Don Bluth's 1986 animated film An American Tail tells the story of a young Jewish-Russian immigrant, Fievel Mousekewitz, who is separated from his family during their journey to America while fleeing the Czar's Cossack pogroms in 1885. The film explores corrosive and false mid-century reactionary versions of the American myth that painted late 19th century America as gladly welcoming all immigrants. These revisionist myths largely propagated throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s in an attempt at bulwarking coalitions of Italian, Polish and Irish-Americans, ethnic groups that were routinely considered non-white prior to World War II, against the gains of black Americans in the civil rights movement. The newly bowdlerized version of American history played up the contemporary positives of the period, essentially taking Emma Lazarus's sonnet "The New Colossus"— "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"— and treating it as the popular consensus of late 19th century America, and not an equally radical statement then as it is now, opposed as it was by a substantial Nativist movement. An American Tail plays with these revisionist myths by having the Irish, Jewish, and Sicilian immigrant mice repeat the myth on the boat ride from Europe; "There are no cats in America, and the streets are paved with cheese."
- ♪ ["There Are No Cats In America"] Cats being synecdoche for racism, exploitation, and the predator class as a whole within the movie's metaphor. However, when the immigrant mice arrive in America, they discover that not only are there cats in America, America is full to the tits with cats. The mid-century myth is contrasted with the reality, that immigrants arrived to America to discover the predator class intact, ready to enforce societal stratification along racial and ethnic lines by whatever means necessary. In this regard, An American Tail is simply repeating the same lesson learned in "Dick Whittington and His Cat", when it was London's streets that were said to be paved with gold; Sir Whittington arriving in London to find not gold, literal or metaphorical, but grime, poverty, and cholera. However, An American Tail fumbles its metaphor at the end. While the climax of the film, where the cats are driven into the sea in an allusion to the biblical demon Legion, can be seen as aspirational or instructive, it is more likely to be read as its own form of revisionism. Though An American Tail suggests that the predator class was a reality of American life, confronting one form of revisionism, the emphasis is on "was", suggesting it as one of the past, a demon driven into the ocean a century earlier. ♪ Now there are no cats in America ♪ ♪ We can do just as we please ♪♪
- Filly? Who's Filly? In succumbing to the necessity of a happy ending, An American Tail succumbs as well to white post-racial fantasies common following the passing of the Civil Rights Act. Still, while the ending of the film may be overly simplistic, An American Tail is unique among children's media for its willingness to depict the crowding, squalor, exploitation and abuse that immigrants faced. The film even includes commentary on the internal racial aggression of the underclass via the use of names, in how Fievel's ally Tony, a 2nd or 3rd-generation Italian immigrant himself, all but refuses to use Fievel's given name, preferentially calling him Filly. Fievel? Ooh, that name's gotta go! Hey, I'll tell ya what, Fi— Filly! An act that recreates the structural suppression of culture, seen when the Mousekewitzes arrive at immigration and Tanya's name is changed to Tilly by the immigration clerk. - MALE IMMIGRANT: Brovoloti Provalinsky.
- CLERK: Okay, Mister... Smith. TANYA: Papa, why did they change my name to Tilly? Aside from these thematic elements, the film itself is a bit of a drag, despite its short run time. Around the midpoint of the film, the story grinds to a halt and Fievel spends an inordinate amount of time futzing around with the vegetarian cat Tiger. While Tiger as an idea reflects the thematic beat that it's not species that defines evil, but behaviour, Tiger being a member of the predator class with no instinct for predation, his role in the film is largely to consume time with the comedy stylings of Dom DeLuise. D'you really think so? On the whole, though, as with much of Don Bluth's work in the 1980s, An American Tail is a flawed but unique and valuable piece of children's media, confronting a young audience with difficult, often complex ideas, emotions and realities. And 21 years later, it was made into one of the worst video games ever. ♪♪ Developed by Data Design Interactive and published by Blast! Entertainment, An American Tail was released for the PlayStation 2 in 2007, and it is one of the worst retail games I have ever encountered. [DRAMATICALLY READING AD COPY]
