MarzGurl Discusses The Land Before Time VIII

(Clips from the movie are shown.)

MarzGurl (vo): When you hear The Big Freeze, what do you see? Well, I see one of two things; I see either a local news station run of your local city's biggest freeze in the last decade, or I see a kindergarten class that doesn't quite understand what winter is. Really, it's the latter that describes this movie, but that's a bit of an overstep. I mean, the movies are made for kids, I suppose. Anyway, oh hey, this surprised me somewhat positively, the old school narration that has been missing for the last couple of movies is back!

Narrator: The planet Earth. A world of constant change and unpredictable weather.

MarzGurl (vo): Call me sentimental, but I kind of appreciated it. Now surprisingly with this movie, our initial character development doesn't happen with Littlefoot, but rather with Ducky and Spike, but mostly Ducky. She's getting pissed at Spike because he's big and dumb and keeps her awake at night. Not only that, but he eats all of her treestars, and when they're getting a lesson from some old guy and they're both falling asleep, the dude gripes and gets only Ducky in trouble and not Spike. So finally, somebody is getting pissed at Spike for being completely stupid after seven movies have passed, sure took them long enough. Oh, right, I brought up that the kids were all getting taught by this big old guy. Who is this guy, anyway? Well, they're all calling him Mr. Thicknose. He's apparently the oldest and wisest dude in all the Great Valley, and by that, they mean he's really boring. Most of the scene seems pretty darn pointless, except for this one part where Littlefoot asks him about why he knows where everybody came from and Mr. Thicknose doesn't seem to have an answer. Littlefoot also uses part of his lesson to make a bunch of noise and drop a bunch of green food from a tree. Tell me I'm not the only one who sees this piece of knowledge getting used somewhere later in the movie. What was I saying before? Oh yeah, Ducky's pissed at Spike, but she's not used to being pissed, so she has Cera teach her through song.

Cera: (singing) Make your face all squinty and scary, don't raise up your head / Hold your breath (Ducky inhales and holds her breath) until you're blue, and make your eyes turn red!

MarzGurl (vo): All the while, Spike is off wandering around doing his own thing, and then suddenly, BOOM! A pink baby spiketail (Tippy) shows up in the picture. Oh, great. You know what, the last thing Spike needs is a derpy significant other, but guess what? They made it happen. Great. And the mommy spiketail comes up and gets to know Spike. She even gives him a nice motherly invite.

Tippy's mom: Oh, your family must come over and see us.

MarzGurl (vo): Oh, I see where this is going, they're gonna pull a line from that Sesame Street movie, Follow That Bird. Have any of you ever seen that movie?

(The poster for Follow That Bird is shown)

MarzGurl (vo): How all these birds decide that Big Bird really needs to be among his own kind, so they send him off with this ridiculous bird family that doesn't really feel like his family? Yeah, that's exactly what's going to happen here.

(More clips from the movie are shown)

MarzGurl (vo): This movie feels like it has a number of disjointed plot lines that all take forever to merge into one because with all this stuff going on: Ducky being mad at Spike, Spike finding a cute pink spiketail to hang out with, and Mr. Thicknose not really knowing anything about what he's talking about. Now Littlefoot is the only one in the Great Valley to see snow falling from the sky in the middle of the night, you know, kind of like how he was the only one to notice that meteor falling from the sky in the last movie? He's just sorta special that way. And just like last time, the one old and wise guy that Littlefoot tells just doesn't believe a word he says, which of course, is gonna get the Great Valley into a heap of trouble. Meanwhile, back with Spike and Ducky's plot line, Spike is struggling with the fact that he really doesn't look anything similar to the rest of his family. That's when the cute little pink spiketail and her* mom shows up, and they offer a simply brilliant idea.

* NOTE: Tippy is actually a male.

Tippy's mom: (To Spike's mom) Do you think Spike would enjoy visiting my herd? He could... well, he could see how his own kind lives.

MarzGurl (vo): Yep, and thus, the Follow That Bird storyline begins. So remember how Mr. Thicknose ignored Littlefoot? Well, guess what? The entire Great Valley gets to pay! For some reason, the Great Valley decided to completely skip the autumn season and went straight into winter. Check it out, snow! Well, the kids like it, but only for so long, and Mr. Thicknose is in trouble for not listening to Littlefoot when he spoke up. Oh, right, like anybody else was ever going to listen to Littlefoot, anyway. Now at first, I was thinking,"Hey, weren't dinosaurs cold-blooded?" I was totally gonna harp on this fact, but apparently, some dinosaurs could regulate their body temperature or something, like ones that would've been found in the Southern Hemisphere, but can anybody tell me if Triceratops and Apatosauruses would have been able to do that? I mean, I'm just curious, especially with all the food they graze on for hours a day completely gone. Actually, that whole lack of food thing is exactly why the spiketails decide to leave the Great Valley at this point. They need to eat tons of food and they'll find no such food in the Great Valley anymore. What do they do? They take Spike with them, of course. Now Ducky is so sad about this that she needs to sing about it.

