Bigg Snoop Dogg Presents "The Adventures of Tha Blue Carpet Treatment"
Label: Snoopadelic Films/Geffen
Author: Steve 'Flash' Juon

Following the success of his 2006 album "Tha Blue Carpet Treatment," our homey S-N-double-O-P D-O-double-G decided to expand his empire further by jumping into the world of animation. For anybody who owns an original copy of "Doggystyle" this shouldn't come as a surprise. Bigg Snoop Dogg has always had a fetish for combining hip-hop and comics, and you can even hear Snoop lending his voiceover talents to the second season of The Boondocks. What DOES come as a surprise is how long it took for the straight-to-DVD release of "The Adventures of Tha Blue Carpet Treatment" to ARRIVE. Snoop's most recent album "Ego Trippin'" hit stores three months BEFORE the animated movie based on the PREVIOUS album. I know it takes a long time to animate shit, but somebody needs to work on their timing a bit.

Speaking of timing, the opening title screen for "Adventures" really needs some work. These days while waiting to press play on a movie you expect some slick animation or an inset with clips from the feature or some really slick background music on a nice clean loop if not both. After sitting through five minutes worth of commercials for a Katt Williams comedy video and a documentary about the feds busting mixtape producers, you get what might be the most obnoxious title screen in hip-hop DVD history. The four characters who would appear to be the stars of these "Adventures" (ironically looking like carbon copies of Huey and Riley) just stare at the screen mean mugging while a familiar synth voice says "Wesssssst, Wesssssst, coa-a-ast, coa-a-ast." The audio lasts 11.4 seconds, there's a HELLA awkward pause, then the whole thing repeats. Perhaps it's better that the loop of this song isn't seamless - it might be even more annoying if it droned on without any pause. Fo' real though I expect at least 60 seconds before a title menu refreshes or at least 30 - not 11.4!

After the opening logos for Snoopadelic Films and Geffen we're treated to some animation that looks like Rock Gods of Rock from Channel 101. That's not a knock on RGOR - they did some very funny stuff for being a low-budget free webtoon - but Bigg Snoop Dogg should have more money in his budget than that. Snoop is a multi-platinum 20 year hip-hop veteran who sits atop an empire of albums and merchandise who gets paid just to do cameos on Monk, so I expect more than Macromedia Flash animation. The shitty looking P-Funk aliens are apparently spying on Snoop from outer space, as we get the non-animated Dogg going on a mission to get some weed. The dealer tells him he's got something better than Snoop's usual purple - THA BLUE CARPET TREATMENT - and it's so good he won't hand it to Snoop before pouring it into a champagne glass. Snoop is so impressed he promptly forks out five C-notes for the indo. We go back to the aliens in the spaceship, where the P-Funk alien doesn't just look like George Clinton - he's VOICED by George Clinton. Go figure.

Snoop finally takes a hit off his Blue Carpet and starts tripping, finding himself in a poorly animated music video with characters drawn like Aaron McGruder but animated like another cheap Macromedia cartoon. Snoop's lips aren't even synced to his mouth while rapping. Is that really too much to ask? Next up is an animated version of "A Bitch I Knew" from Snoop's "Blue Carpet" CD, and while it's a little better than the last video it transitioned from that's not saying much. Arguably that's more exciting than an animated version of SNOOP LISTENING TO HIS ANSWERING MACHINE. This movie is falling off a cliff hard and fast. I like the look of Nate Dogg and Snoop in the animated "Crazy" that follows but one thing has become painfully obvious about the animation style of the film. Every character has precisely three mouth movements per scene - mouth open, mouth closed, mouth halfway open. Each time the music is supposed to be synced to the video, these three frames are cycled in a loop until the scene cuts away. There's failed comedy in this. In a classic overdubbed Wu-Tang film, the english vocals are in no way close to the dialogue of the original actors, but at least the live actors mouths are still moving normally when nobody is speaking or vice versa. Had "Vato" been done that way on "Adventures" it would be like a hilarious animated gangster action movie from the West brought East, but instead of being comedy it's just sad to seee them TRY to sync it up when all they did was draw a few frames and put them on loop.

In sheer desperation I start watching "The Adventures of Tha Blue Carpet Treatment" on fast-forward just hoping to find the four shorties who had been on that obnoxious title sceen. No luck. A poorly animated conversation from a jail day phone is followed by "Theodore Johnson" explaining on a TV show why you should always get to the phone first in a domestic dispute. Back to fast forward looking for the shorties. FINALLY. I found the shorties. The set-up is a dude talking shit to his slutty girlfriend, and she decides to get even with him by fucking his best friend. This lasts all of a minute before we go to a video for the unreleased (but not hard to find) song "Snooperman." Same crappy Macromedia animation but the song is fly. We go back to the shorty with the blue cornrows, who is now chilling at a strip club, with Snoop providing the narration. Snoop's alter-ego ends up fucking a stripper until a pimp breaks in to beat her down. Cornrows grabs a sword to slice the pimp's arm off and succeeds, but afterwards they beat him up and start cutting his fingers off. Perhaps crappy animation is better for this gory scene.

The other shorties from the title screen show up to rescue him from this disaster, and eventually Snoop dubs them the "10 Lil' Crips" which of course leads to an animated version of the song. Clearly what little chronic-induced storyline exists on "Adventures of Tha Blue Carpet Treatment" is solely for the purpose of finding a way to tie together animated versions of the album's songs. Perhaps I shouldn't have expected more from a DVD that shares names with an album than that, but I really thought that some Blue Carpet "Adventures" would be more akin to Snoop giving us some crazy ORIGINAL material inspired by his life story and incredible hip-hop career. This shit on the other hand is easy. Imagine the set-up - aliens spy on Snoop while he goes out on the street to make sure his bitches are on their hoe stroll. A rival pimp wants his hoes and knocks him unconscious with a pimp cane. While unconscious Snoop dreams animated versions of "Tha Doggfather." Pick any album from Snoop's catalogue, hire these same amateur animators and get it crackin'.

The further this DVD goes the lazier the animators become, recycling shots of a pimped out Snoop and his fellow singers from an earlier video, recycling Snoop's animated "Public Service Announcement," recycling the animated "10 Lil' Crips" and so forth. Finishing this DVD tested my patience, leading to a big climax where Snoop and The Game preach to armies of Bloods and Crips waiting with swords and shields in hand. We never get any explanation whether or not Snoop woke up from his chronic-induced animated haze though, or if the crazy P-Funk aliens are still spying on him - the movie just ends right there with credits and words from Katt Williams. Really doe, there's no need to tie up the loose plot holes. If you survived this "movie" all the way to the end you were either high to begin with or really didn't give a fuck whether this shit was well done let alone made sense. The producers and animators clearly didn't. It's almost a directly inverse relationship - I hated "The Aventures" almost as much as I liked "Tha Blue Carpet Treatment." I suggest you stick the the latter and avoid the former, or in other words, once you own the CD you sure as shit don't need this DVD.

Content: 4 of 10 Layout: 2 of 10 TOTAL Vibes: 3 of 10

Originally posted: March 3, 2009
source: www.RapReviews.com