"Fievel Mousekewitz returns!" "6 huge missions!" "Steer Fievel inside a bubble, hitch a ride on the back of a pigeon, and escape from cats aboard a roller skate!" "4 bonus levels!" "Relive the movie!" "See the thrilling story unfold through classic clips from the animated movie!" Let's get started. Before the 6 huge missions and 4 bonus levels commence, we're treated to the menu, where a dead-eyed digital simulacrum of Fievel Mousekewitz stands as a grim portent of things to come. Entering a new game, we get a short clip from the opening of the film; Fievel running from the Cossack cat, and the family boarding the ship that will take them across the Atlantic to America. How, then, will they translate this into a game? It's Super Monkey Ball. It's— it's Super Monkey Ball on a pirate ship. Fievel is in a soap bubble, and it's Super Monkey Ball on a pirate ship. 21 years after the movie went to theaters, some dudes turned it into a video game, and it's Super Monkey Ball on a pirate ship. There's not really a blow-by-blow to be had, because there's just not that much to the level. There's only two rooms; neither is very complex. They're just prolonged by the atrocious controls, making it simultaneously insultingly easy and comically difficult. After reaching the cheese in the second room, the player gets another short movie clip, and Fievel gets to move his soap bubble onwards to the first bonus level, which is... ...just more Super Monkey Ball. This is actually optional anyway; you can just skip it from the menu. But if you do decide to try and complete it because you hate yourself, buckle up, because it is both far more difficult and complex than the previous level. Fievel needs to collect three cheeses that are scattered around a huge puzzle room, and in the process of getting them, you'll get to enjoy such thrilling moments as: thing you can't see that knocks you off, swinging barrels that utterly ruin the camera controls, a weird push maze that you need to reassemble after decoding the bizarre visual instructions, ever-present wind and boat noises... [WIND AND BOAT NOISES] ...and falling into the water over and over and over and over and over again. I can't overstate just how awful these barrels are. Like, you can't— You just— You can't— You j... You can't— Just, come on, just, you just... [INFURIATED GRUMBLE] I get the feeling that they were just working on levels in a linear order, and then realized that the second level was impossible for their target demographic, so rather than change anything, they just called it a bonus level and made it skippable. In fact, on that note, all the other bonus levels are not just easier than this one, they are substantially easier than everything else in the game. The second proper level is a flight sim where Fievel rides on the back of Henri the pigeon, and the player must navigate the two of them through the busy New York harbour until Fievel is safely delivered to... the cheese floating over a pirate ship. Sounds easy enough, but here's the catch: Henri has a stamina bar that depletes comically fast, so every few seconds, the player needs to fly through floating birdseed to refill the stamina bar. Colliding with water, geese or any obstacles will also take off a huge chunk of stamina. There's actually several stretches where birdseed restores less stamina than it takes to fly between them, meaning that in addition to the obvious reactive challenges of the level, there's also the strategic challenge in that you're simultaneously fighting entropy. Henri controls so poorly that it's impossible to get all the seed, and the seed you can get is barely enough to get through to the end of the level. And don't go thinking that if you miss some seed, you can just loop back and get it; even trying is going to consume far more stamina than you'll get, so you're just dooming yourself to a slow loss, even if you fly the rest of the level perfectly. And if you hit something, you're pretty much done. Not only is the stamina cost just as much of a slow death as poor flying, there's a pretty good chance that you'll just get stuck to or inside of whatever you hit. And I should point out that you don't really steer per se. There's an ever-present lag between input and reaction, so for the most part, you're not steering as much as you're gently tapping the D-pad to make microcorrections to your course. The cherry on top of all that is that the level is so poorly designed, and the engine so poorly optimized, that gameplay actually slows down and gets less responsive as more and more assets are loaded. So not only is the path getting harder, with narrower passages and tighter turns, the fundamental interaction is getting more and more difficult as the game chugs to a crawl and inputs take longer and longer to register. And the whole time— the *whole time*— you've got this... "music"?
