An American Tail: Film & Game Breakdown — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] Don Bluth's 1986 animated film, An American Tale, tells the story of a young Jewish-Russian immigrant, Fievel Mauskiewicz, who is separated from his family during their journey to America while fleeing the Tsar's Cossack pogroms in 1885.

[00:14] The film explores corrosive and false mid-century reactionary versions of the American myth that painted late 19th century America as gladly welcoming all immigrants. These revisionist myths largely propagated throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s

[00:28] in an attempt at bulwarking coalitions of Italian, Polish, and Irish Americans, ethnic groups that were routinely considered non-white prior to World War II, against the gains of black Americans in the civil rights movement.

[00:40] The newly-balderized version of American history played up the contemporary positives of the period, essentially taking Emma Lazarus' sonnet, The New Colossus, giving your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

[00:53] and treating it as the popular consensus of late 19th century America and not an equally radical statement then as it is now, opposed as it was by a substantial nativist movement.

[01:06] An American tale plays with these revisionist myths by having the Irish, Jewish, and Sicilian immigrant mice repeat the myths on the boat ride from Europe. There are no cats in America and the streets are paved with cheese.

[01:18] Cats being synecdoche for racism, exploitation, and the predator class as a whole within the movie's metaphor. However, when the immigrant mice arrive in America, they discover that not only are there cats in America,

[01:33] America is full to the tips with cats. The mid-century myth is contrasted with the reality that immigrants arrive to America to discover the predator class intact, intact, ready to enforce societal stratification along racial and ethnic lines by whatever means necessary.

[01:50] In this regard, An American Tale is simply repeating the same lesson learned in Dick Whittington and His Cat when it was London's streets that were said to be paved with gold. Sir Whittington arriving in London to find not gold, literal or metaphorical, but grime, poverty, and cholera.

[02:05] However, An American Tale fumbles its metaphor at the end. While the climax of the film, where the cats are driven into the sea in an allusion to the biblical demon legion, can be seen as aspirational or instructive, it is more likely to be read as its own form of revisionism.

[02:22] Though an American tale suggests that the Predator class was a reality of American life, confronting one form of revisionism, the emphasis is on was, suggesting it is one of the past, a demon driven into the ocean a century earlier.

[02:39] In succumbing to the necessity of a happy ending, An American Tale succumbs as well to white post-racial fantasies common

[02:52] following the passing of the Civil Rights Act. Still, while the ending of the film may be overly simplistic, An American Tale is unique among children's media for its willingness to depict the crowding, squalor, exploitation, and abuse that immigrants faced.

[03:07] The film even includes commentary on the internal racial aggression of the underclass via the use of names in how Fievel's ally Tony, a second or third generation Italian immigrant himself, all but refuses to use Fievel's given name, preferentially calling him Philly.

[03:24] Fievel? Hmm, that name's got a goal. Hey, I'll tell you what, Philly! an actor that recreates the structural suppression of culture, seeing when the Mauskowitzes arrive at immigration

[03:36] and Tanya's name is changed to Tilly by the immigration clerk. Aside from the thematic elements,

[03:52] the film itself is a bit of a drag, despite its short runtime. Around the midpoint of the film, the story grinds to a halt and Fievel spends an inordinate amount of time futzing around with the vegetarian cat, Tiger.

[04:04] While Tiger, as an idea, reflects the thematic beat that it's not species that defines evil, but behavior, Tiger being a member of the predator class with no instinct for predation, his role in the film is largely to consume time

[04:19] with the comedy stylings of Dom DeLuise. Do you really think so? On the whole, though, as with much of Don Bluth's work in the 1980s, An American Tale is a flawed but unique and valuable piece of children's media,

[04:32] confronting a young audience with difficult, often complex ideas, emotions, and realities. And 21 years later, it was made into one of the worst video games ever.

[04:51] Developed by Data Design Interactive and published by Blast Entertainment, An American Tale was released for the PlayStation 2 in 2007, and it is one of the worst retail games I have ever encountered. Frivol Mouse Squits Returns.

[05:04] Six huge missions. Steer Frivol inside a bubble, hitch a ride on the back of a pigeon, and escape from the cats aboard a roller skate. Four bonus levels. Relive the movie.

