Remember Woody Woodpecker? In fairness, you might not. A perennial also-ran compared to the big guns of Disney and Warner Bros, Woody Woodpecker never quite managed to settle on a definitive persona. He was an irritant, then a belaboured everyman. He created problems, then he solved them. He was aggressive, then he was a watered-down Bugs Bunny. Maybe this is why Woody Woodpecker has only fitfully been seen on screen since the early 1970s.
However, like Sixto Rodriguez in South Africa and Norman Wisdom in Albania, Woody Woodpecker has still managed to retain some of that early heat elsewhere. Other countries might have met the news about next year’s Woody Woodpecker film with a disinterested shrug, but not Brazil. Apparently a nation of frenzied Woody Woodpecker fanatics, Brazil seized upon the film so enthusiastically that it actually got to debut the film’s first trailer. Here it is.
We open on what is presumably California, since that is the native habitat of melanerpes formicivorus, the woodpecker that inspired Woody Woodpecker. Although, judging by the country’s bizarre fascination with the character, we might also assume that this is Brazil and Woody Woodpecker is a cream-backed woodpecker, or campephilus leucopogon.
“O pássaro mais famoso do mundo” translates to “the most famous bird in the world”. Which Woody Woodpecker obviously isn’t, unless you happen to be aged between 50 and 85 and have spent the bulk of your adult life frantically avoiding Sesame Street or iPhone games or Twitter or cartoons or most children’s books or 90% of all real-life owls. But maybe this is still an accurate statement in Brazil. Who knows?
And there he is. Time has not been kind to Woody Woodpecker. His beak is mottled and jagged. His eyes are glassy. Years of having his personality shunted around willy-nilly by cynical Hollywood executives has left him so dishevelled that he now looks like the annoying animated sidekick on a 1994 Teach Yourself Esperanto educational CD-ROM. Worse, he’s now taken to referring to himself as “Pica-Pau”, possibly because he’s refusing to leave the past glories of Férias Frustradas do Pica-Pau, his 1995 Brazil-only Sega Megadrive game.
Now to the meat of the trailer. Woody Woodpecker has found a joystick on a construction yard. Crazy old Woody Woodpecker from the 1940s would play with the joystick, creating chaos for everyone. However, Woody Woodpecker from the 60s would be sure to treat the joystick responsibly. What will this garishly Frankensteinian atrocity of a creation do?
Oh no! He’s used the joystick to manoeuvre a pipe over the open sunroof of a car belonging to 47-year-old Timothy Omundson from Psych and what had better be his daughter. I hope nothing bad happens!
Oh no! Woody Woodpecker has pressed a button on the joystick and now they’re covered in concrete! Why did he do that? Is Timothy Omundson a baddie? Has Woody Woodpecker reverted to the disruptive prankster of old? Does he just massively disapprove of the practice of pairing middle-aged actors with romantic partners who are young enough to be their daughter? Hopefully the end of the trailer will explain all.
Except it won’t, because this is a Brazilian Woody Woodpecker trailer and Woody is speaking in Portuguese, which I don’t understand. However, from repeating this one line of dialogue into a translation app on my phone, I believe that Woody Woodpecker is saying, “This was done because Australia is infinite”. So, in summary, Woody Woodpecker is going to be a film about a 76-year-old morally vague abomination of animation who tries to drown age-inappropriate couples in concrete because he’s alarmed by the size of a country on the other side of the world. This has got blockbuster written all over it.