- ♪ [ULTRA-GENERIC POP/JAZZ BLARING] Is this music? I mean, yes, technically? Because the game was made as cheaply as possible, none of the music from the film was licensed, so rather than having the film's score, or any of the original songs, or even sound-alikes, the levels are all populated with bizarre, tonally inappropriate royalty-free pop/jazz music. It gets old *really* fast. Assuming you manage to eventually get to the cheese on the pirate ship, the next bonus level consists of Fievel floating down between laundry, like that one small moment in the movie. This is a bit more of what I would expect from a game made for six-year-olds; it's short and pretty easy, but you can still fail, so you need to at least try, but after the previous level... I'm not sure any six-year-old is ever getting here. Anyway, if you want the pro strats for this absurdly easy minigame, you can use 〇 and ✖ to brake or speed up, and I highly recommend you press ✖ to get this over with as fast as possible. For level 3, Fievel is stuck in the street and needs to collect 16 cheeses to advance while dodging humans and horses. The hardest part of this level is fighting against the camera angle; it's so close to the ground that the open manholes are basically invisible, and it's nigh impossible to accurately gauge depth. Like, here I feel like I should be on this cheese, but I'm not. I'm still in front of it. Anyway, it's still not difficult. The next bonus level is just more falling, except now it's at night. Between levels we get one more short movie clip that provides no story context whatsoever, but it's kinda relevant because we're about to head into a sewer. Level 4 is actually level 4-1; see, both this level and the next one take place in the sewers. But rather than just calling them levels 4 & 5, someone decided they should be called 4-1 & 4-2, so that the final level would be 5? But the back of the box says 6 levels, because even if you hyphenate two of them, they're still distinct levels. So why not just call them 4 & 5? This game is a glimpse into madness! So for level 4-1, Fievel needs to ghost behind Warren T. Rat's accountant, Digit. It's the exact same idea as the stalking missions in Assassin's Creed, a game that incidentally came out a few months before this one, except, you know... bad. The added user interface objects showing if you're too close or too far somehow manage to look out of place in a game where nothing actually looks like it belongs. Just like almost everything else in the game, it's not actually very hard, but the unresponsive controls and frequent abrupt failures make it feel far more difficult than it really is. If you do decide to try this game out, I'll save you a lot of headache and let you know that Fievel has a double jump that's critical to beating the level; there's obstacles that are impossible to clear without it. Also, don't waste time trying to balance on pipes; Fievel's just going to fall off. You can get past just about every barrier by running up the slope of the wall, and then jumping over it. Once you make it to the cheese at the end of the level, it's on to the bonus level, which is more falling, just in a sewer. To be fair, this bonus level does escalate the difficulty from the previous levels, with the addition of moving spikes and pipes that spray poison gas. You actually need to use the brakes and acceleration strategically to avoid damage, but there's also a lot of bonus health available, so it's still pretty forgiving. Again, these bonus levels are the only part that really feels age-appropriate to the target market. Now, level 4-2. Honestly, after the flying level where the game slowly chokes and dies on its own assets, I didn't think the game had any more surprises for me. I mean, how could it top that? Well... How about a physics-based downhill racer that controls about as well as an actual mouse riding a roller skate down a sewer pipe? Just like Henri, the roller skate that Fievel rides is so temperamental that you're not steering as much as you're just gently nudging as a suggestion of where to go. Even being really light on the controls, it's still super easy to skid out and jack-knife the roller skate. Oh, and a bizarre detail that's not super obvious from the footage, but the directional controls are oriented to the pipe, not the skate, so once the skate turns more than 90 degrees sideways, the controls flip. Left becomes right and right becomes left, but as you try to turn back around, they flip again once you're mostly facing forwards, making it super easy to just get stuck sideways and stall out. Also, there's no accelerator; Fievel has no way of gaining velocity except rolling down a hill, so if the skate glances off a pipe and loses momentum, it's entirely possible to get stuck in a position where the skate just rolls back and forth between two small lumps in the terrain that it can't quite get over, until the cats catch up to Fievel and you fail back to the start of the level. Should you escape Warren T. Rat and make it to the cheese, it's on to the sixth and final level, level 5— an autoscroller where the player steers the Mouse of Minsk and chases the cats off the pier. And I have to say, I do not use that word lightly. The Mouse of Minsk may not steer well, but compared to Henri and the roller skate, it does steer. So, if you avoid enough boxes, and don't tip over or fall in the water, what do you get? "Congratulations! Fievel has saved New York from the cats and been reunited with his family! Maybe finally they can settle down and enjoy their new life in America..." Roll credits. That's it. Not even a movie clip. There are, in total, 87 seconds of the actual film in the game. [PITCH DECREASING]
