how much they loved Napoleon Dynamite, so they got the most awkward, so-quirky-you'll-fart cast they could find and threw in some curse words and sex and violence ("America-ed it up" they said) and some overly indie, thinly veiled allegorical stop animation (the apples...represent the main characters!) and, voila, "Eagle Vs. Shark".

Or at least that's what I thought after seeing it.