"Huevos: Little Rooster's Egg-Cellent Adventure" Gets Doubly Screwed in America

 
This post is at least a few months late in coming, but considering what this blog is supposed to be about (and what I want it to be in the future) I can't have it without discussing the release of this particular film and its American release.  The movie in question is an animated Mexican family adventure called "Un gallo con muchos Huevos." If you want more information about the film and it's interesting release in America, I've written a review of it on my main website.  To give you the abridged version though, someone decided to release this computer animated, Spanish film in American cinemas almost randomly one weekend.  The film is rated PG-13 (for which animation is the one type of movie that DOESN'T benefit from this rating), is released without much publicity, and... yeah, this has failure written all over it.  Amazingly the movie cracks the box office top ten that weekend, reviews are largely positive, and an English dub is planned for eventual expansion.

For some reason the English dub didn't materialize in theaters, but the film was still a surprise hit in America.  You'd think that with this potential the home media release would be treated at least a little better than the shotgun release approach used for the theatrical release.  You'd be wrong in that thinking.  Yes, we did get the movie in disk format, but we got probably the most butchered, pathetic attempt to release the movie I've seen in a long time.  Granted, this wasn't a HUGE hit by any means, but you'd think a surprise hit would be treated a little better!  First of all, I am going to mention that, yes, this movie WAS made with 3D in mind when it was released in Mexico!  I suspected this was the case when I saw the movie in theaters and wasn't surprised to find this was the case.  I know why the 3D version was passed up in theaters, but I held out a little hope that maybe with the unexpected success, the format would be given a second look when it came time to make the BluRay.

Well, to state the obvious we did not get a 3D release of the movie (and it is not in 3D on Vudu this time either).  To a certain extent I knew this could be a possibility, but what I didn't expect was for the BluRay to be passed up altogether.  Almost half a year after I saw the film in theaters, I noticed that it was going to be released on DVD soon as "Huevos: Little Rooster's Egg-Cellent Adventure"...

...but when I saw this listing in the Best Buy ad, I found it odd that there was no BluRay release.  For that matter, when I visited the listing page on Amazon I noticed that the rating of the film was PG.  As you can also see from the cover above, the dub did finally materialize (with such big stars as Jon Hedar and Jason Mews).  But there was no BluRay release.  None.  Any digital copy you could buy online only came in standard definition.  There was no HD release at all.  When I did get my hands on a copy of the DVD my fears were confirmed that the dub was edited to receive the PG rating.  Granted, this IS a kids movie and the original PG-13 seemed a bit even for what was in it, but I dislike censorship regardless.  The only good thing to come from this release is that the DVD DOES contain the unedited, PG-13 subtitled version on the disk (and is advertised on the back of the box, so parents are aware of it).

Unlike most DVD's the PG-13 version is buried on the disk, and it takes a little bit of detective work to find it.  This is likely because the distributors are courting families and they don't want the kids to easily find the "naughty" version of the movie, but the extent they hid it just seems a little silly.  Oh, and that Ultraviolet code... yep, you only get the edited PG dub.  This whole release is just... I don't know what to say.  Yes, I did write in my original review that considering what this movie was and where it came from, I was happy to have gotten it at all.  At the same time I think all movies deserve to be seen in their original intended format and in the best way possible.  So this isn't a big enough movie to get 3D?  Fine, I'll reluctantly accept that (though it still would have been on this sites MIA list).  But to not even release the thing on BluRay and then go out of your way to hide the original version of the film?

That is something I can not get behind.  Not even a little.  Of course "Huevos: Little Rooster's Egg-Cellent Adventure" isn't a great movie by any means.  In fact, I haven't really thought much about it since I've seen it.  I bought the DVD so that I could confirm some suspicions I had about the product, but I haven't re-watched.  I sampled the dub - which was ok - and put the disk on the shelf.  I'm honestly surprised that of all the movies I saw last year, this is one of only a dozen movies I've come back to to write about once again.  Just goes to show you never know what life will give you.  At the end of the day if you have a chance to see the subtitled version of ""Huevos: Little Rooster's Egg-Cellent Adventure" I think you will be reasonably entertained.  But I can not recommend this pathetic DVD in any way.  In this case, for the few fans there are of the movie, they got screwed at least three times over with this release.

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