[05:16] See the thrilling story unfold through classic clips from the animated movie. Let's get started. Before the six huge missions and four bonus levels commence, we're treated to the menu where a dead digital simulacrum of Fievel Mouskwit stands as a grim portent of things to come Entering a new game we get a short clip from the opening of the film Fievel running from the Cossack cat

[05:37] and the family boarding the ship that will take them across the Atlantic to America. How, then, will they translate this into a game? It's Super Monkey Ball. It's Super Monkey Ball on a pirate ship.

[05:50] Fievel is in a soap bubble, and it's Super Monkey Ball on a pirate ship. 21 years after the movie went to theaters, some dudes turned it into a video game, and it's Super Monkey Ball on a pirate ship.

[06:02] There's not really a blow-by-blow to be had, because there's just not that much to the level. There's only two rooms. Neither is very complex. They're just prolonged by the atrocious control, making it simultaneously insultingly easy and comically difficult.

[06:18] After reaching the cheese in the second room, the player gets another short movie clip, and Fievel gets to move his soap bubble onwards to the first bonus level, which is just more Super Monkey Ball.

[06:30] This is actually optional anyway, you can just skip it from the menu, but if you do decide to try and complete it because you hate yourself, buckle up because it is both far more difficult and complex than the previous level.

[06:44] Fievel needs to collect three cheeses that are scattered around a huge puzzle room, and in the process of getting them, you'll get to enjoy such thrilling moments as thing you can't see that knocks you off, swinging barrels that utterly ruin the camera controls,

[06:57] a weird push maze that you need to reassemble after decoding the bizarre visual instructions, ever-present wind and boat noises, and falling into the water over and over and over and over and over again.

[07:17] I can't overstate just how awful these barrels are. Like, you can't, you just, you can't, you can't, just, come on, just, you just, no! I get the feeling that they were just working on levels in a linear order,

[07:32] and then realized that the second level was impossible for their target demographic, so rather than change anything, they just called it a bonus level and made it skippable. In fact, on that note, all the other bonus levels are not just easier than this one,

[07:47] they are substantially easier than everything else in the game. The second proper level is a flight sim, where Fievel rides on the back of Henri the pigeon, and the player must navigate the two of them through the busy New York harbor

[08:00] until Fievel is safely delivered to... the cheese floating over a pirate ship. It sounds easy enough, but here's the catch. Henri has a stamina bar that depletes comically fast,

[08:13] so every few seconds the player needs to fly through floating birdseed to refill the stamina bar. Colliding with water, geese, or any obstacles will also take off a huge chunk of stamina. There's actually several stretches

[08:25] where birdseed restores less stamina than it takes to fly between them, meaning that in addition to the obvious reactive challenges of the level, there's also the strategic challenge in that you're simultaneously fighting entropy.

[08:40] Henri controls so poorly that it's impossible to get all the seed, and the seed you can get is barely enough to get through to the end of the level. And don't go thinking that if you miss some seed, you can just loop back and get it.

[08:53] Even trying is going to consume far more stamina than you'll get, so you're just dooming yourself to a slow loss, even if you fly the rest of the level perfectly. And if you hit something, you're pretty much done. Not only is the stamina cost just as much of a slow death as poor flying,

[09:08] there's a pretty good chance that you'll just get stuck to or inside of whatever you hit. And I should point out that you don't really steer per se. There's an ever-present lag between input and reaction,

[09:22] so for the most part you're not steering as much as you're gently tapping the D-pad to make micro-corrections to your course. The cherry on top of all that is that the level is so poorly designed and the engine so poorly optimized that gameplay actually slows down

[09:38] and gets less responsive as more and more assets are loaded. So not only is the path getting harder with narrower passages and tighter turns, the fundamental interaction is getting more and more difficult

[09:53] as the game chugs to a crawl and inputs take longer and longer to register. And the whole time, the whole time, you've got this.

[10:05] Music? Is this music? I mean, yes, technically. Because the game was made as cheaply as possible, none of the music from the film was licensed. So rather than having the film score, or any of the original songs, or even sound alike,

[10:20] the levels are all populated with bizarre, totally inappropriate, royalty-free pop jazz music. It gets old really fast.

[10:32] Assuming you manage to eventually get to the cheese on the pirate ship, the next bonus level consists of Fievel floating down between laundry, like that one small moment in the movie. This is a bit more of what I would expect from a game made for six-year-olds.