Ducky: (singing) Is it someone who looks like us? Is it someone who acts like us? / Is it someone who sleeps beside us in a nest?

MarzGurl (vo): Not only does she sing, but then she decides to go off on her own to chase after Spike. She doesn't even tell Littlefoot or the others that she's going, she just sort of takes off.

Cera: (The Land Before Time II): What could go wrong?

Petrie: (The Land Before Time VI) Me no know.

MarzGurl (vo): And what do the other kids do when they find out Ducky's gone off on her own? That's right, they go on out after her! Of course. But that's when they stumble into Mr. Thicknose, who had basically been ostracized from the herd and decides to go with the kids, both as adult supervision and as dead weight. Look at him, he's all old and slow and keeping them from doing everything they need to do. We also learn here that Mr. Thicknose had been lying about knowing anything about whatever happens outside of the Great Valley because he had never been outside of the Great Valley. Okay, you know what? I'm sick of this "the Great Valley was always here" crap! I thought the Great Valley was this big legend, that nobody even knew if it was real or not, yet this guy has been inside the Great Valley for God knows how long and has never left! And again, let's count the dinosaurs that have entered and exited the Great Valley in this movie alone: Mr. Thicknose, the five main character kids, that entire herd of spiketails. What is protecting the Great Valley from outside devastation?! Speaking of outside devastation, later on, a Sharptooth comes along, of course, because that's their greatest danger in pretty much every movie thus far. Who didn't see that coming? The weather wasn't enough, oh no. Luckily for everybody, the Sharptooth chases Ducky right back to the rest of the kids and Mr. Thicknose, convenient, right? So how do they defeat the Sharptooth? With snow, a big ball of snow! This seems...pretty unlikely. But they do it, kind of, because he's not dead yet, but in the process of everything, an avalanche occurs, blocking the kids out and everyone in the Great Valley in. Well, that sucks. Luckily, they stumble upon some hot springs that are...somehow...frozen over with ice. Wait, how is that even possible?! Wouldn't hot springs be so hot that they don't freeze? Well, apparently, these do! Wait, Mr. Thicknose is singing? Why is this happening?!

Mr. Thicknose: (singing) Everyone wants to be important, everyone wants to be heard / Everyone wants to be the center of the circle, where friends are hanging on your every word.

MarzGurl (vo): Anyway, there's food around here, but nobody from the Great Valley would be able to get to it with the avalanche going on. Well, at least Spike is still equally as stupid and simple as always and can smell food from five hundred miles away, so we know the spiketail herd is going to be okay, because eventually, Spike is just going to lead them straight to the hot springs. Now what about everybody else in the Great Valley? Well, we'll get to them later, for now, the Sharptooth that was defeated by the snow is back. This time, we'll defeat him by pushing a log onto him and shoving him off a cliff. Yeah, that'll show him! Doesn't it seem like one of the best solutions to defeating a Sharptooth is by dropping something on it? Man, we really gotta get something more original going on here. So anyway, back to the whole "being trapped outside the Great Valley by snow" thing. You remember what I said earlier about Littlefoot learning how to make stuff fall by using loud noises? Well, everybody starts yelling, and with Cera being the loudest, most annoying voice in the whole bunch, she causes the snow to fall and reopen the Great Valley. But wait, Petrie was sitting there complaining that nobody could hear them down in the Great Valley. Dude, you're a flyer, what's wrong with you?! Go fly down there, tell them what's up, and then your families will understand what's going on, but no! I guess getting mad solves the situation, too, so sure, whatever! All points now converge on the hot springs, where the spiketails find sustenance, and here comes the point that they really wanted to drive home: Spike falls into a deep section of the water and he can't swim. Now with the obvious teeth grinding sound of Spike shouting...

Spike: MAMA!

MarzGurl (vo): This gets Spike's mom-that is Ducky's mom-to jump in and save his life, and now everybody lives around the hot springs in harmony with one another until the Great Valley gets all its greenery back, and everybody lives happily ever after...until movie nine, anyway.

You know, I have to give credit where credit is due, this still isn't my picture perfect Land Before Time movie, but ever since the animation got better with the previous movie, the stories haven't been quite as rotten to the core as they were previously. But there's still room for the series to topple in either direction. Who's coming on the ride with me to movie nine?

(Credits are shown)