Over the weekend, I went out to the theater and saw Avatar: Fire and Ash. Even as a big Avatar sicko, I walked out disappointed. But I don’t want to talk about that. Instead, I want to highlight a moment I was forced to watch twice due to some snafu at my local AMC. The moment in question involves some children hooking up a tube to a monkey’s face and farting into the other end. Hey Hollywood, what the fuck?
We arrived to see Avatar: Fire and Ash about 15 minutes before the movie started, and to our surprise, my wife and I noticed the trailers were already playing. Strange! We sat down and I caught a new trailer for Sony’s upcoming Zootopia knock-off, GOAT, which is a basketball movie about talking animals or something. Approximately one minute and 49 seconds into this trailer, I was surprised to see two young rhino girls using a tube and a gas mask to funnel a fart from one of the animals’ asses to the face of a sleeping monkey man. Here’s the moment in question.
I looked around the theater, which was basically empty as we’d arrived fairly early, and questioned if I’d actually seen what I thought I’d seen. I mean, sure, animated movies for kids are filled with fart jokes, so it hardly seemed impossible that Sony’s GOAT would feature one. But having cartoon animal kids basically recreate the fart mask stunt from Jackass 2 as a silly moment caught me off guard. I shook it off and soon was lost in the opening minutes of Fire and Ash, the GOAT trailer a distant memory. Or so I thought.
About 10 minutes later, someone seemingly complained that the movie had started early, and so the AMC restarted everything, trailers included. Mildly annoying, but it did make me giggle at all the people who had arrived late specifically to avoid trailers then being forced to watch them anyway. It also meant that I’d have a second chance to catch the fart joke. And yup, to my surprise, GOAT does indeed include a recreation of Jackass 2’s fart mask bit, complete with the victim retching and losing it.
Folks, I’m not a prude. I love the Jackass movies. And I’m not above laughing at a fart joke or someone getting hit in the groin. But it feels like GOAT and the people involved were desperate to one-up all the other fart jokes in kids’ movies these days and, in the process, created something that feels like it crosses a line that I’m not even sure I can properly put my finger on. At the very least, moving forward, I’d like a warning before any trailers that feature kids recreating gross-out pranks from Jackass movies, okay?
