There’s no rule that says a dog can’t play basketball. Nevertheless, it still never should have happened, and the results of those words have changed cinema forever. The following 25, yes you read that correctly, 25 movies prove this fact. Airing in 1997, the air bud movie follows a simple, wholesome golden retriever who plays basketball, and goes on to lead his owners’ school basketball team to victory. While the original movie is lighthearted and enjoyable, every additional movie leads us further astray from the light, down into the “Funny dog movie” rabbit hole.
After Air Bud 1, there are 4 more Air Bud movies where he learns and excels at football, baseball, soccer and volleyball. He also has puppies in between Air Bud: Golden receiver (Football) and Air Bud: World pup (Soccer). These pups change the face of the air bud franchise forever when it becomes their turn to get their own movies. To appeal better to kids, they amp up the “comedy”, and give the “Air Buddies” the ability to speak, something that animals never did in the original Air Bud movies. All semblance of our reality is thrown to the wind as the buddies get superpowers, go to the moon, and reawaken Egyptian gods. That’s correct, in the dog basketball universe, the Egyptian gods are real, also aliens, ghosts and Santa Claus (also a guy NASA left stranded on a satellite?).
Following the end of the Buddies movies, basketball is nothing but a pleasant memory as we descend, and the further down we go the less likely you are to have ever heard of these forgotten straight to VHS movies. What about the MVP (Most Valuable Primate) series? Jack, the sign language speaking chimp’s impressive ice hockey skills get him a spot on the local team as “the lab officials close in” (Whatever that means). Don’t worry, the movie has 2 sequels, so he likely turns out fine in the end. Who would ever watch, or worse, direct that? Or the stand alone movie Spymate? About the secret agent monkey who fights middle eastern terrorists, Ninjas and KGB agents. Yes, that’s a real movie that people actually wrote, directed, and acted in.
Did you even know that there have been 3 Air Bud shows on Netflix in the past 2 years? Scaredy cats, a show about people who turn into cats to explore a witch themed world, Phantom Pups, a show about ghost dogs trying to turn back into normal dogs, and Super Pupz, a show about dogs with superpowers.
The success of Air Bud left the studio thinking they could simply pump out movies that had an animal in them, but, in the process, they left behind every part of air bud that anyone actually liked, leaving us with these uncanny and unlikeable movies that no one asked for or wanted. In conclusion, there should be a rule that dogs can’t play basketball.
