WARNING: This post contains a major spoiler for Meet the Robinsons. If you have not yet seen this movie, stop what you’re doing and watch it right now. Please? As this post will posit, it is SO underrated. Here’s the Disney+ link. You’re welcome.
I am a bad aunt: there is a dearth of games on my phone. While in search of entertainment, my niece was reduced to flipping through the My Disney Experience app. She enjoyed thumbing through the photos, playing the Tower of Terror animations several times before stopping on a race picture of me with Bowler Hat Guy. “Who’s that?” she asked.
Needless to say, I was aghast. “That’s Goob from Meet the Robinsons!” I said. “I love Goob! I always stop for him!” She still had no idea who I was talking about but expressed interest in finding out.
A few days later, still searching my phone for a single shred of amusement, she noticed the Disney+ app on my phone. I opened it up and she immediately asked for “that movie with the guy in the picture.” Meet the Robinsons it was!
And she loved it. She watched it twice! Yet it made me wonder: how had this official piece of feature length Disney animation escaped her notice? Why has no one seen Meet the Robinsons?!
Y’ALL ARE SLEEPING ON MEET THE ROBINSONS
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but I am saying it’s GREAT. I love Goob as young Mike Yagoobian almost as much as I love him as Bowler Hat Guy, who does everything with… unique style.
(Lest we forget, this movie is from 2007. He was ahead of Frozen, for God’s sake!)
I love the sinister goofiness of DOR-15. I love the poor mind-controlled dinosaur with his big head and little arms.
I love Angela Bassett’s beautiful voice, and Laurie Metcalf’s bonkers one.
I love Tom Selleck.
I love love love the Rat Pack mafia frogs.
But above all, I LOVE the bizarre montage in which we, in fact, meet the Robinsons.
Is that, or is that not, an absurdist masterpiece? Let me answer that question for you: it is. Uncle Spike and Uncle Dimitri are my favorites, I think. Although I do have a lot of questions about the Mother puppet.
Normally this would be where I implore you to please just watch the movie, but you already did, right? I told you to watch the movie first. Otherwise I’ve spoiled the Goob/Bowler Hat Guy connection for you and that’s kind of a big deal.
BUT MY POINT IS
Anyway, my points are as follows:
a) Meet the Robinsons may have a plot hole or 10 and a little family-friendly cheesiness here and there, but it is, overall, AMAZING and deserves more love.
b) John Cleese would make an excellent live action Bowler Hat Guy.
c) I will always hit up a Goob runDisney photo stop. I hear there’s a Lewis costume and possibly also a Wilbur, too. But if runDisney really wants to please me, they’ll trot out a lounge singer frog. Or maybe Tom Selleck is available…?
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So I never saw Meet the Robinsons until a good 10 years after it came out – I think I just wasn’t watching all the Disney films at that time cause they were not so great (it’s stuck in there with Dinosaur, Chicken Little, and Home on the Range). But it was better than I expected and it grows on me more every time I watch it!
By the way, I have in fact completed the trifecta and I have photos of all 3 characters (Lewis, Wilbur, and Bowler Hat). I’ll email them to you 😉
I still haven’t seen Dinosaur OR Chicken Little OR Home on the Range. Or Brother Bear or whatever. What’s the opposite of a Renaissance? Was that the Disney Dark Ages? >D (Atlantis was good though. Saw that one in theaters!)