"See the thrilling story unfold through classic clips from the ＡＮＩＭＡＴＥＤ ＭＯＶＩＥ！" Now, many of you— connoisseurs of bad video games— you may be wondering why, nay, *how* you have never heard of this before, and it's because this game is surprisingly rare. It was only released in Europe, Australia & New Zealand as a budget title for the PlayStation 2, at a time when retailers were quickly pivoting to the newly released PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. So it wasn't exactly a massive distribution in the first place, and it's only available in PAL video format. So it's not impossible to find, but it's hardly cluttering up pawn shops like sports titles of years past. In fact, it was actually a bit of an ordeal for me to get a working copy. Just to add to the cheapness, the game is printed on CDs, not DVDs, which would explain why there's only a whopping 87 seconds of movie footage in the game. Now, being CD-based wasn't super uncommon for PlayStation 2 games, but they're somewhat notorious for not working properly, and this was the problem I was having. My PAL PlayStation would read DVD-based games just fine, but not An American Tail, which was the only CD-based game I had available. Now, just to explain this, when playing a CD-based game, the PlayStation 2 needs to adjust the focal distance of its laser and run the disc drive's motor at a much higher RPM than what is used for DVD games. As a result, the two most common points of failure are that the CD setting for the laser falls out of position, or the disc spins too fast and slips inside the disc tray because the stopper doesn't have a tight enough grip. A commonly recommended solution for disc slipping is what's called "the tape trick". The idea is to put a few short strips of tape on the top of the disc, giving the stopper extra grip. So I tried this, since it's a pretty simple home hack, and something went wrong. The tape got caught inside the drive, though it didn't damage the PlayStation at all, and when I took the game out of the tray, the tape had actually peeled off the label *and* the reflective aluminum layer underneath, because the game is printed on super cheap CDs where the label is screen-printed directly onto the back of the reflective layer, with no protective plastic or lacquer backing in between. This isn't unheard of; it's just the video game equivalent of a pulp novel printed on low-quality paper and bound with cheap glue that dries out and cracks. So the game is uncommon, it's region-locked, and it's fragile. And I have two copies now. Whatever one of them works. So... Why, Part 1: Why does this exist? The simple answer is money. I wish there were a deeper story here, but that's really it. The game is exactly what it looks like: a cheaply made product shoveled out at a budget price, using a recognizable franchise to draw at least a modicum of attention. Blast! Entertainment was a London-based publisher & development studio focused on cheaply made budget games, usually leveraging an older, less popular, or forgotten movie license, like Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, Charlotte's Web, Lassie, Dr. Doolittle, Home Alone, Babe, Beverly Hills Cop, Jumanji, Xena: Warrior Princess and Top Gun; most of these games coming out years or decades after their respective properties. Data Design Interactive, similarly, was a shovelware developer, though licensed games were more the exception than the rule in their library. Like, you maybe remember them for Ninjabread Man, but probably not. According to producer Stewart Green's LinkedIn page, Data Design Interactive was the leading publisher of Nintendo Wii titles, with 28 titles developed and published in a single year. While he doesn't say what year that was, and I have no easy means to verify that information, I'm gonna take him at his word, because... why would you brag about that? The other producer, Mark Gemmell, currently works for PikPok making microtransaction-stuffed Cow Clicker games. Now... Why, Part Two: Why care? I wanted to share this with you, not because it's important or good or an underrated gem, but because it's none of those things. This game is bad. It's cheaply made, it's difficult to find, it's largely forgotten, it's not fun, and for all those reasons, it's likely to vanish entirely. And that's why I wanted to preserve it. I believe in the value of failed art; art that is driven by carelessness, by unchecked and untalented ego, by spectacularly low-stakes greed. It has a tendency to be novel, to be unpredictable, in a way that deliberate art never can. This is why it's so much fun to watch bad movies. No one would ever make this game on purpose. Something in the creative process needs to be fundamentally broken to get to this point. If you were going to sit down two decades later to make a game out of An American Tail because you actually cared about the movie, and you cared about making a game, you're not going to churn out a hodgepodge series of disconnected minigames that don't work well. It is not simply a lack of time or money that produces something like An American Tail the video game, but a profound lack of caring. The end product of that broken process isn't worth playing for its own merits, but it is worth playing because it's worth remembering. So, thank you all for coming along. I hope you all have shared in my epicaricacy, the joy of looking on something bad. [OBNOXIOUS TITLE SCREEN MUSIC]
Submission statement: Dan Olsen applies his usual dry wit and borderline obsessive analysis overkill to both the original childhood favorite animated film, An American Tail, and then delves into the depths of madness of trying to analyze a crappy shovelware videogame adaptation that came out 2 decades after the movie.
I cannot fathom what compels a man to inflict this upon himself and I can't understand why I find watching over-analyses of shitty forgotten media so compelling myself.