Harvey Jerkwater

While I know that you usually don’t cover kids’ movies on the podcast, I must recommend a particular piece of smarmy, porcine crap to the How Did This Get Made crew: 1995’s cinematic slop-bucket “Gordy.” My younger daughter fell in love with the 2006 live action adaptation of “Charlotte’s Web,” particularly the lead animal, Wilbur the talking piglet. Soon thereafter, I showed her other talking piglet movies: “Babe,” a truly great film, and “Babe: A Pig in the City,” a truly weird film. All went well. Then a few days ago, while perusing Netflix streaming, we stumbled across a different movie whose cover art was a photo of a piglet wearing a necktie. She had to see it. Even my four year old wasn’t impressed. Boring, strangely structured, badly acted, smug, smarmy, creepy in spots – “Gordy” is, as Jason would put it, “fucking garbage.” It also has features that make it potentially valuable for HDTGM: a community-theater-level bad guy with a feathered salt-and-pepper mullet and double-breasted suit; a hip-hop interlude with the funk and style of an eighties McDonald’s commercial; a country music tween star who was almost played by Britney Spears; a boy named ‘Hanky’; a national mania for a piglet somehow sparked by the titular baby swine saving Hanky from drowning in a pool; a cast of actors who never appeared in anything before or since; and the mysteriously mind-warping, psychedelic effects of wide-angle lenses. It’s a triumph of failure. That said, I can’t tell you how it ends, because an hour into the movie, my daughter announced that she had jammed a coffee bean up her nose and couldn’t get it out. “Gordy” was forgotten in the ensuing bean-extraction excitement. Despite her age-appropriate love of watching flaming piles of garbage again and again, she’s never asked for a repeat viewing of “Gordy.” Even her love of adorable piglets wasn’t enough to redeem this crapfest. Check it out. It’s appalling.