There’s kind of a dream team behind Mr. Peabody and Sherman: Dreamworks Animation, which gave us the deeply awesome How to Train Your Dragon; director Rob Minkoff, (The Lion King); and an all-star voice acting lineup including Ty Burrell, Stephen Colbert, and Allison Janney. A new official trailer was just released for the movie, which is set for a March 7th release.
The trailer pulls a little bit of a fake-out, playing to the basest of zeitgeisty trends like Zumba and fist-bumping. But once we get past that, Mr. Peabody and Sherman promises to be straight-up funny. With the source material at hand – Mr. Peabody and Sherman started out, of course, on Jay Ward’s Rocky and His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show – you kind of can’t go wrong. Looks like Sherman commandeers Mr. Peabody’s WABAC Machine to impress a girl, and like all time travels with the best of intentions, nearly destroys the space-time continuum. Hilarity ensues. Points for best non-Coachella use of a Bastille song.
I saw a comment on Youtube that said this looks more like a crossover of the classic Peabody’s Improbable History with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,
The voice difference is as jarring to me as one would experience if the voice of HAL 9000 were swapped with someone who is more streetwise and has an overt sense of humor.
CAUTION: Full frontal nerdity.
It’a already too much to ask that this is going to be faithful to the cartoon. Here’s why.
VERY FIRST EPISODE of the cartoon it’s established that the WABAC was built FOR Sherman. It was an educational tool and a way to get Sherman some exercise. (An apartment is no place for a boy. Boys need running room.) So Peabody would never forbid Sherman from using it.
Other issue is that the WABAC could NOT mess with the Space-Time Continuum. In the first episode they attempt a trial run and find that they can’t alter history: they don’t exist according to what’s already happened.
Mr. Peabody re-tooled the WABAC to be a “Could Have Been” machine, which permitted them to visit a time period and change anything they wanted, because they weren’t technically visiting the past. This was contradicted several times by later episodes where Peabody, for example, didn’t return Napoleon’s suspenders, which became the reason why Napoleon always held his hand through his coat. (He was holding his pants up with his hidden hand.)