[10:44] It's short and pretty easy, but you can still fail, so you need to at least try, but after the previous level, I'm not sure any six-year-old is ever getting here Anyway if you want the pro for this absurdly easy minigame you can use circle and X to break or speed up and I highly recommend you press X to get this over with as fast as possible For level 3 Fievel is stuck

[11:09] in the street and needs to collect 16 cheeses to advance while dodging humans and horses. The hardest part of this level is fighting against the camera angle. It's so close to the ground that the open manholes are basically invisible, and it's nigh impossible to accurately

[11:23] gauge depth. Like here I feel like I should be on this cheese, but I'm not. I'm still in front of it. Anyway, it's still not difficult. The next bonus level is just more falling except now it's at

[11:39] night. Between levels we get one more short movie clip that provides no story context whatsoever, but it's kind of relevant because we're about to head into a sewer. Level four is actually level 4-1. See, both this level and the next one take place in the sewers, but rather than

[11:56] just calling them levels 4 and 5, someone decided they should be called 4-1 and 4-2, so that the final level would be 5? But the back of the box says 6 levels, because even

[12:09] if you hyphenate two of them, they're still distinct levels, so why not just call them 4 and 5, this game is a glimpse into madness. So for level 4-1, Fievel needs to ghost behind

[12:22] Warranty Rat's accountant, Digit. It's the exact same idea as the stocking missions in Assassin's Creed, a game that incidentally came out a few months before this one, except, you know, bad. The added user interface objects showing if you're too close or too far somehow

[12:39] managed to look out of place in a game where nothing actually looks like it belongs? Just like almost everything else in the game, it's not actually very hard, but the unresponsive

[12:51] controls and frequent abrupt failures make it feel far more difficult than it really is. If you do decide to try this game out, I'll save you a lot of headache and let you know that Fievel has a double jump that's critical to beating the level. There's obstacles that are impossible to

[13:05] clear without it. Also, don't waste time trying to balance on pipes. Fievel is just going to fall off. You can get past just about every barrier by running up the slope of the wall and then jumping over it. Once you make it to the cheese, at the end of the level, it's on to the bonus level, which is

[13:21] more falling just in a sewer. To be fair, this bonus level does escalate the difficulty from the previous levels with the addition of moving spikes and pipes to spray poison gas. You actually need to use the brakes and acceleration strategically to avoid damage, but there's also a lot of bonus

[13:38] health available, so it's still pretty forgiving. Again, these bonus levels are the only part that really feel age-appropriate to the target market. Now, level 4-2. Honestly, after the flying level,

[13:50] where the game slowly chokes and dies on its own assets, I didn't think the game had any more surprises for me. I mean, how could it top that? Well, how about a physics-based downhill racer

[14:03] that controls about as well as an actual mouse riding a roller skate down a sewer pipe? Just like Henri, the roller skate that Bible rides is so temperamental that you're not steering as much as you're just gently nudging as a suggestion of where to go. Even being really light on the

[14:21] controls, it's still super easy to skid out and jackknife the roller skate. Oh, and a bizarre detail that's not super obvious from the footage, but the directional controls are oriented to the

[14:33] pipe, not the skate. So once the skate turns more than 90 degrees sideways, the controls flip. Left becomes right and right becomes left. But as you try to turn back around, they flip again once

[14:46] you're mostly facing forward, making it super easy to just get stuck sideways and stall out. Also, there's no accelerator. Fievel has no way of gaining velocity except rolling down a hill,

[14:58] so if the skate glances off a pipe and loses momentum, it's entirely possible to get stuck in a position where the skate just rolls back and forth between two small lumps in the terrain that it can't quite get over until the cats catch up to Fievel

[15:13] and you fail back to the start of the level. Should you escape Warranty Rat and make it to the cheese, it's on to the sixth and final level, Level 5, an autoscroller where the player steers the Mouse of Minsk and chases the cats off the pier.

[15:27] And I have to say, I do not use that word lightly. The Mouse of Minsk may not steer well, but compared to Henri and the roller skate, it does steer. So if you avoid enough boxes and don't tip over or fall in the water,

[15:41] what do you get? Congratulations! Fievel has saved New York from the cats and been reunited with his family. Maybe finally they can settle down and enjoy their new life in America. Roll credits.

[15:54] That's it. Not even a movie clip. There are, in total, 87 seconds of the actual film in the game. See the thrilling story unfold through classic clips from the animated movie.

