I just finished watching Gnomeo & Juliet (it’s a new release on Netflix streaming and I was just testing out my new Blu-Ray player and I picked this and I ended up sticking to it no excuses… it was highly entertaining and pun-derful), but something about the ending bothered me.
It ended with a stupid dance scene.
I don’t know where the idea for this cop out ending began, but the last time I noticed it was during the end of Despicable Me (I watched this one on a long flight to Prague no excuses). This was the first dance scene that really bothered me because it seemed to be an answer to the question posted above – how should we end this movie?
(SIDENOTE: This is how…)
When the live action version of Alice in Wonderland came out, there was a lot of brouhaha over this ending (amongst other things). For the record, I’ve not yet never seen this movie:
So did this start the trend? Let’s see if there were any others before these (I will not count dancing during the credits):
- Shrek
- Robots
- Shrek 2
- Megamind
- Rio
But hey! Those are all Dreamworks films! That’s like picking on them for their Dreamworks faces!
Okay, well to be fair, here are some live-action, non-musical, non-credit dance number endings:
- Beetlejuice
- The 40-Year-Old Virgin
- Hitch
Even though this walk down memory lane hasn’t really produced an answer, I have a theory. Beetlejuice is the oldest one on here, and the scene fits in with the rest of the movie’s universe, so I could probably discount it for the film I truly lay the blame on… There’s Something About Mary and the infectious (in every sense of the word), Build Me Up Buttercup:
(SIDENOTE: I’ve always found this Farrelly Brothers’ flick to be overrated. Also, I had never heard The Foundations ode to Legos-shaped flowers (build… buttercup… ha!) before, and people picked on me for that. Plus, I worked at Circuit Shitty at the time of DIVX, and it was claimed at the time that TSAM was partly to blame for its demise. Apparently, 20th Century Fox released it on DIVX earlier than DVD, and DVD owners were pissed you had to have a “special format” to watch the movie a week or two earlier, and wrote angry letters to Fox. Not that I was on the DIVX gravy train or anything, but there’s something to TSAM’s ruining everything!)
*end rant*
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