[16:07] Now, many of you, connoisseurs of bad video games, You may be wondering why, nay, how you have never heard of this before, and it's because this game is surprisingly rare. It was only released in Europe, Australia,

[16:22] and New Zealand as a budget title for the PlayStation 2 at a time when retailers were quickly pivoting to the newly released PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 so it wasn exactly a massive distribution in the first place and it only available in PAL video format so it not impossible to find but it hardly cluttering up pawn shops like sports

[16:42] titles of years past. It was actually a bit of an ordeal for me to get a working copy. Just to add to the truthness, the game is printed on CDs, not DVDs, which would explain why there's only a

[16:54] whopping 87 seconds of movie footage in the game. Now, being CD-based wasn't super uncommon for PlayStation 2 games, but they're somewhat notorious for not working properly, and this was the problem

[17:06] I was having. My pal PlayStation would read DVD-based games just fine, but not An American Tale, which was the only CD-based game I had available. Now, just to explain this, when playing a CD-based game, the PlayStation 2 needs to adjust the focal distance of its laser and run the disc

[17:22] drives motor at a much higher RPM than what is used for DVD games. As a result, the two most common points of failure are that the CD setting for the laser falls out of position, or the disc

[17:34] spins too fast and slips inside the disc tray because the stopper doesn't have a tight enough grip. A commonly recommended solution for disc slipping is what's called the tape trick. The idea is to put a few short strips of tape on the top of the disc, giving the stopper extra grip.

[17:50] So I tried this, since it's a pretty simple home hack, and something went wrong. The tape got caught inside the drive, so it didn't damage the PlayStation at all, and when I took the game out of the tray, the tape had actually peeled off the label

[18:03] and the reflective aluminum layer underneath, because the game is printed on super cheap CDs where the label is screen printed directly onto the back of the reflective layer with no protective plastic or lacquer backing in between.

[18:19] This isn't unheard of, it's just the video game equivalent of a pulp novel printed on low-quality paper and bound with cheap glues, it dries out and cracks. So the game is uncommon, it's region-locked, and it's fragile.

[18:32] And I have two copies now. Whatever one of them works. So, why? Why? Why part one? Why does this exist?

[18:45] The simple answer is money. I wish there were a deeper story here, but that's really it. The game is exactly what it looks like, a cheaply made product shoveled out at a budget price using a recognizable franchise to draw at least a modicum of attention.

[18:59] Blast Entertainment was a London-based publisher and development studio focused on cheaply made budget games, usually leveraging an older, less popular, or forgotten movie license, like Water Horse, Legend of the Deep, Charlotte's Web,

[19:13] Lassie, Dr. Doodlittle, Home Alone, Babe, Beverly Hills Cop, Jumanji, Xena Warrior Princess, and Top Gun. Most of these games coming out years or decades after their respective properties.

[19:27] Data Design Interactive, similarly, was a shovelware developer, though licensed games were more the exception than the rule in their library. Like, you maybe remember them for Ninja Bread Man, but probably not.

[19:41] According to producer Stuart Green's LinkedIn page, Data Design Interactive was the leading publisher of Nintendo Wii titles, with 28 titles developed and published in a single year. Well, he doesn't say what year that was, and I have no easy means to verify that information.

[19:56] I'm going to take him at his word, because why would you brag about that? The other producer, Mark Gemmel, currently works for PicPoc, making microtransaction-stuffed cow clicker games. Now, why part two? Why care?

[20:12] I wanted to share this with you, not because it's important or good or an underrated gem, but because it's none of those things. This game is bad. It's cheaply made, it's difficult to find, it's largely forgotten, it's not fun,

[20:25] and for all those reasons, it's likely to vanish entirely. And that's why I wanted to preserve it. I believe in the value of failed art. Art that is driven by carelessness, by unchecked and untalented ego,

[20:38] by spectacularly low-stakes greed, it has a tendency to be novel, to be unpredictable in a way that deliberate art never can. This is why it's so much fun to watch bad movies.

[20:52] No one would ever make this game on purpose. Something in the creative process needs to be fundamentally broken to get to this point. If you were going to sit down two decades later

[21:04] to make a game out of an American tale because you actually cared about the movie and you cared about making a game, you're not going to churn out a hodgepodge series of disconnected minigames that don't work well.

[21:16] It is not simply a lack of time or money that produces something like an American Tales of video game, but a profound lack of caring. The end product of that broken process

[21:28] isn't worth playing for its own merits, but it is worth playing because it's worth remembering. So, thank you all for coming along. I hope you all have shared in my epic heracracy the joy of looking on something bad.